During Summer 2024, Climate Land Leaders met up in Central Iowa at Whiterock Conservancy. There Liz Garst and her partner, Darwin Pierce, gave the land leaders a gift: Insights into their lifetimes of observing, working and restoring the land around them. We asked Liz to expand on some of her “place-based knowledge.” A banker, activist…

By Oliver Luker* In 2022, we discovered a degraded fen on our property in McHenry County, Illinois. Originally transformed in the 1960s into a fishing and camping site, disturbances to the water table have led to multiple water channeling issues. The fen, once vibrant, is now overrun by invasive species, with nettles as its only…

Guest blog by Climate Land Leader and Iowa landowner Angie Smith Harris, who worked in several areas of risk and project management throughout her professional career, including analyzing the financial stability and viability of bank holding companies and developing risk control frameworks and mitigation plans for Fortune 500 companies.

Recently Jonathan Foley of Project Drawdown released a piece “Regenerative grazing is overhyped. We should do it anyway.” He wrote that some suggest raising regenerative beef is the climate “silver bullet” the food sector needs. However, Foley says, “the climate benefits are often smaller than claimed and only work under limited circumstances…. Regenerative grazing has…

A guest blog by Climate Land Leader Vicki Rae Harder-Thorne. Vicki Rae and her family steward Earth Heart Farms in Ottawa County, OH.

by Climate Land Leader Oliver Luker, Seq Solutions and Wonderland Community Project Nature is not one-dimensional: Just as human hopes and dreams cannot be reduced to “human capital,” neither can the variety of natural ecosystems be reduced to “natural capital.” Yet carbon offset systems seem to do just that, promising that by addressing the harm…

Climate Land Leaders Board member Dr. Michelle Montgomery is a Haliwa Saponi (enrolled)/Eastern Band Cherokee (descendant) and tenured professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma. She recently attended a Climate Land Leaders meetup to lead an exploration into the landowners’ heartwork for 2050. Here she expands on her comments at the meetup on justice and…

Reprinted with permission from our friends at Illinois Farmlink. Agriculture is a climate problem – and a climate solution. This is the belief of the non-profit, Climate Land Leaders, now beginning to serve farmland owners in Illinois. The organization views landowners as powerful decision makers capable of implementing agricultural and conservation practices that alleviate climate…

Last week the House Agriculture Committee released its draft Farm Bill. The Climate Land Leaders Initiative joins many agriculture, food systems and hunger relief organizations in opposing the bill. While the bill brings the remaining Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) conservation funding into the Farm Bill – a move toward more robust, long-term investment in farmer-led…

Wendy Johnson, an Iowa farmer and Climate Land Leaders’ Policy Co-Lead, writes with clarity and heart about the challenges of regenerative farming in corn and soybean country. Here’s an excerpt from her recent newsletter. Sign up for her newsletter at Joia Food & Fiber Farm. One thing I love about Iowa is being able to…