www.montereycountynow.com FEBRUARY 5-11, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 On first pass, the optics don’t look great. What appears to be a dumpster on fire sits at the center of Brothers Ranch, a 356-acre property owned by the Elkhorn Slough Foundation in Prunedale. The fire pit is surrounded by a thin patch of trees, contrasted by bucolic views of rolling hills and agricultural lands. As bits of wood and embers swirl about, two Cat excavators pick up piles of wood stationed around the site, dropping logs into the top of the container. The scene depicts a logging operation, but not the kind one might think. “Previously, this was a complete wall of eucalyptus. You couldn’t see more than 5 feet where we’re standing right now,” says Dash Dunkell, conservation director for the Elkhorn Slough Foundation. Looking across the highlands, he explains that the eucalyptus trees were over 150 feet tall, growing since the 1980s when the land was last logged. Eucalyptus are notorious trees familiar to most Californians. They are visually striking and aromatic, invasive and fast growing. They’re known to be oily and incredibly messy—as a result, highly flammable—thereby placing them in the crosshairs of wildfire mitigation groups, city planners and residents alike. Counties across the state have deployed all sorts of eucalyptus grove removal projects; in Monterey County, efforts in recent years have targeted groves in Garland Ranch Regional Park, along Highway 101 in North County, at the Elkhorn Slough and more. But what to do with all of that leftover biomass is a question the Elkhorn Slough Foundation has become uniquely well positioned to answer, thanks to its access to agricultural lands and partnerships with researchers. “There are lots of different ways to deal with the biomass produced from fuel reduction projects like this,” Dunkell says. “For us, we wanted to try and capture as much of the carbon as possible. And we also were really interested in the product of the biochar, something useful for our organic farms, potentially for habitat restoration projects, and producing something that we could do something good with.” The dumpster-looking container is a carbonator: a large machine that heats up organic material in low-oxygen conditions, turning it into a charcoal product known as biochar. It’s an industrial version of a process that’s been used by Indigenous people for thousands of years as a way to create more nutrient-rich soils. In the last decade, the practice has also emerged as a critical tool to help lessen the burden of climate change impacts by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While the use of biochar on large agricultural fields is growing, researchers still have limited understanding of where it is most effective, how long its benefits last and at what application rates. In 2023, the nonprofit Elkhorn Slough Foundation—which leases out several organic farms—began working with a farmer and a researcher from CSU Monterey Bay on a field adjacent to the biochar operation to test those questions in real-world conditions. With a second planting season underway, the experiment could provide useful insight to help growers throughout the county improve soil fertility and, inadvertently, farm carbon. “For centuries, Indigenous people used cultural fire to maintain healthy forests,” said Esselen Tribe Chairman Tom Little Bear Nason with Ventana Forestry, the Indigenous-owned forestry company that supplied the carbonator. “But much of today’s landscape has gone generations without beneficial burning, leaving an overload of woody material and non-native trees.” Ventana Forestry, an Indigenousowned forestry company focused on fire response and prevention work, purchased a gently used Tigercat 6050 carbonator for $500,000 in late 2022. A new unit costs about $1 million today. A Cat excavator transfers felled eucalyptus logs and biomass to the carbonator to be transformed into biochar, a soil amendment that can help improve soil fertility and store carbon. Arun Jani, an assistant professor in the Department of Biology, Agriculture, and Chemistry at CSUMB, is studying how varying amounts of biochar can help local growers improve soil fertility and water retention.
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