This year is going to be hot and dry in most of the Central & Western US. That will cause stress for most dryland farming operations. Even irrigation will be difficult because farmers won’t be battling just a lack of precipitation, but record-setting temperatures. The Midwest may be experiencing a tropical heat wave in 2025. With planning, you can beat the heat and the drought with biochar soil amendments and cover crops.
Key Takeaways
- Drought-proofing your fields starts with soil tests
- Biochar and cover crops work together to build soil structure and reduce soil water evaporation
- Sandy soils and sandy loam are particularly prone to drought issues
- Different biochar feedstocks are best for different end uses. Pine wood is the best for soil amendments because of its high porosity
- Living roots in the soil all year stop erosion and feed the soil microorganisms
Have You Used Biochar for Drought-Proofing Your Fields?
If your fields are sandy or sandy loam, it will be more difficult to retain moisture in your crop root zone. Sandy soils are notoriously drought-prone. From 2022 to 2024, U.S. farmland faced intense and widespread drought conditions that reshaped agricultural productivity, water management, and cropping strategies. The effects of climate change are evident in expanding deserts and marginal cropland. Water scarcity, groundwater contaminated with salts, and low snow melt leading to inadequate groundwater recharge are hitting agriculture hard.
Biochar possesses unique physical and chemical properties that make it a powerful tool in the pursuit of water security in agriculture. We are experiencing more severe weather events, and agriculture will have to change.
That change can come in the form of different crops, different soil management strategies, or both. Sustainable agriculture incorporates biochar, organic matter, and living root mass with a decrease in pesticide use for greater soil fertility. The more resilience you build into your ecosystem, the easier it will be to handle the frequency and severity of our next natural disaster
In 2022, we experienced a megadrought that wiped out 74% of the upland cotton crop in Texas. Also, that year, 32% of corn fields and 57% of alfalfa fields were in drought during peak growth, leading to a subpar yield. In 2023 and 2024, it wasn’t much better. The drought expanded to cover more of the United States. The Mississippi River hit an all-time low, and just to make sure we were paying attention, 2024 brought hurricanes, heat, and flash flooding with serious erosion problems.
How did this extreme weather affect agricultural producers and their water supply? It depended on the cropping system and ranching practices.
Benefits of Biochar and Cover Crops in Extreme Weather
Biochar is a high-carbon product produced through pyrolysis. Heating at a high temperature in the absence of oxygen. It acts like a sponge in the soil. Its ultra-porous structure dramatically increases soil water-holding capacity. This is particularly important for sandy soils, where drought is felt first and for longer periods.
You don’t need a large amount of biochar in your soil to make a difference. In fact, 10% by volume is shown to increase readily available water for crop roots by as much as 165%. If you use too much, you’ll have nutrient tie-up issues. Biochar improves soil structure, soil porosity and creates a habitat for a thriving microbial population.
Biochar sequesters carbon while improving your farm profits. Learn how.
Biochar for Water Retention; Cover Crops for Erosion Control
We’ve all seen the dust clouds in Illinois and the Western United States on the news. That dust is topsoil loaded with nutrients, microorganisms, and if you applied biochar, that too. If your soil doesn’t have any cover crops to hold it in place, your neighbor will get the benefit of the nutrients you carefully applied last year.
On most of those agricultural operations in the news, they not only had no cover crops but also no biochar. The biochar would have retained enough moisture for the cover crops to establish strong root systems and the needed aboveground biomass.
Even during a drought, cover crops greatly enhance soil structure and retain moisture. They create a living mulch to protect the soil from the scorching heat of the sun.
The soil under the covers is cooler than the surrounding bare earth. When planted between cash crops, covers have positive effects on soil, water, nitrogen, oxygen, and temperature dynamics.
A study from Middle Tennessee State University found that cooler soil temperatures under cover crop biomass helped reduce stress on cash crops like corn and soybeans, especially during dry periods.
The Right Biochar and Cover Crop Mix Retain Moisture
The type of feedstock determines the physical characteristics of a specific biochar. Studies show biochar made from wood waste to have more water retention capacity than other feedstocks. Pyrolysis temperature also impacts the biochar’s ability to be beneficial for water retention in sandy soils. To know the potential of a biochar to increase your soil’s water holding capacity, you need a biochar with the right characteristics. The International Biochar Initiative (IBI) has standards that ensure the highest quality and safest biochar is available to you.
We also offer a biochar with preloaded nutrients, VITAL Blend, so you only need to make one pass over your field. You are adding porosity to your soil and micro- and macro-nutrients that are in plant-available forms. The biochar holds those nutrients. Even highly mobile nitrogen can be retained in the pores of the biochar.
Learn more about our biochar blends designed for water retention.
At American Biochar Company, our biochar is IBI certified and OMRI listed (is appropriate for Organic farms in the NOP). Our feedstock is harvested with sustainable forestry practices. It is Southern Yellow Pine, a soft wood with good pore structure. It has the best balance of porosity and carbon durability.
Our NAKED Char is useful for improving soil structure but needs to be charged with nutrients to be a soil amendment. This table shows the characteristics of different feedstocks.
The Right Cover Crops to Maintain Soil Porosity and Nutrients
Adding nutrient-loaded biochar to your fields is part of a sustainable agriculture that leads to increased soil organic matter. Another part that increases organic matter and reduces compaction is cover crops.
The nutrients in the biochar are cycled through the soil and plant biomass by beneficial microbial communities. Fungi, bacteria, nematodes, amoebas, and many other microscopic organisms form symbiotic relationships with plants.
We tend to think that plants are converting sunlight, CO2, and water into sugars for their own growth. But up to 40% of those photosynthates are passed through the plant into their root system. The root system releases from 5-20% of the net photosynthates as carbon and sugars to microbial allies.
It’s important to keep roots in the soil. Microbes most effectively use the nutrients and carbon supplied by the nutrient-loaded biochar when they have exudates from plants.
Those root exudates act as chemical signals to microbes and attract specialized bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms when a plant needs them. The microbes metabolize the exudates and, in turn, provide services to the host plant, such as:
- Nutrient solubilization and delivery
- Production of growth hormones
- Protection against pathogens through competitive exclusion or antimicrobial production
The Power of Mixed Species Cover Crops
A mixed cover crop planted after harvest of a cash crop gives you a lot of bang for your buck. Different plant species attract different microbes, which creates highly diverse soil life. Interseeding cover crops with cash crops is becoming more popular.
Scientific data shows the buffering benefits cover crops have for optimizing crop yields and plant health. USDA research shows that cover crops improve available water capacity, which contributes to cooler soil profiles during hot periods
The type of cover crops you use will vary based on your climate, soil type, soil pH, planting window, and many other factors. Cool-season covers are best planted in the early spring, interseeded with your cash crop, or after harvest in late summer or early fall.
A mixed species cover crop blend would be cereal rye, crimson clover, radish, and hairy vetch. After the wheat harvest, good warm season cover crops would be buckwheat and sorghum Sudan grass. The benefits you could reap from a wise choice of cover crops combined with nutrient-loaded biochar are tremendous.
These are a few examples of the potential cover crops you can add to your rotation. The sweet spot for pH for most cover crop plants is around 5.5-7.0, which is the same as the optimum growth of most cash crops. There are exceptions, such as strawberries and blueberries, that need more acidic soil for best fruiting and plant health.
And “well-drained” soil is preferred by almost all crops (except cranberries). Nutrient-loaded biochar creates the porosity and water-holding power for even clay soils to drain. It takes more effort to change a clay soil to a clay-loam, but the effort is worth it.
Clay soils hold nutrients, and as the biochar increases soil porosity, those nutrients are released and made available to plants.
What Combination of Biochar and Cover Crops Gives Maximum Impact?
That question can only be answered with baseline data, the kind you get from soil and water testing. Soil type matters. Biochar shows the biggest short-term gains on sandy soils. Clay soils benefit from improved aggregation and nutrient availability.
For biochar applications, start with a sample plot and spread 5-10% by soil volume and monitor moisture changes. Investing in a soil moisture meter can give you valuable insights into your soil’s water-holding capacity.
For use as an agricultural soil amendment or soil conditioner, a nutrient-loaded biochar is necessary. Read this article to learn why a NAKED Char would not be appropriate.
When using biochar for drought resilience, you need to couple it with drought-hardy cover crops. Plants with long taproots, such as alfalfa, radish, and cowpea, can penetrate the deeper moisture zones. Cover crops that winter kill act as water conduits for other less hardy plants.
The greater the diversity of your cover crop mix, the more biology you’ll have in your fields. The pores in biochar give them a place to call home.
A living soil is a drought-proof soil. Studies all over the world have shown how biochar works with soil biology and plant root exudates to turn arid marginal areas into productive fields.
For further in-depth reading on biochar and its impact on remediating arid marginal landscapes, see the links below.
Biochar in Sikkim : Organic Farming’s Best Kept Secret – Grow Billion Trees
Biochar and microbe synergy: A path to climate-smart farming
Retaining Moisture for the Future of Agriculture is Survival
In regenerative farming, retaining moisture isn’t just a convenience; it’s a survival strategy. Biochar brings reliability to rain-scarce seasons, turning fragile soils into reservoirs of resilience. Coupling the porosity biochar brings to soil with the photosynthates cover crops share with the microbial populations restores ecosystems.
Whether you’re growing food for human consumption or feed for livestock, biochar and cover crops make water stay a little longer where it’s needed most. There isn’t any one-size-fits-all answer to drought-proofing your agricultural operation.
The world is getting warmer. Applying biochar and keeping the soil covered with living roots have stood the test of time for retaining moisture.
Farm practices such as no- or low-tillage, crop rotation to break up pest life cycles and for weed control, benefit the natural environment and farm productivity.
Because not all biochars are created equal, we have developed a biochar/humate blend (VITAL Blend) that adds porosity and more than 55 micronutrients, enzymes, minerals, fulvic/humic/ulmic acids, amino acids, and biostimulants.
Our BioChar is USDA Certified Biobased. The Humate (ACTIV80 AG from Black Earth) is OMRI Listed, and the blend has a pH value of just below 7.0 - perfect for soil nutrient availability. The Biochar increases the soil’s porosity, and the Humate provides nutrients and high-energy food for the soil microbes. One cubic foot of BioChar has the surface area of over 690 acres (with its pores)and is a powerful water conservation tool.
These two ingredients, biochar and humate, create an all-natural, organic soil conditioner that is so concentrated, its application rate is 50-60% less, compared to other similar products on the market, saving time, effort, & money.
Learn more about the benefits you can receive this season with our biochar blends.
