Gary Betts

producer

Yellow Dog Farm

51513 Sherman St.
Athena, OR 97813

(w) (541) 566-0131

About

Graduated from the University of Washington with a Master's degree in World Literature. Taught college level English composition and literature for 8 years, and by applying the "Westinghouse Effect", all my students got A grades. Inspired by Goethe, became interested in concrete, started own business (15 yrs) and was ultimately commissioned to design a mix for the World Trade Towers Plaza. Because had earlier learned the Forth programming language (then in use for satellite control and manned space exploration), was offered a job programming the new Epson computer for a start-up company named Rising Star, in Redondo Beach, CA. Subsequently was offered the position of manager of the programming environment for SABA corporation, which had developed a page reader and a hand scanner, which were awarded Product of the Year 2 years running, by BYTE magazine. Then offered a position by IBM to oversea development of IBM's CAD program at IBM headquarters in Boulder, CO. Retired in 1991. Acquired family wheat farm in Eastern Oregon in 2005. First learned of bio-char from an article in the Financial Times on the "Lost City of Z", in the Amazon, and the subsequent discovery of "tera preta" (black soil), where waste charcoal from the civilization's pottery industry had been tilled into the earth, making sustainable, continual, agriculture possible in the Amazon basin. Later articles in New Scientist led to contact with Dr. Machado, who was the first US researcher to investigate bio-char. My farm became the first test location for bio-char, in cooperation with the Columbia Basin Ag Research Station, in 2014.