Rodale Voices: 2008 NOFA Summer Conference

A bazaar of organic ideas, methodologies and accomplishments

By Alison Grantham

Greetings! I’m a Rodale Institute research intern enraptured with food, soil carbon, agriculture and climate change. I came to Rodale fresh off the boat from Mt. Holyoke College in central Mass where I studied biology, environmental policy issues and soil microbes. Before that, I originally set sail from the sizzling southland metropolis of Los Angeles.

I write to share my experience at the awesome 2008 Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) conference. This annual event is the Mecca of the local and organic food movement in New England, and this year’s conference, located at UMASS Amherst, was right next door to my alma mater. Although I had always (or at least for the last three years) wanted to go to the NOFA conference, I had no idea when I would get the opportunity. This August, less than 24 hours elapsed between the moment I leapt at the opportunity to go and the pre-dawn moment when we—Greg Bowman (New Farm editor), my mom (just off the plane from L.A.) and I—set off.

After the second or third conference attendee stepped by our Rodale booth, I realized that I would be learning far more from conference goers than I could ever hope to share with them. Actually, I hadn’t gotten any further than the dining hall breakfast table when my first loud reminder trailed by her silent husband arrived from Barre, Massachusetts. Nothing could rival her enthusiasm about going organic on her small acreage, but all that plagues pit fruits had come home to roost on her nectarines and peaches. She shared her several theories as to what ailed her nectarines, while I took mental notes, and added “organic pest control options for peaches” to my to-do list.

Before I finished my bowl of delicious Massachusetts organic blueberries, the avid farmer from Barre had also given me a crash course in pickles in addition to the lesson on common pit-fruit ailments.

The next eye-popping realization was the scope of the organic community represented under the exhibitors’ tent. There were the usual suspects—the original pioneers of the organic movement in the area, the farmers who started the first CSAs and farmers’ markets, and their newer counterparts. Severine—our vivacious table mate, documentary filmmaker, and young farmer enthusiast—was one of the bold new faces of organic farming. Greenhorns is the young-farmer networking and support framework she works to develop, and it well may help to influence and develop the future of farming. But the bigger players—USDA Extension, USDA-NRCS, Horizon Organics, and Stonyfield Farms—were there too, as a testament to the evolution of organics from fringe to grassroots to mainstream. The possibilities and accomplishments of the Northeast’s organic movement have expanded to an impressive scope.

In the lulls of tent traffic I sprinted off to two workshops where presenters offered their visions for the organic movement’s continued evolution toward sustainability. Both presenters discussed theories behind, motivation for, and principles involved in designing farm-scale permaculture (permanent agriculture), the ultimate in agricultural sustainability design.

These presenters stressed the ecological principle of maximizing agricultural systems’ health and resilience in the face of disturbances like storms or pests by maximizing species diversity on multiple scales. They also focused on minimizing soil disturbance as a means of maximizing ecosystem health, a principle the Rodale Institute is also developing with our rotational organic no-till system using our roller/crimper tool with over-wintering cover crops.

These workshops also played with all the important pieces of organic agriculture as they pertain to carbon cycling and climate change: eliminating synthetic inputs, minimizing soil disturbance and thus soil carbon emissions to the atmosphere, and maximizing crop plant productivity and thereby sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. How fabulous to have so many colleagues moving around these pieces of the carbon cycle/climate change puzzle in the context of agriculture!

Aw shucks: The author, center, collects corn samples in the Rodale Farming Systems Trial with other research interns.

Nowhere do those pieces fly around with more precision, urgency and intensity than back here at the Rodale Institute. Here researchers have flagged and planted field upon field of various cover crop polycultures to incorporate into our organic no-till revolution. Still other researchers are thinking about these principles of perennial polycultures as possible carbon sequestering cellulosic ethanol fuel sources.

Through interactions that start at conferences like NOFA, and continue in research trials here at the Institute, I can only hope that these agricultural inroads to addressing our misplaced carbon mess will soon be as mainstream as Horizon milk and USDA extension. In the meantime, we’ll also keep at the more mundane and necessary questions like organic pest management, so we and my farmer friend from Barre can keep eating, while we save the planet.