PrimaTerra | Biochar-Rich Soil Blends

It Starts With Soil.

Soil is the most extraordinary thing in your garden. A handful of healthy soil holds more living organisms than there are people on earth, and every one of them is working for you.

But soil doesn't arrive that way. It has to be built.

And that’s why we made PrimaTerra

Long live soil.

Soil Is Alive

There are more living organisms in a single handful of healthy soil than there are humans who have ever lived.

Soil Is Biodiverse

A single teaspoon of healthy soil contains more species than there are plant species in the Amazon rainforest.

Soil Is Precious

It takes nature approximately 500-1,000 years to form a single inch of topsoil.

Soil Is Resilient

Biochar found in Amazonian terra preta soils is still actively improving fertility after 2,500 years.

Soil Is Porous

Healthy soil is approximately 50% empty space. That pore structure is what holds air and water for roots.

Soil Is Hydrated

Soil can hold up to 20 times its weight in water when structured correctly.

Soil Is Threatened

We have lost roughly half of Earth's topsoil in the last 150 years of industrial agriculture.

Establishing Soil Is

The Foundation

Upon Which Great Gardens Are Built

Most soil products are built to feed for a season. Ours is built to establish for many seasons. PrimaTerra provides the structure and habitat your soil runs on, at the one moment that matters most: the start. We call this Establishing Soil. You build the foundation once, and reap the benefits for years to come.

Potting

It's all you need to start your potting right and give your plant a strong, healthy foundation from day one.

Ingredients:

Compost, aged bark, sphagnum peat moss, biochar, mycorrhizae

Active Ingredients

Ectomycorrhizal fungi

Pisolithus tinctorius220,509 propagules/gram

Endomycorrhizal fungi

Rhizophagus intraradices33.1 propagules/gram

Funneliformis mosseae33.1 propagules/gram

Planting

Give your trees, shrubs, and perennials the best start possible.

Ingredients:

Sphagnum peat moss, compost, aged bark, biochar, mycorrhizae

Active Ingredients

Ectomycorrhizal fungi

Pisolithus tinctorius220,509 propagules/gram

Endomycorrhizal fungi

Rhizophagus intraradices33.1 propagules/gram

Funneliformis mosseae33.1 propagules/gram

Raised Beds

A raised bed is only as good as the day you build it. This mix is made for that day.

A Remarkable Substance

With an even more remarkable story

What is biochar?

Biochar is a natural, organic, charcoal-like soil additive that dramatically improves the structure, productivity and longevity of soil it is combined with.

What does biochar do?

A helpful metaphor is a coral reef. Like the limestone structure of a reef, biochar is not alive. But its job is almost identical: a rigid, porous structure that ensures the life around it thrives. In biochar's case, its microscopic pockets and gaps hold water and nutrients, preventing them from washing away, while providing an ideal home for the billions of microbes that make soil healthy and fertile.

Where does biochar come from?

Biochar is created by heating wood or other organic material in a low-oxygen environment (a process called pyrolysis). South American tribes used biochar for thousands of years to turn the acidic, infertile soil of the Amazon Basin into "terra preta" (dark earth), some of the most fertile soil ever discovered. Until it was forgotten.

The knowledge was lost with the tribes after European contact. But soil scientists analyzing sites that were still incredibly fertile centuries after their creators abandoned them realized that tiny bits of charcoal-like carbon were the key to this miracle.

Where does PrimaTerra's biochar come from?

The knowledge the Amazonian tribes (and many other ancient cultures) unlocked has been studied exhaustively by scientists. So now with modern processes we can reproduce the pyrolysis they generated in dirt pits in our clean, solar-powered facility in Rhode Island. PrimaTerra biochar is made exclusively from New England hard and soft wood forestry waste. This clean blend ensures unmatched consistency and quality.

What are the environmental benefits of biochar?

Biochar has another enormous benefit those indigenous tribes never imagined. Because biochar is so stable, it sequesters carbon in the ground for decades or even centuries. That makes biochar one of the very few carbon-negative agricultural inputs, meaning it removes more carbon than its production creates.

There are estimates that if we start using biochar at scale, we could sequester gigatons of carbon every year.