PASA Conference

I recently attended the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s (PASA) 19th annual Farming for the Future Conference in State College, PA. Over the course of the three days I had the opportunity to hear a great deal about many exciting possibilities in the field of agriculture. There were sessions about edible forest gardening, integrating various animals into agricultural landscapes, composting, crop diversification, and building structures with natural materials. Many of these topics are relevant to the work that Anzar Exchange has and will be doing in Morocco. For instance, Morocco has one of the oldest food forests in the world and we hope to implement a similar design this coming summer. We will also be working on a soil building regime which will include composting and the use of some animals. Finally, while building whole structures is unlikely, the use of local, natural materials in our projects is an important element of any Anzar Exchange project.

This was my second PASA conference and I have been looking forward to it for the whole year. It is an excellent opportunity to meet with others who have been developing new ways of farming and living in a more sustainable way. The conference featured Michael Reynolds, designer of the Earthship, and Lisa Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted, as well as dozens of workshops. What has surprised me at each of the conferences I have attended is that the most beneficial way for us to interact with the environment moving forward is to look to the past. Growing and storing food in a decentralized way, maintaining a complete nutrient cycle through composting, and preserving genetic diversity in both plants and animals are all old ideas, but they represent our best way hope for a prosperous future. PASA’s executive director Brian Snyder summed things up this way – while our farms may be small, our ideas are not.