Helping
You Help Your Land! Charles Leinen
The session describes the Natural
Resource Conservation Service in Nebraska and the program opportunities that
are available to farmers and landowners.
About: Charles
Leinen, Civil Engineer with over 30
years of work experience with the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS)
formerly Soil Conservation Service. He
has multi-state experience in conservation planning, design, and implementation
on several engineering practices, such as, terraces, waterways, ag-waste
facilities, surface and subsurface irrigation systems, grade stabilization structures,
wetland restoration, watershed rehabilitation, and emergency watershed program
assistance. He is a graduate of Iowa State University, BS (1991) with over 16
years’ experience as an NRCS employee in Nebraska serving agriculture farmers
in Eastern Nebraska.
Global
Gardening: Urban Community Gardening & Farming with Refugee Populations
This breakout session will provide insight
into initiatives happening around Omaha and Lincoln that are providing refugee
communities with available land and resources to grow their own food. We will
focus on funding ideas, seed orders, overcoming initial challenges, and overall
best practices for the most successful growing season.
About: Aaron French is currently the farm training manager at Community Crops,
where he helps to oversee the day to day production and farmer training on the
Prairie Pines Training Farm.
About: Laura
Weiss is the Education, Employment, & Outreach Coordinator at Southern
Sudan Community Association and founder of Root Down Community Gardens, a
program aimed at providing resources for refugee communities to grow their own
fresh and culturally appropriate food. Outside of work you can find
her singing in her band, gardening with Root Down participants,
eating Kim-chi, or conversing over coffee.
Nebraskan
Permaculture Design & Trees as the Farmer’s Best Friend.
Gus would like to share Permaculture designs that
highlight lessons he has learned when designing landscapes for the Nebraskan
home, community or farm. The main lesson he would like to showcase is the
many uses for every tree in your landscape; with all its different stages of
development and decomposition.
About: Gus Von Roenn is a permaculture
designer in Omaha. With a background in
social sciences, he pursues sustainability projects that help improve healthy
food accessibility for low-income communities. As a general contractor
for many years, he adopts a building sensibility when designing permaculture
projects. He engages his community by participating on boards of
local food organizations to help promote sustainability and create awareness of
water quality degradation from agricultural runoff. He hopes to
spread a vision of agroecology throughout the farms of the midwest.
Building
a Local Foods Movement. Next Steps
Local food is
fresher, tastier and more nutritious—good for our personal health and the
health of our communities and local economies. But with the onset of
climate change and the increasing peril of extreme weather to our global food
production and distribution system, local food is also vital to our ‘food
security.’ The farther away we are from our food supply, the more
food insecure we are. The need for building a vibrant local food movement
capable of meeting these economic and environmental challenges has never been
greater. In this workshop session, we will examine some possible
‘next steps’ local food advocates may want to take to dramatically grow both
the production and consumption of local foods.
About: Tim Rinne just celebrated his 20th year as the State Coordinator of
Nebraskans for Peace. Long
interested in environmental and climate issues, from 2004-2013, he was the
Political and Legislative Chair for the Nebraska Sierra Club. Helping create the Hawley Hamlet and
learning to grow some of his own food is the most satisfying political thing
he’s ever done. Makes you
wonder why he waited until he was in his fifties to get going…
Register today and save!
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