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Coalface The ‘tough and dirty’ business of the last charcoal burners

Markus Wicky with a sooty face

Markus Wicki. His predecessors featured in fairy tales and horror stories because they would live alone in the forests and only rarely come to town, covered in soot.

Piles of wood

All types of wood from the surrounding forests are used to make coal.

Piling wood

Wicki piles the wood into a sort of igloo, some four metres high.

Finished wood piles

In the middle of the so-called kiln there's a chimney that's later filled with glowing coals.

Wicki shovels woodchips

It's physically demanding work.

The kiln

The kiln, which takes around a fortnight to build, is covered with spruce twigs and an airtight layer of coal sand and earth.

Smouldering coals

After air holes are made in the pile - the fire needs oxygen - it starts burning.

Wicki on the coal pile

For the next two weeks Wicki has to pound the pile day and night to get rid of any air pockets. He adds burning material or cooling water so the kiln smoulders evenly.

Wicky schläft im Schopf

The kiln is checked every two hours, so Wicki has set up a bed in a trailer next door.

Smouldering coal pile

White smoke is a sign of water vapour. That means there's still too much moisture in the wood.

Smouldering pile at night

When the smoke turns bluish, the process is finished.

Sacks of coal

The coal must remain covered, cooling down, for four weeks before being put into sacks.

A handful of coal

The charcoal has an aromatic smell, clinks like glass and burns more slowly than industrially prepared charcoal.

Gallery of charcoal burning.

In the heart of central Switzerland only nine charcoal burners still produce charcoal by hand. Farmer Markus Wicki is one of them. 

The Entlebuch, a remote valley in canton Lucerne, has been used for coal making for centuries. Farmers do it as a sideline to boost their income. There’s plenty of forest in the region but it’s hard transporting wood through the impassable surroundings. The solution is to turn it into coal on the spot. 

Wicki and his friends feature in a documentary filmexternal link that illuminates the tradition and the daily struggle for the survival of this skill. “It’s a real slog to run a farm and make coal on the side,” he says with a soot-covered face. 

He runs a calf-fattening business, but he earns more than half of his income from charcoal burningexternal link. 

Wicki and his helpers, mostly retired local farmers, pile up about six tonnes of wood for a coal kiln. “Burning charcoal is a tough and dirty business,” he says. 

Free-time doesn’t exist during the charcoal burning – the fire has to be watched around the clock. Wicki says he’s probably the last person to burn coal on the farm: his three daughters have other plans. It’s difficult finding young people to do the strenuous work. 

Ups and downs 

The art of making coal from wood has a long tradition in the area. Charcoal generates a lot of heat, and in the past it was used for the extraction of ore, for the production of glass and in forging. 

However, with the expansion of transport routes and electrification, demand fell rapidly. Irons and cookers could be operated electrically and cheaper coal was imported. After the Second World War, many coal kilns were no longer used. The future of charcoal burning looked bleak. 

Then in 1986 Otto Ineichen, a parliamentarian and industrialist, had the idea of making barbecue charcoal instead of industrial charcoal. The plan worked and today the Entlebuch farmers sell 17,000 six-kilo sacks a year at “Otto’s”, a Swiss retailer. 

The burners can’t even keep up with demand. In Switzerland, 10,000 tonnes of charcoal are burnt a year, mainly for barbecuing – 1% from the Napf regionexternal link.

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