Day 4: Wednesday, Dec. 9th
9am – 5pm
Help Desk Open
We have staff on call during the entire conference to help with any questions or issues you may have.
9:30am – 10am
Yoga
Stretch out and mentally prepare for your day with yoga instructor: Megan Miller, Yoga For Good. Today’s focus is: a mindful meditation to reflect on this year’s gathering and how you’ll move forward.
10am – 11am
Nutshell Talks
A main feature of the gathering will be the ever-popular 5-minute Nutshell Show & Tell talks, which are open to all attendees to share success stories, lessons-learned, or nagging questions to help build knowledge across the region.
10am – 11am CST
AFTA Session: Research Relevant to Farmers
11am – 12pm
Passing on the Gift: Sponsored by Curt Grant: Country Financial
The importance of recognizing the next generation of farmers: Joseph Klingelhutz, SILT farm specialist, Lyle Luzum, land donor, Will Lorentzen, Owner and Farmer at Jupiter Ridge Farm. Many beginning farmers can’t find long-term access to land, putting agroforestry far down their list of farming options. Long-term leases, ground leases and other innovative approaches can solve this problem while providing the many benefits of keeping roots in the ground. In this workshop, you’ll hear the story of a landowner who donated his entire heritage farm to a land trust dedicated to long-term leases. You’ll also hear from a young farmer about his experience with a long term ground lease in partnership with SILT.
11am – 12:20pm CST
AFTA Session: New Approaches, Techniques, and Crops
Lunch Break: 12pm – 2pm CST
12:30pm – 1:30pm CST
Decolonizing Agriculture Brownbag Part III:
Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquín, Regenerative Agriculture Alliance
Building the Foundational Organizing Structure of an Intellectual Insurgency
Utilizing ancestral organizational and governance structures that sought to balance the innate colonizing nature of human beings (ALL OF US) we will collectively seek to build a framework for organizing by areas of affinity and from there, build a larger representative and fully accountable governance structure to represent our collective interest and to coordinate the multitude of sub-sectors of the larger Midwest agriculture landscape so that collectively we can build an independent, self-governed REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE ECOSYSTEM.
Bring your lunch!
2pm – 3pm
Regenerative Farm Design – From Paper to Practice: Sponsored by Osage
Designing and managing an ecologically regenerative and economically profitable farm requires focused research, diligent planning, keen observation, and unshakable determination, With over two decades of experience, Peter and Lindsay will guide you through the process of defining your context, mapping and analyzing your site, becoming aware and interactive with the ecology of your landscape, and getting up to speed on regenerative farm enterprises such as silvopasture and multi-species grazing for crafting your very own Regenerative Farm Design.
Lindsay Rebhan, Ecological Design and Peter Allen, Mastodon Valley Farm
3pm – 3:45pm
Forever Green: A Market-Driven Strategy for Perennializing Agriculture
Colin Cureton and Nick Jordan, Forever Green Initiative, University of Minnesota. Forever Green is a public/private/NGO partnership, hosted by the University of Minnesota and spanning the Midwest. Forever Green partners are working in concert to advance and commercialize a portfolio of perennial and winter-hardy annual crops for our region, including the perennial grain crop Kernza®. These crops complement current agriculture, providing a wide range of options for perennializing agriculture, i.e., achieving the perennial presence of green and living crops in agroecosystems, across the annual cycle and across the landscape. We will describe the crops and our market-driven strategy for commercializing and scaling these crops, so as to advance social, environmental, and environmental sustainability in our region.
3:45pm – 4:30pm
Farm Finances Panel
David Lezaks environmental scientist and financial activist at the Croatan Institute, Paul Dietmann, Senior financial specialist at Compeer financial, John Steven Bianucci, Director of Conservation at Iroquois Valley Farmland REIT, discuss the trends of concern and promise happening in their respective fields.
4:30pm – 5:00pm
Closing and Conference Synthesis
Thank you for making this event a success! Closing remarks from Savanna Institute Co-Executive Director, Keefe Keeley and AFTA president Uma Karki.