Carbon Harvest is company pursuing regional, community-powered carbon offsets platforms focused on agriculture and forestry. Carbon Harvest offers carbon land planning services to farmers and land managers and then envisions working with those land managers to attract investment that will fuel carbon sequestering projects on their regional lands. Investors include businesses and community members who want to purchase carbon offsets or mitigation certificates while also contributing to greater community food security and resilience.
Carbon Harvest is led by Mari Stuart, Laura Lengnick and Meredith Leigh. Each partner brings a unique depth of expertise to the development of a regional carbon platform, from landscape design expertise to agricultural experience, climate resilience science, and food system project development.
After years of research, communications, and development, Carbon Harvest launched in Spring 2022 with a Beta Project: Bringing Carbon Home. This pilot endeavor partnered with four farmers in Southern Appalachia to design climate-smart agroforestry projects for North Carolina land bases. Beginning 2025, Carbon Harvest will work in partnership Building Soil Building Equity, a project of Accelerating Appalachia, to conduct a market feasibility study for regional carbon offsets or mitigation certificates from climate smart agriculture.
Carbon Harvest formed in response to the lack of transparency in global carbon markets, and in acknowledgement of the fact that large scale policy toward climate drawdown is not happening quickly enough or effectively enough to address real-time climate impacts, especially for small scale farmers. The project hopes to produce a replicable model for regional, community-owned climate resilience efforts.
