Keynote Speaker: Dr. Rattan Lal
We are pleased to announce Dr. Rattan Lal as our Keynote speaker for our 2022 Conference, “Soil Carbon Storage: Combating Climate Change from the Ground Up”. Dr. Lal is a globally renowned soil scientist whose research ranges from regenerative agriculture, soil carbon sequestration, soil restoration, natural resource management, and global food security. Lal received the Glinka World Soil Price in 2018, the World Food Prize in 2020, the Good Will Ambassador of IICA in 2020, and the Padma Shree Award in 2021.
The World Food Prize writes, “Dr. Rattan Lal, a native of India and a citizen of the United States, will receive the 2020 World Food Prize for developing and mainstreaming a soil-centric approach to increasing food production that restores and conserves natural resources and mitigates climate change.
Over his career spanning more than five decades and four continents, Dr. Lal has promoted innovative soil-saving techniques benefiting the livelihoods of more than 500 million smallholder farmers, improving the food and nutritional security of more than two billion people, and saving hundreds of millions of hectares of natural tropical ecosystems.”
In “Rattan Lal: Our Soils Rockstar“, Alayna DeMartini writes: “A prolific author, Lal has published hundreds of journal articles on everything from soil ecosystems and effects of tillage systems to global food security and sequestering carbon in the soil. He was in the top 1 percent of highly cited agricultural researchers for three years running and was awarded the Atlas Award for the best paper among 1,800 journals in 2016.
His soils research has resulted in honorary doctorates from universities in five countries: India, Norway, Moldova, Germany, and Spain. Lal was also named one of 2014’s most influential scientists in the world.
Today, he is not only a Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science, but also serves as director of the CFAES Carbon Management and Sequestration Center.
In the early 1990s, he, along with two colleagues from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wrote the first documented report that soil can defend against rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air.”
Learn more about Dr. Lal’s contributions to soil conservation and regenerative agriculture: