If you’ve followed this series, you’ll know how much I value conversations and connections—those unexpected insights that come from chatting with someone who’s tried what you’re trying, maybe even failed a few times. Well, if networking is the first step, site visits are the deep dive. Seeing biocharBiochar is a carbon-rich material created from biomass decomposition in low-oxygen conditions. It has important applications in environmental remediation, soil improvement, agriculture, carbon sequestration, energy storage, and sustainable materials, promoting efficiency and reducing waste in various contexts while addressing climate change challenges. More production at scale, meeting people across the supply chain, and catching a glimpse of cutting-edge R&D—it changes how you think about everything.

Last week’s IBI Study Tour in Wales was exactly that—a reminder of why getting out of your own backyard matters.

In this article, I want to highlight some of the benefits people can extract from going on tours and visits like this. I left the trip feeling as though I had peeked behind the curtain and seen the industry in its true glory. With the biochar space being so nascent and young, there is limited information online. And whilst we at Biochar Today endeavour to demystify and disseminate, there are some things you can only learn in the place they happen.

Day 1: Severn Wye Biochar

We kicked off with a visit to Severn Wye Biochar—part of a charity, but operating with an industrial mindset. They’re using only tree crowns (what would otherwise be waste), producing around 125 kg of char per hour from 500 kg feedstock—and turning out around 1,000 tonnes a year. With 92% carbon content, that translates to about 2,700 tCO₂e sequestered annually.
Watching their system work that smoothly—and learning how funding gaps have shaped the project’s path—was like a masterclass in both the promise and the reality of biochar scaling.

Day 2: Woodtek Engineering

Next up was Woodtek’s site, where they’ve taken innovation seriously, becoming a well-regarded name for their solid and efficient engineering. Their C1000 flame-curtain system cuts oxygen from the feedstockFeedstock refers to the raw organic material used to produce biochar. This can include a wide range of materials, such as wood chips, agricultural residues, and animal manure. More after momentary exposure to the flame, producing biochar with slightly lower carbon (only around 2-3% lower) but higher exchange capacity—excellent for soil interaction.
They’re churning out 2.5–3 tonnes of char per day, supplying energy back into their operation. It’s the kind of hands-on industrial design that turns theory into working reality—and shows how connected approaches can fuel farms, facilities, and future iterations. It’s places like this that put your mind at ease, if you are ever worried about biochar not reaching the heights we expect.

Day 3: Brodie Biomass

Finally, we landed at Brodie BiomassBiomass is a complex biological organic or non-organic solid product derived from living or recently living organism and available naturally. Various types of wastes such as animal manure, waste paper, sludge and many industrial wastes are also treated as biomass because like natural biomass these More, the UK’s largest biochar producer. Handling 10,000 tonnes of feedstock per year, they focus on consistency and context—thanks to 30 local tree surgeons bringing in chip every day. However, this doesn’t even cut it at that scale so some is purchased to meet demand, showing the level that some people are operating at within the biomass space.
They dry material down to ~10% moisture at 0.5 t/hour, sort it by size, and feed their system with precision. The output is smooth, reliable char. Their application experiments? Wild. They’re applying 21 t of char per hectare, mixed with compost and muck—building lasagne layers of soil amendments. One experiment even grew plants in char-only media, no soil needed.

Other Visits

There were other fantastic visits on the tour to Black Bull Biochar and TerrAffix‘s innovative highway project with Kier. But to keep this article at a reasonable length, I have had to omit them, so check out the write ups at the links above.

Why Visiting goes beyond Reading

1. Feels Human: Walking a site teaches you about people, not just output. Meetings with operators, engineers, and farmers bring context to dusty numbers.
2. Unfiltered Insight: You see what works—and what’s truly tricky. Drier feedstock? Fast throughput? Funding challenges? They all come alive.
3. Cross-Sector Peek: One moment you’re talking R&D with engineers; the next, you’re out in a field seeing biochar piled high with compost. That blend—labs, logistics, land—is powerful.
4. Interwoven Perspective: One big thing for me was seeing the way that different components of the bioeconomy interact within a setting. This stood out to me when I saw Woodtek’s biochar filtration system:

Woodtek are filtering organic pollutants out of the water running off fields. I already understood the role biochar can play in filtration but seeing this and speaking with them, you then realise this char was also being inadvertently charged by the runoff. This ‘filter’ char could then be spread back on the farm, minimising waste and solving multiple problems at once. Learnings like this are referenced in the literature and news, but to truly understand it, you have to witness its intuitive genius.

Takeaway for the Backyard Producer

If you get a chance to join a study tour, festival, or demonstration—grab it. These visits reshape how you tinker, how you troubleshoot, how you even talk about biochar. Plus, you walk away with stories, ideas, and a better sense of how your own work could fit—or scale—into a bigger story. With IBI’s ‘Biochar Academy: India’ and the 2025 North American Biochar Conference taking place in the coming weeks, it is an important time to consider attending an in-person event of some description.

After all, biochar isn’t just about turning feedstock into char. It’s about connecting feedstock, people, ideas—and turning those sparks into action across farms, forests, and communities.