Biochar, buffers, and the fight against flooding
Episode 150 | 35:22 min
With Guests:
- Christy Gibson, Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
- Trey Allis, Prinsco Application Engineer
Christy Gibson, an Illinois Distinguished Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, kept noticing the same thing on her research travels: farm fields across the Midwest standing in water after increasingly intense storms. That observation led to more questions: How do farmers work with or around waterlogged fields? How do mitigation tactics, like replanting, create inefficiencies? And what solutions can actually make a difference?
Guest host Trey Allis talks with Christy about her decision to study field inundation and her work helping farmers expand their toolbox for managing wet fields. They dig into one amendment getting a lot of attention, biochar, and discuss what it would take to use it at a farm scale. Christy also shares why a water management plan matters and what her research team hopes to learn next.
Note: This episode was recorded on June 8, 2026.


