Biochar has been made Worldwide

I saw this on another site and it made sense to me.   I have read about biochar being made traditionally in many nations on Earth, each in their own way. I even think that in a passive way, it gets made naturally, and tribal people use it, as it enriches their soil. Any time there's a big fire, it adds a form of biochar to the soil.
John S
PDX OR

Biochar: A Shared Global Heritage

Biochar isn’t something new — it’s wisdom carried across cultures for centuries.
Different communities around the world independently discovered that adding charred plant material to soils could bring life, fertility, and resilience:
Amazon (South America) – Indigenous communities created the famous Terra Preta (black earth) by combining charcoal, food waste, and organic matter, forming soils that are still fertile today.
Africa – Traditional farming practices included mounds enriched with char and organic residues, which boosted yields and soil health across generations.
Australia – Indigenous Australians practiced firestick farming — cool, controlled burning that created biochar in soils, leaving the land soft, spongy, and fertile.
🌱 These practices remind us: biochar is not just a modern technology, but a rediscovery of ancient wisdom.
Today, science helps us scale and refine what our ancestors already knew — that healthy soils mean thriving communities.

While not wholy intentional for the purpose of biochar humans have also been using fire for grasslands all around the world and when grass burns quickly like that it turns to char dust.

My speculation is that people did that, and eventually observed that the plants grew better.  People here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon intentionally burned the valley floor every year.
John S
PDX OR

I remember as a child the farmers used to burn the wheat and barley stubble on the fields (Southern UK). I think it was probably as a pest deterrent. We used to have to be careful when we hung our washing out in harvest season for the smuts in the wind! I don't know how old the process was. Of course it isn't done these days, and I'm not sure that ploughing in the stubble isn't better for the soil anyhow!

Indeed, I quite clearly remember one of the last years of stubble burning in E. England where I grew up before it was effectively banned in 1993.  It seems to be considered a traditional technique.

Here's an article about it, which concludes open burning in fields is overall more environmentally harmful than beneficial: https://tracextech.com/stubble-burning-environmental-problem/

But the piece also lists beneficial effects that can usefully be achieved in other ways.  Also, gathering material to char in one location in a highly controlled way, could tip the process to avoid unacceptable harms.

Yes, the burning of the valley here was done by the Native Americans for thousands of years.   Burning of the fields was done for many years here later, by "modern" farmers.  It stopped, not due to pollution or climate change, but because it created huge smoke that consistently led to giant car pileups and deaths on the interstate freeway through the area.  When populations in an area increase substantially, what was before a temporary impact can have a much more substantial effect.
John S
PDX OR