Biochars improve agricultural production : the evidence base is limited /Chaplot, Vincent Baveye, P. Guenon, R. Le Guyader, E. Minasny, B. Srivastava, A. K. Biochar application to soil is commonly recognized to improve soil fertility and consequently biomass and food production sustainably. We re-examined the robustness of the underlying data and found that, of the 12 000+ publications on "biochar and agriculture" used in meta-studies, only 109 Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) papers (or 0.9%) provide experimental data on the impacts on crop yield and/or biomass production. Our analysis revealed that none (0%) of these studies compared a biochar treatment to a treatment adding to the soil the same amounts of easily accessible nutrients as found in biochar, 0.9% evaluated the toxicity of biochar, and 5.5% considered at least two cropping cycles after a single biochar application, which in all cases are major shortcomings. Finally, when computed only for agricultural soils (n = 65), the mean biomass or grain yield gain, which was 16.1% (median at 7.1%) for all available experiments, decreased to -0.64% (median at 5.2%). Consequently, the underlying evidence base to support biochar application in agricultural soils to enhance biomass production and grain yield is so far limited. 2025 text https://www.documentation.ird.fr/hor/fdi:010092792 fdi:010092792 Chaplot Vincent, Baveye P., Guenon R., Le Guyader E., Minasny B., Srivastava A. K.. Biochars improve agricultural production : the evidence base is limited. 2025, 35 (1), 295-298 EN