Indiana Certified Organic
OK, this “live-blogging” thing is harder than it looks. In fact, what I’ve done here probably doesn’t even qualify as “live.” I tried to keep up, but it took so much time (for me) to write the posts and download the pictures, that I ended up spending more time blogging than conference-ing. Now it’s a couple days later and I’m back in the office trying to wrap it up by memory. Hopefully I captured some of what was going on at LaCrosse. It’s a great meeting, I would say better than Eco-Farm.
The last day I attended a cover crop workshop and the general session. The general session featured Andrew Kimbrell of the Center for Food Safety and International Center for Technology Assessment. Andrew spoke at Eco-Farm and his presentation at Upper Midwest was the same one he gave in California, so you can read my comments about him on an earlier post. After listening to Mr. Kimbrell we enjoyed our last Upper Midwest organic lunch and headed for home.
Before introducing Andrew Kimbrell, MOSES director, Faye Jones pointed out that they have changed the name of the conference. Now it’s the Organic Farming Conference. They have removed the words “Upper” and “Midwest” from the title. She made an off-handed comment that some other conferences had stolen their name. I almost died. We named our conference this year, the Midwest Organic Production and Marketing Conference. Not a direct rip-off, but I guess it could be perceived as similar and might even cause some confussion. We’ve change our name every year (four) as well as the location. I have to admit that I left the MOSES meeting wondering why we even bother having a conference in Illinois. The LaCrosse meeting is so good, so big, so everything, that it’s hard to think we can even compete. We’ll probably be rethinking our whole approach. I understand now that we’ve been trying to reproduce the MOSES meeting. We need to think about how we can make our meeting uniquely valuable to farmers down here and still complement the MOSES meeting that more and more folks are attending every year.
Thanks for reading!
1 Comment
February 26, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Hi, it was great to read about organic farming in the US! Conferences can be so inspiring – and hopefully practical. (Don’t agonise too much about the title of your conference; there are only so many permutations on organic/farming etc). Re nutrition, check out the Soil Association charity in the UK (founded by Eve Balfour and co. in 1946 to promote organic farming) http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/a71fa2b6e2b6d3e980256a6c004542b4/7a54a18f894fee45802571bc00443124!OpenDocument&Highlight=2,flavanoid