By Steve Thompson, NCAT Executive Director

Dave Atkins, a forest landowner in Montana’s Blackfoot Valley, peers through the smoke-filled gloom of another hot and dry August, and he sees hope on the horizon. He’s part of a collaborative project with other small landowners, federal land agencies, conservation and watershed groups that thinks that an important solution can be found in a porous black shred of carbon called biochar.

“We’re on the cusp where biochar could really take off in the next decade. There is tremendous opportunity to form public-private partnerships that will be the catalyst to take this technology to scale,” he says. “We ‘re solving the production issues, and a market is starting to take shape. But there are some critical investments needed to jumpstart a viable biochar industry.”