City of Cheyenne announces partnership with Encore Green

Encore Green works closely with landowners, from farms to golf courses, to find out what their goals are going into the year. These landowners are locked into a one-year contract where, once a month, Encore Green returns to their land to test the quality of the soil. By the end of the year, landowners see a cut of the profit as a result of selling carbon-rich soil.

“The purpose of that is to improve the soil and increase the population of plant species on the surface,” said John Robitaille of the Wyoming Carbon Asset Network and Encore Green. “Which, in turn, creates more organic carbon in the soil. We come back the next year, and we offer the same program to create additional soil profile, additional plant species in the soil, and we ask them to come back.”

A simple way to explain this process is that by Encore Green testing the soil quality, it can monitor if the carbon levels are increasing. The more carbon, the more evidence of increased photosynthesis brought on by higher vegetation rates. More carbon is leaving the air and entering the soil, with oxygen replacing it.

“I love the partnership of having an expert come to your property and help you design a plan so that you will understand how to do a better job of increasing the quality of your plant life,” Mayor Patrick Collins said during Friday’s presentation.

Collins emphasized the steps that the city has taken to become more ecological-friendly in the past year. He then read the official proclamation issued by the city.

“The partnership between Carbon Asset Networks and the city of Cheyenne is to promote resources for land managers, through the help of nonprofits, that support soil health in order to empower the landowners to be better stewards of their land,” one section read.

The biggest complication for implementing this program was creating a third-party verification program. All collected samples are to be logged in a blockchain, which will add a timestamp to every time a soil sample is entered. The city of Cheyenne agreed to be the verifier. Blockchain is the same technology the undergirds digital currencies like Bitcoin, providing a way to store and access information across a wide range of people and devices.

It’s a system of checks and balances to ensure that an entity is not implementing misleading statistics, and that Encore Green is following its own sample protocol.

The topic then turned to discussing how this proclamation will hopefully put Cheyenne at the forefront of eco-friendly policies, compared to the rest of the nation.

“I am so excited about it because it is revolutionary, in my mind,” said Dale Steenburgen, CEO of the Greater Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce. “We are, on the one hand, helping to build the agriculture community. On the other hand, we are keeping climate wellness in the forefront of everybody’s mind as we move forward.”

Marvin Nash, co-founder of Encore Green Environmental, addressed his background as an environmentalist. He told a story of how, in 1972, he pointed down to Denver, and said that in time there would be houses stretching from the city up to the Wyoming state line.

He believes Cheyenne is making steps to expand in a similar pattern.

The city also announced a partnership with the Iraan (Irah-ann) Sheffield Independent School District in Iraan, Texas. The program provides hands-on education in soil stewardship, photosynthesis and produced water reclamation for students in grades 3-12.