2017 Friday Workshops Sessions

Explore how an investment in regenerative farming and soil restoration will help mitigate climate change. Sally Dodge: Northeast Community Development Manager & Director of Farmer Relations, Iroquois Valley Farms. Dale Guldbrandsen: Investor Relations & Northeast Community Development Manager, Iroquois Valley Farms.

Learn how to set up your very own grow room and start transforming local waste from your community into food, medicine, compost, and a means to cleaning up environmental pollution. Transform a basement, barn, or other area into a space to grow oyster, shitake and lionsmane mushrooms. Start growing mushrooms today! Alex Dorr: Mycologist and fun guy; has taught fungi workshops across the world.

Trees and a small forest provide a wide range of benefits and products on our farms. Drawing on 45 years of experience, I will discuss forest succession, low-tech management, and utilizing local lumber and other products. Focus will be on native species and their uses. Bill Duesing: Has taken great pleasure in working with trees, wood and NOFA.

We will identify the common pests and diseases we see in our work in the greater Boston area, and discuss standard and creative management strategies! We’ll focus on concerns specific to urban and suburban areas, such as maintaining plant health in small spaces and containers, animal pests, and safer management options for education gardens. Laura Feddersen: Director of Horticulture at Green City Growers.

As one of the oldest and largest farms at a liberal-arts college, the Hampshire College Farm is a leader in the campus farm movement. We’ll tour the fields and facilities of our 200-member vegetable CSA and pasture-raised livestock program, including our recent sustainable energy initiatives such as electric tractors, new vegetable storage and solar panels. Nancy Hanson:  The Hampshire College CSA Manager. Pete Solis: The Hampshire College Livestock and Pasture Manager.

How are food co-ops partnering with anti-hunger organizations to better meet the needs of all community members by increasing access to healthy, local food and member-ownership?  Learn about how food co-ops are leveraging community ownership of their grocery stores to make healthy, local food more accessible. Bonnie Hudspeth: Membership & Outreach Manager, Neighboring Food Co-op Association Dorian Gregory : Loan & Outreach Officer, Cooperative Fund of New England Jon Megas-Russell: Marketing & Community Relations Manager, Brattleboro Food Co-op Maria E. Infante: Director of Community Outreach, Project Bread

Until a few centuries ago, we held and managed the vast majority of resources in common: defined groups of people formed evolving agreements about how to share and manage specific resources. Privatization of commons laid the basis for capitalist industrial society–and continues today, to our detriment. How might commoning improve today’s food and agriculture? Dave Jacke: Ecological designer, author of Edible Forest Gardens, student of the commons. David Bollier: Director, Reinventing the Commons Program, Schumacher Society; author of eight books on commoning; independent scholar.

Fertility inputs need not be from a bag! We’ll reduce your reliance on purchased fertilizers by exploring other sources: cover crops – using and managing with or without machinery; natural mulches in and out of season; simple composting; and home sources of some minerals. Soil tests 8 years apart will illustrate results of several fertility schemes. Al Johnson: Agricultural Educator and long time organic inspector who has farmed or gardened organically for decades.

Participants will learn options for managing sheep organically including information on breeds and housing, practices for parasite control, handling, feeding and health care. The presentation provides an overview of the basics of organic certification for livestock including general requirements, where to go for help, and management requirements. Kimberly Mastrianni: B.S. in Animal Science, raising sheep organically since 2008.

This year we are celebrating 40 years of making compost at Earth Care Farm! My father began making compost with a pitchfork in 1977, and today we make mountains of it. We will revisit the history of ECF, looking at how the family farm has changed and where we are headed in our next generation. Jayne Merner Senecal: Grew up making compost at Earth Care Farm.

Join in making a fresh batch of soap, using the traditional cold process method. We will build upon what we explored in Part 1, learning about blending, pouring, cutting and curing soap. Everyone will be invited to take some soap, to be cut and cured at home. Melissa Probst: NOFA enthusiast and soapmaker, Sweet Suds.

Learn how to assess your forages and match them to your livestock needs, which tools to use, how to plan your paddocks, and sharpen your recordkeeping. This workshop will give farmers guidelines for writing or updating their own grazing plan with tips for adjusting to the changing needs of their operation. Lee Rinehart: Works for NCAT’s ATTRA Project, focusing on agronomy and livestock.

Rice is a worldwide staple of our diet but very few of us in the Northeast understand the how it is grown or the beauty it can provide. We will explore what varieties and what techniques you can use to grow rice on a small scale in the Northeast. Nick Storrs: Manages a one acre urban farm and education on Randall’s Island, NYC.

Vegetative grafting as been used for centuries in Asia to overcome disease pressure and environmental stresses such as drought and cold soils. Learn the vegetative grafting technique and the tips and tricks to be successful using grafted plants to the fullest potential. Live demonstration of grafting both melons and tomatoes. Janel Martin: Lifelong farmer/gardener studying grafting and planting systems.

At the summer’s Free Open Meeting, held in conjunction with the annual NOFA Summer Conference scheduled for that weekend, we invite activists from the Northeast Region who are engaged in projects and organizing efforts that come under the broad heading of Domestic Fair Trade to come together to share their work and ideas and to discuss possible collaboration for the immediate future. Who should come? We welcome farm workers, farmers, food system workers, processors, manufacturers, worker organizers, farmer organizers, cooperative organizers, visionaries, and allies. Consider attending if your work (paid or volunteer) involves fairer wages, safer work, fairer prices, ethical trading, making the food system environmentally, economically, and socially just, sustainable, and humane. Our mix of attendees assures a strong update of the current state of the landscape in our region; who is working with whom; who should we be inviting to join us in our work and what may be the most promising areas for collaboration moving forward. Extended Special Reports on: The Agricultural Justice Project’s emerging efforts in New England; Migrant Justice’s campaign to support dairy farm workers in Vermont; Farmworker activities in upstate New York; The newly-launched pilot initiative between Red Tomato, a Northeast marketer of fresh produce, and the Equitable Food Initiative; To include yours please address Gathering’s Organizers in advance. The all-morning meeting is free though it is listed on Friday’s Pre Conference Track. Pre-registration appreciated, so please contact Liz Henderson elizabethhenderson13@gmail.com or Louis Battalen louis@topoftheforest.com.  

Fruit tree diseases, unchecked by holistic understanding, can wreak havoc in the orchard. We’ll take an in-depth look at how the organic grower can keep apple scab, rusts and rots from developing on the fruit to a reasonable minimum.

Agroforestry, or the intentional integration of trees into agriculture, is a key carbon farming and climate adaptation strategy for farms worldwide.

The indiscriminate use of glyphosate and GMO crops are precipitating a major chronic health and environmental crisis. Rather than the way to feed the world, current genetic engineering is a disaster in the making and is not a sustainable strategy!

A region’s ability to adapt genetically resilient crops to it’s environment is critical to food security. Across the 13,000 year history of agriculture, that has been the solemn vocation of farmers. In the past 100 years, farmers have lost control of their seed to the massive centralization of global seed systems. The organic farming movement has provided the safest haven for seed diversity in American agriculture, often favoring workhorse open pollinated varieties, over modern hybrids. Our climate is changing, however, and those varieties need careful stewardship and improvement to continue to serve our needs and remain productive in our diversified organic farming systems. This workshop will cover essential seed biology, on-farm considerations for producing seed crops suitable for New England, and introduce the concepts necessary for robust varietal maintenance and development. Introductory on-farm variety trialing and participatory plant breeding will also be discussed.