SANTA CRUZ CO., California – Preparing the Bay Area for climate change sometimes requires large-scale projects, like restoring a fire-ravaged forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And while that restoration work is underway, managers of the San Vicente Redwoods are developing an environmentally friendly way to dispose of the dead and charred wood—an innovative method that also benefits local farmers.
Four years after the CZU fires raged in the Santa Cruz Mountains, crews are still working to clear the charred forests to prevent a repeat of the disaster.
Nadia Hamey is the lead forester of the fire-damaged San Vicente Redwoods. She says workers have created miles of sophisticated firebreaks in the area and removed more than 20,000 tons of logs and dead trees. The challenge is what to do with them.
“I’m trying to find someone who can turn it into lumber, maybe even boards with a lot of character,” she says.
MORE: Stanford University’s fire control experiment could help ecosystem and reduce fire risk in the coming years
But then the forest managers came up with another environmentally friendly solution: they burned the wood, not to ash, but to a product called biochar.
They’re blackened chips that can be worked into soil to sequester carbon and help plants develop healthy root systems. We first reported on the technology when researchers at UC Merced were working to make the specialty burners cheaper and more accessible.
“It’s kind of a stable form of carbon, so it’s long-lasting and actually a really great agricultural additive,” Hamey adds.
Producing biochar is one challenge. The second is finding a use for it.
While commercial suppliers truck the material across the state, San Vicente managers have found at least one destination closer to home: a well-known organic grower called Jacobs Farm.
MORE: How climate affects California’s fire season and a plant-based solution
Manager Greg Rawlings met us at one of their fields north of Santa Cruz, just a few kilometers from San Vicente. There, the farm mixes biochar into the rows of high-quality dill and cilantro.
“And then once it’s in the ground, it acts like a house or an apartment again and protects it from, you know, overwatering or, let’s say, excessive rainfall or flooding or, you know, desiccation because it’s, you know, in this protective shell,” explains Rawlings.
He is convinced that customers will ultimately taste the difference.
“This is crucial for biobiology and organic farming, especially in the sense that in an organic field you want to achieve a symbiosis of the plants with the fungi and bacteria in the soil. And that is exactly what gives organic products their great taste,” says Rawlings.
MORE: Chicago machine mimics cow stomach to keep thousands of tons of food waste out of landfills
Biochar processing at San Vicente is supported by generous grants from CAL FIRE and the State Coastal Commission, both agencies that have invested significantly in wildfire resilience and prevention on the site.
San Vicente is a test lab for a technology that helps transform the remains of a painful disaster into a productive solution – a solution that is hoped to spread to other areas of Northern California and the West.
This story is part of our Climate Ready series – a collaboration between ABC News and ABC-owned television stations focused on providing practical solutions to help you and your family adapt to extreme weather events and today’s climate change challenges.
Click here for all stories and videos in our Climate Ready series.
Copyright © 2024 WLS-TV. All rights reserved.
