Education & Training

The Carbon Cycle Institute provides high quality education and training opportunities to our partners. While rooted in universal ecosystem processes and principles, an understanding of carbon farming and carbon farm planning remains elusive for many producers and natural resource professionals. CCI continues to play a pivotal role in guiding the emerging carbon farming community toward a more complete understanding of the concept, its methodologies, its metrics and its implications at the farm, global and intermediate scales.

Training Carbon Farm Planners

CCI is continually evolving to meet the growing demand among producers, Conservation Districts, and other key partners in and out of California for Carbon Farm Plan development that exceeds existing capacity.  To meet the growing demand CCI has worked with the Colorado State University COMET team to develop an on-line, multi-module carbon farm planning education platform designed to be paired with a guided training with the CCI Staff. The curriculum was first launched in 2020 with the North Carolina Foundation for Soil and Water Conservation.

In 2021, CCI is partnering with Chico State University’s Center for Regenerative Agriculture and California Polytechnic University’s Center for Sustainability to scale carbon farm planning education and training opportunities for students, farmers and ranchers, conservationists, and natural resource management agency staff.

CCI’s Carbon Farm Planning Curriculum strives to:

1. Provide essential background and key concepts for understanding the ecological and economic significance of Carbon Farming.

2. Provide a framework of knowledge to facilitate development of a Carbon Farm Plan.

3. Provide necessary tools, materials, and ongoing support for writing a Carbon Farm Plan.

Café Hour

CCI provides a monthly open discussion “Café Hour” training series, providing technical support/education to carbon farm planners focusing on topics selected by participants. Café Hour workshops are held on-line via Zoom, greatly facilitating access for participants across the state and beyond. Where feasible, Café Hour trainings are conducted by partner carbon farm planners as part of our Train-the-Trainer approach and targeted Conservation Districts, NRCS, and Cooperative Extension staff working on building carbon farming programs across the country. View recordings of past Café Hours here.