Co-sponsored with the Marin Carbon Project
“Climate change, quite simply, cannot be halted without fixing agriculture.” - Michael Pollan
Capturing and storing carbon in the soil—carbon sequestration—is among the most practical and promising ways to mitigate climate disruption on a large scale. Carbon farming also has multiple agricultural benefits: protecting against drought and flooding, enhancing fertility, and boosting production.
The Marin Carbon Project co-founded by John Wick, is one of the nation’s most cutting-edge research and implementation efforts in this domain, performing field trials, gathering rigorous data, and advancing scalable tools and practical models for widespread adoption. Calla Rose Ostrander, an activist with a background in climate policy, has been working with John Wick and many of the organizations in this rapidly growing field to advance these solutions at the state and federal level.
We’ll spend the day at the beautiful Stemple Creek Ranch in West Marin, a thousand acres protected in perpetuity in an agricultural land trust, which raises grass-fed beef and lamb using strict animal welfare practices, and which has protected three miles of riparian area and planted 1,000 trees to help control erosion, provide shade, and create habitat for wildlife. We’ll discover firsthand how carbon farming practices work and their enormous potential. Our guides will be: Loren Poncia, rancher/owner of Stemple Creek (which has been in his family for a century); John Wick, rancher, carbon farmer, and sustainable land management advocate, co-founder of the Marin Carbon Project and co-owner of the Nicasio Native Grass Ranch in Marin; and Calla Rose Ostrander, a strategic advisor to individuals and organizations committed to stabilizing Earth’s climate who worked for 10 years in municipal climate policy for the cities of Aspen and San Francisco and also worked at Earth Economics and the Rocky Mountain Institute; Whendee Silver, Professor, Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley; Rebecca Burgess, Executive Director of Fibershed, board chair of the Carbon Cycle Institute; Paul Muller, co-owner of Full Belly Farm, a pioneering northern CA organic farm; Puja Batra, Ph.D., founder of Batra Ecological Strategies, highly experienced sustainability consultant; Janaki Jagannath, coordinator of the Community Alliance for Agroecology; Elly Brown, Director of the San Diego Food System Alliance, a coalition with a mission to develop a healthy, equitable, and sustainable food system; and Mark Shepard, CEO of Restoration Agriculture Development and Forest Agriculture Enterprises, author of Restoration Agriculture: Real-World Permaculture for Farmers.
Price: $195 (includes lunch)
