We just returned from the 2010 Organic Farming Conference and had a wonderful time catching up with old friends, meeting new farmers and friends and finally meeting Lynne and Justin, our 2010 interns in person!
A few highlights from the conference schedule
A workshop on mushroom production which gave us some new tips as we prepare to grow shitake mushrooms on our farm.
A set of two workshops which discussed food safety by the USDA. We certainly had our eyes opened to the ways that new food “safety” legislation could negatively affect our farm by requiring the elimination of all wildlife and habitat for animals and requiring the removal of all livestock (including chickens and pigs) from areas in or adjacent to produce production. As you may know our chickens help us out by trimming the grass in our orchard and cleaning up the fields in the late fall and our pigs are used in place of rototillers to open up new land for production the subsequent year. As organic farmers we are already meeting a strict set of food safety rules, and these new rules set in place for factory farms in California are inappropriate for our scale; but also contradict the values and practices of organic agriculture. We will keep you posted as legislation in the Senate goes forward.
We also attended workshops on CSA logistics, succession planting and reducing tillage picking up a few new tricks along the way.