When Stuart Allen purchased a few hundred acres on the north side of Conway in 2019, he wasn’t thinking about starting a company or his next venture. He was interested in creating a space for him and his family to enjoy the outdoors, whether that be hunting, fishing, or exploring nature with his kids. The bottomlands along Cadron Creek, thick with old-growth red oaks, offered the perfect place for all of it.

Not long after the purchase, a procurement forester approached Allen with an offer he hadn’t anticipated. If harvested, the timber on his property was worth nearly twice what he’d paid for it. He said no.

“Clear-cutting it, even though it was very appealing to double my money on the property, really wasn’t what I wanted to do,” Allen said.

Allen began wondering what other avenues were available to him to add value to his property. With his background in the energy industry, he pondered whether carbon credits were a viable option.

A Colorado School of Mines graduate, Allen’s career included stops at Southwestern Energy during the height of the Fayetteville Shale boom and the creation of a chemical automation company that optimized how chemicals were used on well pads for some of the energy industry’s largest companies. It was during this time that he first encountered carbon credits.

“At that point, I looked at carbon as another cost I had to incur just to do my job,” Allen said. “It was a lot of extra expense when you’re running a business, especially a small business, where every dollar matters.”

When he called one of the country’s largest carbon credit developers, he found out small landowners like him weren’t eligible. The minimum parcel size to enroll was 20,000 acres, much more than Allen’s few hundred acres in north Conway. But his experience in the energy industry continued to push him ahead.

“We aggregate parcels of land owned by multiple landowners all the time in oil and gas to create scale. You have to unite a lot of landowners to be able to drill and operate,” Allen said. “I said, ‘Why can’t we just apply that to forest carbon?’”

But to make this idea for a company a reality, a lot of work was still needed. Allen had to find numerous small landowners who would understand the value of this land management tool and partners to make this work. To really be successful, the company would have to attract the attention of big carbon credit buyers, including energy and tech companies, and Allen would need to scale the business rapidly.

“I knew that if we were to build something like this, that we had to go out there and do it with scale in mind and process control,” he said.

“Taking that sort of concept, the concept from my last business of aggregating landowners, bringing it all together, that’s where the concept of NativState really happened,” Allen said. “We had to create the forest carbon space, almost like a manufacturing business. But it also had to be individualized for each landowner.”

What Allen built from that question became NativState’s foundation. NativState aggregates small landowners into carbon credit projects large enough to attract some of the world’s largest corporations, a model Allen borrowed directly from the oilfield, where unitizing landowners to drill a single well is standard practice. The company, which has now conserved over 700,000 acres and issued over 4.5 million credits, covers all upfront costs, conducts a detailed carbon inventory on each property, and sells the resulting credits to major corporations looking to invest in conservation. Landowners receive a royalty on every credit sold, retain the ability to selectively harvest timber throughout the 40-year agreement, and gain access to a dedicated forester and wildlife biologist, expertise most could never afford independently. And they can make a choice they might not have been able to without this program — sustainable management, instead of clear-cutting for income.

When meeting with landowners, Allen saw himself in them, people who had purchased land for family, for recreation, for legacy.

“Whether this landowner has 40 acres or 40,000 acres, for that landowner, it’s usually their most important and valuable asset. Where years of blood, sweat, and tears have gone into it,” he said. “We’ve built the company on tailoring a process for these small landowners to allow them access to this global carbon market in a way that didn’t exist just five years ago.”

NativState and Allen quickly adopted a landowners-first mentality, and it continues to today.

“We’ve got to put the landowner first each and every time. And what that has done, by putting the landowner first, that’s what the biggest tech companies in the world want to see, that’s what the biggest energy companies in the world want to see,” he said. “The dollars that they’re buying these credits from are going back to the hands and into the forests that these landowners own.”

Now, NativState has returned over $20 million to landowners and counts Fortune 50 companies among its clients. The company has grown from 13 employees three years ago to about 70 today, and continues to recruit for new roles, especially in forestry.

Clients have flown into Conway to tour forests and meet the landowners behind the credits they’re buying. In June, Allen will take an Arkansas landowner to London to speak at Climate Action Week, one of the carbon industry’s premier global stages.

“We have had the opportunity to entertain groups from every corner of the world,” Allen said, naming Chile, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and others.

NativState expects to cross one million acres enrolled by the end of this year, and Allen sees more growth on the horizon. His goal is for NativState to become a single point of contact for landowners navigating everything involved in land and forest management, from timber and minerals to solar leases and water rights.

“Carbon is just one facet of the operation,” Allen said. “There’s a whole natural capital opportunity out there for both the landowners and credit buyers.”

“It’s almost biblical for me,” he said. “God put us here as stewards of the earth. We’re planting trees that I won’t be here to see mature. If we continue to consume at the rate we have, it doesn’t exist. So there has to be some balance. NativState is a small piece of that across this country.”