OneCanopy Quarterly Update - Q3 2023
Our Colorado-grown seedling trees and shrubs are available for pre-order for your spring 2024 reforestation planting! Our 2024 pallet includes a larger selection of species as we aim to provide plant material for full ecosystem restoration.
Find spring ordering information and more, including project highlights, container recycling, and team updates in this quarter’s eNewsletter!
OneCanopy teams up with C Lazy U Ranch on East Troublesome Fire reforestation project
The C Lazy U Ranch in Granby, CO had 6,000 acres impacted by the East Troublesome Fire in 2020. In early October 2023, 40 OneCanopy volunteers planted 1,600 trees to help bring this landscape back to life.
The East Troublesome Fire ignited Oct. 14, 2020, changing the landscape and lives of Grand County residents. C Lazy U Ranch in Granby was in the fire’s path. On Oct. 21, the fire exploded across Colorado Highway 125, right through C Lazy U.
Since the fire, the ranch’s owners, employees and even guests have worked to restore the damaged landscape.
Nature does a great job of healing itself, as shown by grass and aspens growing in the former barren landscape. But nature often needs a helping hand. On Oct. 1, 2023, C Lazy U staff and volunteers teamed up with OneCanopy to plant 1,600 new trees in the burn scar.
Katelynn Martinez Named 40 Under Forty Honoree
OneCanopy’s director of operations and business development, Katelynn Martinez, was named a 40 Under Forty honoree by BizWest. The award recognizes young professionals making a mark on their communities through professional success and volunteer efforts.
Connections were the key to success for Katelynn Martinez.
While completing work toward her master’s degree in business administration at Colorado State University, she said, “I connected with Kevin Brinkman, a local entrepreneur aiming to establish a reforestation venture. Leveraging my nine years of prior forest management experience in governmental agencies, I contributed valuable insights to this initiative. Within OneCanopy, I progressed from impact investment manager to director of business development and operations.”
Martinez’s key achievements encompass defining the company’s social enterprise framework, devising strategic goals, team recruitment, and securing a suitable property. In less than two years, the pioneering reforestation firm has cultivated more than 500,000 trees for Rocky Mountain reforestation efforts, partnered with more than 300 entities – including government bodies, nonprofits and private landowners – and overseen 1,000 volunteer hours at its Loveland nursery.
Martinez received scholarships such as the CSU College of Business’ Sustainability Scholarship for her conservation and forestry work, and has completed wildland firefighting training, along with certificates in carbon management and permaculture design.
Her community service centers on uplifting people, animals, and ecosystems. She prioritizes education for underserved communities, particularly through active engagement with the Samburu Youth Education Fund. She also initiated projects promoting outdoor experiences for youth, including one such effort that brought 50 Loveland grade schoolers to Sylvan Dale Guest Ranch so they could foster interest in natural resource careers while aligning with state science standards.
OneCanopy joins annual Poudre RiverFest to inform and entertain NoCo community
As printed in The Rocky Mountain Collegian>>
The annual Northern Colorado Poudre RiverFest took place at New Belgium Brewing Company this past weekend.
The focus of the festival is to bring the community together to celebrate the Cache la Poudre River while simultaneously informing the public of the river’s impact on Northern Colorado, said Hally Strevey, executive director of the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, a Fort Collins-based nonprofit.
The Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed has been involved in the planning of the festival since 2014, when the modern iteration of the Poudre RiverFest began.
“It’s a great day to showcase our work and to be here with a bunch of different partners who all care about the Poudre River,” Strevey said. “The community collaboration piece is really key, which is why this event is so important to us. It’s a really great time for the community to figure out the ways that they can get involved with our organization.”
The event boasted booths from 60 organizations and businesses, said Annemarie Fussell, volunteer community coordinator for the Wildlands Restoration Volunteers.
The festival also featured a lineup of diverse live music and periodic classes and seminars on everything from the basics of bird-watching to an in-depth breakdown of current efforts to support the Poudre River ecosystem through the impact of the devastating Cameron Peak Fire.
The Wildlands Restoration Volunteers were another of the six collaborating organizations responsible for organizing the event. They became involved with the event because of the opportunity it provides to inform the community on what dangers face the Poudre and other local rivers, what can be done to help and how the community can get involved, Fussell said.
Fussell explained that the organization works to restore rivers after floods, fires or other human-created impacts that have damaged a river and that the donations the Poudre RiverFest generates were responsible for funding some of the work the Wildlands Restoration Volunteers were currently looking to undertake.
Fussell said donations were being put to use on two projects the Wildlands Restoration Volunteers were involved with this year. The first was a project to collect native ponderosa pine cones and grow them in a nursery into plantable saplings in an attempt to combat the native pine tree shortage Colorado currently faces.
“The Poudre is the lifeblood of Fort Collins.” –Caroline Denison, Colorado State University student
The second project bookends the first: Once the saplings have grown large enough to be planted, volunteers will plant the trees specifically in the areas impacted by the Cameron Peak Fire in an attempt to heal some of the damage the fire caused to the Poudre River watershed. Fussell emphasized that the undertaking was a joint project with partner organizations OneCanopy and the Coalition for the Poudre River Watershed, both members of the festival’s planning committee and sponsors.
“A lot of our work is the same, and the great thing about this festival and a lot of the groups involved is that we all work collaboratively together because there is too much for all of us to do,” Fussell said. “So the more that we can work together, the more we can get done.”
The festival appeared to succeed in its goal of engaging the community with a large crowd circulating through the booths and enjoying the live music on New Belgium’s outdoor lawn for the duration of the event, despite the threat of rain early in the day.
New Belgium has been an integral part of the event for several years, said Tera Been, the event coordinator on New Belgium’s side. Been said the festival is one of the busiest days of the season for New Belgium and is aligned with the core values of environmental stewardship and sustainability that the brewery has championed since its inception.
Several community members present at the festival mentioned how impressed they were with how informative the event was while also being a fun time.
Several also commented on the importance of the Poudre River and expressed pride that there was an event dedicated to celebrating it in Fort Collins.
“Go spend time at it,” said Noah Gonzales, ex-rafting guide and Colorado State University student. “Stick your feet in it. Splash your face with some Poudre.”
“The more time you spend around it, the more I feel like you (realize) it needs to be saved,” fellow CSU student Caroline Denison said. “The Poudre is the lifeblood of Fort Collins.”
This sentiment was also expressed in depth by Fussell, who painted a vivid picture of the impact the river has on the Northern Colorado community.
“Anyone who lives here in Fort Collins, even if you never go rafting, you never drive up the (Poudre) Canyon — maybe you’re not a hiker, maybe you’re not even outdoorsy — we all need clean water, and we all need our watershed to be healthy because this is where we get our water that grows our fruit and grows our crops, that comes out of the tap here in our cities,” Fussell said. “Without that water, we don’t have a city here.”
OneCanopy operation is raising “bread and butter” tree species common in Colorado, with plans to expand
The demand for trees suitable for reforesting the Rocky Mountain region’s mountainsides, high plateaus and prairies is enormous, and a new social enterprise company, OneCanopy, is there to help fill it.
OneCanopy is the brainchild of Kevin Brinkman, whose day job is CEO of Brinkman Real Estate Services LLC. With an interest in the environment and seeing the need in Colorado for reforestation, he launched Brinkman Conservation LLC, hired a staff and began to plant trees under the trade name OneCanopy. The operation runs from a former hemp greenhouse at 2880 14th St. SE in Loveland. A company Brinkman created called KMB 525 LLC bought the greenhouse property for $2.1 million.
There, on 7.5 acres — half of which is covered by greenhouses — the staff works to create a crop that will fill the void created by beetle kill and wildfires.
Click here to read the full article in the Reporter Herald >>
Impact MBA alumna helps launch first-of-its-kind reforestation company in Northern Colorado
Katelynn Martinez’s career has been propelled by a simple — but ambitious — goal: to help humans coexist with the environment in a mutually beneficial balance.
After graduating from Colorado State University with a degree in forest management, Martinez spent nearly a decade working in forest health for the U.S. and Colorado State forest services. Over her career, she saw Colorado’s forests change rapidly. Eager to do more but frustrated by funding limitations in the public sector, she began researching what a triple bottom-line business solution that focuses on people, planet and profit might look like.
That research led her to the College of Business’ Impact MBA in 2020 and its emphasis on the triple bottom line. A year and a half later, she was building her own solution as she partnered with local entrepreneur Kevin Brinkman to launch OneCanopy, a privately funded conservation nursery that grows native trees and shrubs for reforestation in the Rocky Mountain region.
Martinez serves as director of operations and business development for the Loveland-based social enterprise, which is the state’s first reforestation company. With OneCanopy, she hopes to address the entire reforestation process from seed to project monitoring.
OneCanopy's differentiator is in their ability to adapt to client needs
OneCanopy has sold 35,000 trees for 2023 planting so far. Their current clients include federal, state, and local government entities, nonprofits, tribal agencies, and private landowners. The plant material they’ve purchased will support wildlife habitats, river and wildfire restoration, soil conservation, and food sovereignty.
“One of our core tenets is truly partnering with our clients,” said Martinez. “We know their needs will vary greatly, from order size to species to timing. As a small company, we can be flexible and adapt our processes to meet their specific needs.”
Rocky Mountain region welcomes needed reforestation company, OneCanopy
OneCanopy is a privately funded conservation nursery in northern Colorado, growing native trees and shrubs for reforestation throughout the Rocky Mountains. The demand is enormous, and OneCanopy is there to help fill it.
Trees started in the nursery are able to get a jump on trees that might sprout from seed in the wild. In six or eight months, a nursery tree will be as tall as a 2- or 3-year-old tree in nature. That translates into an increased survival rate for greenhouse trees when planted in nature. While forest service trees typically have a 50% survival rate, trees from private greenhouses have upward of 75% survival rates.
Reforestation operation takes shape in Loveland greenhouse
Imagine, if you can, 350,000 tubes, each six to eight inches tall and an inch in diameter. Each is filled with a special mixture of fertilized soil and popping from the top is a ponderosa pine, Douglas fir, lodgepole pine, a narrow-leaf cottonwood or some other tree suitable for planting in Colorado.
Each of those tubes was seeded with exactly three seeds — by hand. If all three seeds sprouted, two would be removed, again by hand, to leave room for the strongest. Or perhaps the other two seedlings would be replanted and nurtured into viable plantings.
The result of this hand labor is an expanse of seedling trees that in the next year or two will find new homes in the landscape of Colorado, replacing trees lost to beetles or fire or, perhaps, in a local homeowners association looking to have more visual greenery.
The demand for trees suitable for reforesting the region’s mountainsides, high plateaus and prairies is enormous, and a new social enterprise company, OneCanopy, is there to help fill it.
OneCanopy is the brainchild of Kevin Brinkman, whose day job is as CEO of Brinkman Real Estate Services LLC. With an interest in the environment and seeing the need in Colorado for reforestation, he launched Brinkman Conservation LLC, hired a staff and began to plant trees under the trade name OneCanopy. The operation runs from a former hemp greenhouse at 2880 14th St. SE in Loveland. A company Brinkman created called KMB 525 LLC bought the greenhouse property for $2.1 million.
OneCanopy aims to address the entire reforestation process from seed to project monitoring
It all started with an article. In February 2021, researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the United States Forest Service explored the aggressive reforestation goals that have been proposed in response to climate change. Their study showed that 30 billion trees were needed by 2040, requiring nursery production in the US to more than double to meet this target.
Fort Collins native Kevin Brinkman has joined the effort to combat deforestation issues in the Rocky Mountain region by founding OneCanopy, Colorado’s first reforestation company.
The company is a privately funded social enterprise that aims to engage in various facets of the reforestation pipeline, beginning with a seedling nursery growing plants that are native to the Rocky Mountain region. Although the seedling nursery is the company’s first official foray in to the conservation space, their vision is to engage in every aspect of the reforestation pipeline. Over time, OneCanopy plans to add project financing and implementation, seed collection, out-planting, and post-project monitoring to their services.
