This is not regenerative farming.
This is biochar farming.
Carbon Hill, Caebardd Farm, Mid Wales. A working beef and grass farm where the biochar is made next door, goes into the cattle shed first, and reaches the field as manure. Six years of soil tests, herd records and weather say it works. Scroll and we will show you how.
Mick Jones. The Biochar Farmer.
Mick and Sandy Jones left farming in 1980, the year the first boat of New Zealand lamb arrived and prices collapsed. They went into timber, then biomass boilers, then engineering. The farm never quite let go of them.
In 2019 Mick spread the first biochar on a field at Caebardd and it changed what he thought a farm could do. At 68 he went back to school to study the life in the soil, so he could understand why. He kept it simple: make sure it pays on a real farm first, then go deep into the science.
“Once I could see what was happening under the surface, I needed to understand why it was working.”
Mick died in July 2026. He left a method, a herd, a set of soil results nobody expected, and a farm that now runs without synthetic fertiliser, lime, or bought-in feed.
Good biochar is too expensive to spread.
Pure certified biochar is a premium product. At the rates a soil needs, no farm can buy it by the tonne, spread it on a field and make the numbers work. That is the problem Carbon Hill was set up to solve: find the proven, realistic route from the machine to the field, one that pays on a working farm.
The route turned out to run through the cattle shed.
It starts with wood nobody wanted.
Whole-tree chip from local forestry: the bark, the brash and the tops that would otherwise be left to rot or burnt in a heap. Nothing that could have been a plank. It arrives wet, is dried on the farm using the plant’s own heat, and goes in as chip.
Made next door.
The chip goes through a Woodtek C1000, built a hundred metres from this field. Out of one end comes biochar. Out of the other comes heat, which dries the next load, warms the workshop and powers the factory that builds the next machine. Every tonne of biochar is certified to the highest grade in the European Biochar Certificate scheme, and every tonne carries a verified carbon removal credit.
That is the last we will say about the machine on this page. The C1000 has its own page.
Charged manure. Nitrogen held, not lost.
When the shed is cleaned out, the spent bedding is already the fertiliser. Muck normally goes anaerobic: packed down and airless, the bacteria that take over strip nitrate back to gas, and what does not go up the shed wall as ammonia goes off in the first heavy rain. Biochar keeps the pack aerobic, so the ammonium is made and then held on the char, which grips it the way a sponge grips water. It comes out denser, composts down faster, and there is a good deal less of it to shift: 185 tonnes measured this spring. It goes onto the field once a year, in the autumn.
The average grassland farm buys around 38 kg of nitrogen a hectare a year. This one buys none.
Same field. Same lab. Four years apart.
Organic carbon went from 5.3% to 7.1%, about 33 tonnes of carbon a hectare. The pH climbed from 6.6 to 7.1 with no lime. The soil’s ability to hold nutrients rose by two-thirds. Available phosphate rose by two-thirds. Calcium, boron and magnesium all moved towards where a grassland soil wants them.
All of that from 1.4 tonnes of biochar a hectare over four years. The biochar’s own carbon is a small part of the story; what it set in motion in the soil is around ninety times its weight.
Underneath it is a living workforce: over a tonne of microbes in every hectare of topsoil, cycling roughly 250 kg of nitrogen per hectare every two weeks, feeding the grass on demand rather than in one shock from a bag.
Healthier cattle on cheaper feed.
A suckler herd with no bought-in concentrate, on grass and forage only. Almost no vet, medicine or antibiotic costs. Scour still turns up in winter calving, as it does on any farm, but the calves are resilient enough that it is easily treated with natural methods, the way our grandparents did it. Better fodder goes further, so feed efficiency is up 20%, and calves put on 1.25 kg a day from birth to weaning in October. And these are grass-fed cattle, not corn-finished, and they still made the top ten percent of prices at Welshpool market.
“It’s become a more balanced, more relaxed, and genuinely stress-free farming system.”
And back to the shed.
The grass feeds the cattle. The cattle charge the bedding. The bedding feeds the field. The biochar goes round with it, and every pass leaves the soil with more carbon, more life and more water than it had before. Nothing is bought in. Nothing is lost to the air or the river.
That is biochar farming. Mick kept it simple on purpose.
£130 a tonne, delivered. Priced against straw.
Charbed25 is £130 a tonne delivered within 25 miles of a C1000 plant. That puts it in the same bracket as bedding straw. The bedding costs about the same as what it replaces, the shed uses half the straw, and the heat and power from the machine that makes the biochar is what pays the difference. That is the whole point of making energy the main product: it is what gets good biochar onto ordinary farms at a price a farm already pays.
Last winter, measured: 183 days housed, 21 cows, 17 weanlings, 21 calves. Bedding cost £2,430 more than a straw-only winter. Back the other way came 23 bales of straw not bought, no nitrogen bought, no feed bought, and 185 tonnes of charged muck.
Start with the bedding. Try it on a few strips.
Biochar will not show you the result tomorrow. That is why we have priced Charbed25 next to straw: so you can try it without adding anything to your farming overheads, and let the farm tell you whether it works.
Swap half your straw for Charbed25. The first thing you will notice is the smell, or rather the lack of it. Through late winter you should see fewer health problems in the herd than you had before. But the real result does not arrive until the muck is spread, the grass comes, and you have fed that fodder back to the cattle. That is a year, and it is the only test that counts.
So do not take our word for it. Try a few strips of a field for now, put the charged muck on those and not the rest, and see what happens. Then decide.
“It’s so nice to farm without stress.”
Mick Jones, 1960 to 2026. Farmer, husband, father, grandfather. The Bard of Caebardd.
It began with Betty, his first humble biochar plant, and grew into the C1000. Everything he learned about the soil and about farming in step with nature, he shared, freely and warmly, with anyone who cared to know. Because he wanted a better way.