CRPR Seminar - Carol Morris & Catherine Price - UK farmer framings of biochar

Please note that this is a hybrid event - please contact CRPR@exeter.ac.uk to request the Teams joining instructions.

Whilst agriculture is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise (along with shipping and aviation), it is uniquely placed in potentially being a carbon sink and contributing to achieving net zero. Although carbon emissions need to be reduced rapidly, there is also a need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. A growing suite of greenhouse gas removal (GGR) approaches are being developed, and one potential land-based approach is biochar. Biochar is a carbon-rich substance produced by a thermochemical process called pyrolysis. It sequesters carbon from biomass source materials for potentially hundreds or thousands of years. Agricultural land is anticipated to be one of the main sites of application for biochar. However, there has been limited research into what farmers think about this scenario and the facilitating governance arrangements.

In this seminar, we ask the questions: How is biochar production and application framed by farmers? What do these framings mean for: policy and incentives for biochar application to agricultural land; the role farmers can play in land-based GGR, and in wider transformations required for addressing climate change? We draw from original data collected in 2023 and 2024 from 29 semi-structured interviews with UK based farmers involved with biochar field trials and those with an active interest in biochar. 

Using an ‘issue frames’ analysis approach that we developed to analyse the reporting of biochar in the UK print news media, we explore the relevance of the following frames to understanding UK farmers’ engagements with biochar: Innovation, Economics, Security, Governance and Accountability, Risk, Justice, Substitution, and Tradition.