Abe Collins is a cattle grazier in St. Albans, VT, and the founder of New Soil Matrix, Inc.and New Soil Quantum, Inc.
Abe is a co-founder of the Soil Carbon Coalition, which is sponsoring the Soil Carbon Challenge, a local/global contest to see how quickly land managers can accrue carbon in soils.
Abe Collins, New Soil Matrix inc., Soil Carbon Coalition, Carbon Farmers of America
Previously, he co-founded Carbon Farmers of America, a Vermont farmer-owned company that introduced the idea and practice of accelerated topsoil formation as a means of mitigating and adapting to climate change to many farmers and policy makers around the world.
Abe's focus for the last 15 years has been studying and developing management tools to grow new topsoil as a means of achieving food, water and climate security and reversing desertification.
He has carried that work through to New Soil Matrix to assist agricultural producers and policymakers to scale and monetize topsoil formation toward sustainably increasing production and cost-effectively meeting the environmental security priorities of our time.
Using Food and Stewardship to Build Soil and Fight Climate Change
Presentations from the Quivira Coalition's 9th Annual Conference, November 10-12, 2010, in Albuquerque, NM
Right now, the only possibility of large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere is through plant photosynthesis and other land-based carbon sequestration activities.
Strategies include: enriching soil carbon, farming with perennials, employing climate-friendly livestock practices, conserving natural habitat, restoring degraded watersheds and rangelands, and producing local food.
Over the past decade, many of these strategies have been demonstrated to be both practical and profitable.
A carbon ranch bundles them into an economic whole with the aim of creating climate-friendly landscapes that are both healthy ecologically and the source of healthy food.
In this conference we explored this exciting new frontier and heard from carbon pioneers from around the world.