Article in New York Times about biochar:

Simmered out of eucalyptus, charcoal is being hoed into the degraded soils of former forests in western Kenya. Roasted out of chicken manure, it is spurring the growth of malting barley in Australia. And in Iowa, researchers are plowing charcoal into corn rows, hoping to limit the tons of fertilizer that saturate the state's fields each year.

At these farms and more, scientists are probing the limits of how high-grade charcoal, dubbed biochar, can be formed from plant and animal waste to squirrel away the atmosphere's carbon for centuries, or even millennia. Inspired by ancient Amazonian soils, researchers have found that buried charcoal resists bacteria's attempts to break it down. And thanks to its porous geometry, it has a knack for improving land in ways still being revealed.

"Once we get serious about climate change, this information is available now," said James Amonette, an environmental geochemist at the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. "[Biochar] is one of the major tools we can use to fight climate change, if we decide to do so."

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