Watauga Cooperative Extension Offers Free Workshop on Making and Using Bio-Char for Building Long-Term Fertility
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Collapse ▲On Wednesday, October 15, 2025, Watauga Cooperative Extension is offering a free workshop on making and using Bio-Char for Building Long-term Fertility.
Farmers and gardeners in our mountain region are challenged by our ‘old’ soils: the many thousands of years since glaciers last crossed our region and hundreds of years of tillage-based agriculture have caused our soils to lose important nutrients, minerals, and organic matter.
While growers can test soils and use the results to replenish these elements via lime, composts, and fertilizers, they sometimes find such replenishments insufficient or short-lived. Bio-Char offers growers a tool for extending soil improvements: it can be a long-lived component of soil organic matter that also helps hold important soil cations and nutrients.
On Wednesday, October 15: Watauga Cooperative Extension will offer a free workshop on making and using Bio-Char for Building Long-term Fertility. The workshop will take place from 4:30 – 6:30 p.m., and will be held on a small farm in the Meat Camp region of Watauga County. The address and further details will be sent to participants who register at the link below.
The workshop will be taught by Richard Boylan, Area Extension Agent for Agriculture with N.C. Cooperative Extension, and Jeremy Ferrell, Assistant Department Chair & Associate Professor Dept. of Sustainable Technology & the Built Environment at Appalachian State University.
At this workshop, participants will get to see all the steps from a bio-char kiln beginning its burn, to options for processing and inoculating the char into a complete soil amendment. This workshop will guide participants through all the steps of bio-char making, to include:
(1) Setting up either of the kiln types available from Watauga Cooperative Extension
(2) Firing the kiln and managing the burn through completion
(3) Crushing the char to soil amendment size
(4) Options for inoculating or "charging" the char with microbes and nutrients such as lining a barn floor, adding to home-scale composters, or soaking in vats
To register, visit Eventbrite BioChar Registration.