Chuck Schembre

Chuck Schembre

Chuck Schembre lives in the high desert in Carson
Valley, Nevada, with his wife and two children. His
agricultural background includes managing diversified
vegetable farms, fruit orchards and vineyards, and
working as a soil scientist, agronomist and conservation
specialist in California and Nevada. He holds a
bachelor’s degree in Earth and Soil Science from
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo,
and is a Certified Professional Soil Scientist (CPSS), and
Erosion and Sediment Control Specialist (CPESC). He
has extensive experience in cover crops, and currently
serves on the Southwestern Cover Crop Council.
Throughout Chuck’s multiple positions, he served as a
soil health educator, conducted many presentations,
and provided on-farm technical assistance and soil
health consulting.

Chuck did not grow up on a farm and found his
journey into agriculture through a passion to cook
and eat locally grown food. He began volunteering
on small organic farms for work-trade, and while at
the university, he cut his teeth in production farming
at the Cal Poly Organic Farm, a 15-acre, diversified
commercial vegetable farm, with a permaculture site.

In 2007, he attended the Ecological Farming
Conference in California, and was inspired by
regenerative agricultural pioneers, igniting his
soil health journey. After college, Chuck joined
the AmeriCorps Watershed Stewards Project in
Northern California, and continued farming at a
diversified farm owned by a local tribe.

After his AmeriCorps experience, he further
pursued farming, managing multiple diversified
vegetable and fruit farms, focusing on
agroecological practices and small livestock
integration. Chuck eventually moved on to
manage larger scale vineyards in California
where he managed no-till cover cropping
systems and organic and biological pest
management practices in vineyards. He then
moved on to manage a regional soil health and
conservation demonstration vineyard for the
Napa Resource Conservation District (RCD). While
at the RCD, he helped create the North Coast
Soil Health Hub and a soil health monitoring
protocol. He also worked with many vineyard
producers conducting soil health assessments,
developing water quality farm plans, carbon farm
plans, providing erosion control assistance, and
water use efficiency evaluations. He then moved
to Nevada and took over the direction and
management of the Desert Farming Initiative, an
educational, demonstration, and research farm
focused on high-desert foods systems at the
University of Nevada Reno, Experiment Station.

I love to grow as much food for my family
as possible, teaching my children and the
community, and pushing the limits and
possibilities of small-scale food production
in the high desert where I live. I continue to
educate myself with the advancing information
of soil health sciences, while taking a practical
approach when implementing the principles of
regenerative agriculture and considering the
unique challenges of every farm.

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