It’s been a busy month for standards work at ABI.
At the ASABE Annual International Meeting in Indianapolis (July 12 to 15), Britni Wall accepted the 2026 ASABE Standards Development Award on behalf of the ES-238 Solid Biofuel and X668 Biochar Development Committee. The award recognizes ANSI/ASABE/USBI S668, our standard for measuring and testing biochar, developed with input from experts across industry, academia, and analytical labs. This recognition reflects years of detailed, often unglamorous work, and it gives us a strong foundation to keep building on.
We’re not stopping there. We recently launched a new standards subcommittee that will build on S668 to develop a safe use standard covering biochar across all end-use markets. Now that we have solid methods for measuring and testing biochar, this group will focus on how to use it safely, from farm fields to concrete.
The team also came together for a retreat to map out our five-year market development strategy. Standards only matter if the markets they support actually grow, so it was the right time to step back and plan where we want biochar demand to be in the coming years and how we plan on working to get it there. The conversation was energizing: we have real resources and networks already in place to turn this strategy from a planning exercise into an action plan.
More to come as it takes shape.
Tera Lewandowski
Director of Agricultural Markets
American Biochar Institute
