The Small Farm Conference

We loaded up the orange toaster (Honda Element) and trekked to Grayling for our annual pilgrimage to the Small Farm Conference. We saw Eric Toensmeier's presentation about Permaculture for Farmers. We saw but only a fraction of his presentation on Perennial Vegetables, but I own the book. There were other equally valuable "conferences" to be had outside in the hallways that were a source of distraction. Eric, an eloquent, thoughtful speaker, espoused the wide variety of low labor/high production native food crops that can be produced by multi-cropping and stacking enterprises.

We held onto our hats during Gary Zimmer's keynote address. He has been clocked regularly at 500 words per minute, with gusts up to a 1000 (his words)! To sum up what kind of force Zimmer is: his formerly Buddhist Vegetarian son-in-law now runs the meat-processing facility. Gary doesn't rule out large or small ag. His approach is to go literally to the root of the matter, soil biology - the ultimate determinant of food quality. I sat next to Chelsea, our Gardening Angel, who would regularly show up with a carload of young adults to pitch in and help out on the farm. 

On the way to the conference we were discussing the need for both sides of the food fence to collaborate on solutions. Too much time is being wasted arguing about who's to blame and it's going to take all of our skills and talents combined to fix it. We talked about creating a network, a diverse talent pool to assemble the tools, talents and resources for helping each other in our start ups. 

During Zimmer's talk Chelsea and I started "joint-diagramming" in her words. She drew a circle representing the conventional/global paradigm next to another circle representing the sustainable/local paradigm. Then she drew an overlapping area in the center between the two circles. In permaculture, the edge where two systems meet, is considered the most productive. I whispered "that's our logo". A few minutes later, underneath the logo, I wrote "Middle Ground". I whispered "that's our name", allthough
I'm not sure exactly what was being named. Stay tuned.