WHO WE ARE
The Working Lands Innovation Center (WLIC), launched in partnership with the California Collaborative for Climate Change Solutions (C4S), is a new, multi-stakeholder consortium focused on testing the carbon and crop benefits of soil amendments in California’s agricultural lands. WLIC aims to catalyze negative carbon emissions by deploying soil amendment technologies at multi-acre scales in partnership with California researchers, state agencies, industry, farmers, ranchers, Tribes and small-business development. Our mission is to minimize barriers to adoption of promising soil amendment practices and increase understanding of climate-smart interventions that can scale within and outside of California, driving the state toward negative carbon emissions. Our approach addresses one of the greatest barriers to capturing carbon dioxide in farmland by verifying the ability of rock-dust, biochar, and compost to sequester soil-carbon in real live settings across a variety of cropping systems (corn, alfalfa, tomatoes, almonds), rangelands (coastal and interior), soils, and climates.
​
WLIC has created a consortium which includes Specialty Granules (Ione, CA), Oregon Biochar Solutions, Pacific Biochar, California Compost Coalition, West Marin Compost, farmer's and ranchers across California, UC Cooperative Extension (ANR), Pauma Tribe, Picarro, Larta Institute, Strategic Growth Council, Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Cal State East Bay, UC Merced, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis.
WHAT WE DO
Catalyzing negative carbon emissions in California’s crop and rangelands
We are deploying ~100 acres of soil amendments at demonstration sites across Imperial, San Joaquin, Yolo and Yuba Counties – the largest project of its kind in the world. Crop varietals include almond, alfalfa, corn, tomato and forage biomass. We are evaluating the economics behind the amendments and adopting the California Natural and Working Lands Carbon and Greenhouse Gas Model (CALAND) model to estimate full scale-up carbon dioxide capture potential through 2050. Barriers to adoption will be evaluated through stakeholder engagement, economic analysis, and farmer surveys.