PASA Conference

Last week Denise and I went to the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture Farming for the Future Conference. This year's theme: Cultivating Excellence: Farming to Serve the Common Good. We made it a small winter vacation, enjoying the conference's speakers, outstanding food, and networking; we're planning to have a much larger garden this year and involve the kids from the preserve's spring, summer, and fall programs in planting, growing, and harvesting food. And they call it a farming conference, but it is also relevant to anyone who eats.

I went specifically to hear the visionary keynote speakers: Joel Salatin, a pioneer in multi-species farming at Polyface Farms. He's written several books on pastured beef, pigs and poultry but calls himself a grass farmer—each of the species raised on the farm relies on natural pasturage and occupies a niche that complements the others, breaking the cycle of pests and enriching the soil. He and his family have developed a local market for their products and he stresses the importance of the relationship between the farmer and the consumer. Polyface Farms is also a subject in Michael Pollan's recent book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Salatin's talk did not disappoint!

Another keynote was by James Howard Kunstler, known for his book The Geography of Nowhere—a critique of suburban sprawl. I recently read his recent The Long Emergency which was largely the subject of his talk, about passing peak oil production and how our lifestyles and social order will change. This book makes everyone think differently about our future. Food will have to be local, so small local farms will be crucial.

The third keynote was by Michael Ableman, founder of Fairview Gardens, an organic urban farm in southern California. At the Land Trust Alliance Rally in 2005 I saw the short film about this farm and Ableman's travels around the world to learn about local farms: Beyond Organic, so it was great to hear him speak in person. He was using the term "beyond organic" more than a decade ago, long before its current popularity. People are talking about it today because they feel that organic food shipped across the country or around the world and processed into prepackaged meals betrays the original intent of the organic movement: that not only would the food be grown without synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, but that it would nurture the local soil and community and put fresh whole foods on our table.

The three speakers' themes tied together: get to know the people who grow your food. The trust that develops from a face-to-face community of growers and eaters leaves no room for unhealthy foods or unsustainable practices.

The breakout sessions turned out to be great as well, even better than I expected. Denise went to ones on preserving the harvest, beekeeping, raising chickens, yogurt making, and building a straw-bale house. I went to this last one too and also sessions on selecting cover crops, using cover crops to reduce weeds, forest farming, and organic apple tree growing (we have speaker Michael Phillips' book, The Apple Grower, in the library at Crow's Nest!). I'll just mention one topic that was eye-opening:

I came away with a new understanding of cover crops—plants used over the winter or other fallow periods to build the organic matter, reduce erosion, and improve soil structure. I had known that some, such as clover, fix nitrogen from the air and add it to the soil. Cover crops also serve as "green manure," returning nutrients to the soil when they are cut or turned into the garden and aerate the soil as their roots decay. But what I didn't realize was that there is an interplay between the nitrogen-fixing legumes and the grass cover crops (such as rye). Rye pulls the nitrogen out of the soil and stores it in the cover crop—otherwise the nitrogen leaches out of the soil with rain over the winter. So some cover crops add nitrogen and others store it away—temporarily—and return it when it is needed to grow food.

Anne and Eric Nordell who farm in Lycoming County blew away the audience with their demonstration of using fallow periods, cover crops, and very shallow tillage to reduce weeds in their organic market farm, calling this a bio-extensive approach. We'll see how we can apply this to our garden.