Sequestadors from Mexico

A delegation of hydrologists and soil carbon scientists from Mexico visited the Carbon Coalition's HQ in the Cudgegong Valley near Goolma NSW to talk about water and see the rare sight of full dams, running creeks and tall grasses in our district. One of the party, Dr Jorge Etchevers from Chile,, co-edited Carbon Sequestration in Soils of Latin America with Dr Rattan Lal. The party was brought to our carbon farming/woolgrowing enterprise by Dr Willem Vervoort to meet the farmers who started a grassroots soil carbon campaign. Dr Vervoort, Senior Lecturer Hydrology & Catchment Management in Alex McBratney's Faculty at Sydney University, had visited Mexico because of the similarities of their challenges with soils and climate change. Dr Israel Velasco and Dr Waldo Bustamante are hydrologists interested in irrigation. Luckily we found a great deal of water running through our soils towards the creek, because of the clay pan we inherited from nearly 200 years of mouldboard plowing. Dr Etchevers informed us that the soil classification system used by the Aztecs was approximately the same that scientists in South America use today. Jorge also shares the same anxieties about soil carbon trading that Australian scientist suffer. As the party was leaving, Dr Velasco told me he was going to become a sequestador. Nice word.