A West Australian bushfood grower is praising heavy use of biochar to be the saviour of her highly saline soils.

Biochar is a charcoal product that is produced from plant matter, and is used in agricultural contexts.

Over the last decade it has been subject to a lot of research and development, with focus on yields and fertiliser use, but there has been no dedicated researched that investigates the application of biochar on dryland salinity.

To bushfood grower Karry Fisher-Watts, however, there is no question about its salinity-reduction capabilities.

Ms Fisher-Watts and her husband Barry bought a small farm in Brookton, two hours south-east of Perth, three years ago to farm native bushfood species such as sandalwood and quondongs.

Karry Fisher-Watts in her electric car named 'Polly' ( ABC Rural: Tyne Logan )

After discovering the land had severe salinity issues, the pair set to work implementing a vast array of saline reduction methods.

It included applying eight tonne of biochar into made-made wells, spreading it along rip lines and also putting it inside permeable biomass walls.

"This soil here was actually white on the surface, you could walk on it in summer and you would just hear crunching with salt," she said.

"One of the depressing things about it was that when we put trees in they just couldn't grow, and basically we discovered that there was an underground sub-surface drain that leached salt water from the area to here."

Now, after extreme efforts in implementing salinity reduction methods, five hectares of bushfood species grow on the land.

Dryland salinity costly to farmers

Dryland salinity is a major form of land degradation in Australia's agricultural industry.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics it impacts about 2 million hectares of agricultural land across the country, half of which is in Western Australia.

Ms Fisher-Watts said she believed bio-char and its by-product, wood vinegar, accounted for 70 per cent of the reason their soil now successfully grows trees..

Visible salt scalds evident on the Brookton property in January 2016. ( Supplied: Karry Fisher-Watts )

While the land is still hard and slightly saline, it now successfully grows native bushfood plants. ( ABC Rural: Tyne Logan )

While most of the species grown on the property are salt-tolerant varieties, Ms Fisher-Watts said she was so confident about its benefits to salinity that she was this year planting clover on the property as well.

"We put clover in last year and 98 per cent of it died," she said.

"But this year we are so confident that we have invested a lot of money its planting clover this year.

"It's very salt-tolerant clover."

Biochar varies in price, ranging form $100 to $300 a tonne in Western Australia, not including freight, to about $600 in the eastern-states.

More research needed

Ms Fisher-Watts' efforts have attracted the interest of a number of researchers, including being used as a case study for a feature article published in Future Directions International. [link]

Although the results are purely anecdotal, there is interest from companies, researchers and NRM groups in undertaking official trials of biochar and its impact on salinity.

Euan Beaumont, the director of Energy Farmers Australia, a WA based biochar company, said their company would be keen to see what application of biochar to saline soils has on the actual salinity of the soil.

"We'd like to work with NRM groups or farmers in particular, and all it need is covering the cost of getting the biochar there, the application and then the monitoring of it," he said.

Mr Beaumont, who formerly worked as a grain farmer, said for it to be worth it for farmers they would need to assess the application rate to see if it was cost viable.

In the meantime, Karry Fisher-Watts has been involved in setting up WA's first Biochar Network which will aim to fund and conduct trials and create a resource of information on biochar's benefits.