J
John Winter
British architect
1
APPEARANCES
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Aug 18, 2026
Charred for Change
5:23
20:52

Pippa JonesHOST
And was it always your plan when you went back to the farm in 2014 that this was going to be part of how you farmed, or was it a, a just a natural something that progressed or something that came out of a, a challenge or a necessity?
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5:40John WinterGUEST
So I discovered this, you know, biochar carbon that's come from photosynthesis of, of plants.
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5:46John WinterGUEST
You know, where do I get it from? Who's making it? And it just was nothing out there.
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5:52John WinterGUEST
Putting on my engineering hat was like, "Well, how do we scale this up? How do we make it better? How do we make it simple enough for a farmer to run?" All of these criteria had to be met for it to be successful.
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6:02John WinterGUEST
And then the divergent from that was like, how are we gonna make it cheap enough for farmers? Um, unfortunately, making biochar you need three tons of material to make one ton, so it can be costly if you just focus on biochar.
15 MINS LATER

Pippa JonesHOST
When you first did it, did you do it because it made good business sense or because it would reduce emissions, or because you were just really interested because you had your chemical engineer brain happening in the background and you knew there was a solution to this problem, or a bit of both?