JOEL SALATIN — LOCAL SUSTAINABLE FOOD FOR ALL
SECURING OUR LOCAL FOOD SYSTEM
Tuesday, Jan. 28 from 11:30 am to 2:00 p.m.
(free healthy food samples 11-noon, talk from noon-2); Free and free lunch.
Cedar Valley College
registration -click here
STEWARD"S DINNER FUNDRAISER
Tuesday January 28, 7-9 pm $90
Register through the URBAN ACRES MARKET websiteA POWER BREAKFAST AT URBAN ACRES Thursday, Jan. 30, 7-9 am
LOCAL FOOD TO THE RESCUE
Workshop Wednesday, Jan. 29 from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. $99
ABOUT JOEL SALATIN Joel Salatin, a third generation alternative farmer who has been featured in “Food, Inc.” and “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” is a masterful speaker whose humor and positive energy guarantee a rewarding experience. Can we feed Texas and the world with local food? This is hands down the most frequently asked question to Joel or anyone else who promotes local, solar-driven, carbon-fertilized systems. Even most foodies and environmentalists have a deep-seated assumption that were it not for the petroleum-based fertilizer boom – the green revolution – we could not feed ourselves. Those massive Kansas wheat fields and California almond groves, for most people, represent efficiency and abundance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Backyard gardens and multi-speciation are far more productive per acre. In these workshops, Joel will give you the information and tools to feed your family and articulate a credible “feed the world” argument.
LOCAL FOOD TO THE RESCUE:
REGISTER FOR 3 WORKSHOPS:
JOEL SALATIN
Joel Salatin, 53, is a full time farmer in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley.
A third generation alternative farmer, he returned to the farm full time in 1982 and continued refining and adding to his parents' ideas.
The farm services more than 3,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs with salad bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products using relationship marketing.
He holds a BA degree in English and writes extensively in magazines such as STOCKMAN GRASS FARMER, ACRES USA, and AMERICAN AGRICULTURALIST.
The family's farm, Polyface Inc. ("The Farm of Many Faces") has been featured in SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, GOURMET and countless other radio,television and print media. Profiled on the Lives of the 21st Century series with Peter Jennings on ABC World News, his after-broadcast chat room fielded more hits than any other segment to date. It achieved iconic status as the grass farm featured in the NEW YORK TIMES bestseller OMNIVORE'S DILEMMA by food writer guru Michael Pollan.
URBAN SUSTAINABLE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
with Toby Hemenway
April 16, 2014, 8:30 – 9:15 a.m.
Keynote speaker at DCCCD Sustainability Summit at North Lake College.
April 17, 2014
Full day workshop 9am-5pm.
At North Lake College: Main Campus
5001 N MacArthur blvd, Irving TX 75038 room H226
REGISTER FOR WORKSHOP
Urban Permaculture: Growing Food, Healthy People, and a Just Society in Cities, Towns, and Suburbs
Permaculture was originally envisioned for farms and rural properties, but it works at least as well in cities and town. Urban permaculturists are finding novel, productive ways to grow food on city lots, but just as important, they are reforming food policy in cities, developing garden-based comprehensive school curricula, reducing energy and water use, legalizing graywater, providing disaster relief, and leading the food justice movement. Growing more food in cities is just the beginning, and turns out to be the easy part of making towns more self-reliant. Permaculturists are changing antiquated anti-farming laws in cities, bringing healthy food to upscale restaurants as well as the urban poor, raising the grades of schoolchildren through whole-systems curricula, providing the basis for the transition movement, and helping to convert sterile parks and office grounds into vibrant, food- and habitat-producing oases.
This workshop will show you how to find, harvest, and integrate the many resources in our cities in sustainable ways, including high-yield, small space gardening methods, getting access to land for gardening, creating business guilds and networks, working with local government and policy makers, learning the pattern language of the city, creating public space in neighborhoods, and building urban ecovillages. This workshop will offer specific techniques and strategies for food production, energy security, and community resilience in metropolitan areas. You’ll learn how permaculture’s principles and design methods apply to the challenging yet rich environments of our cities as well as the sprawling, car-requiring spaces in suburbia, and will provide ways to leverage the special opportunities that cities and suburbs provide
BIOGRAPHY:TOBY HEMENWAY
Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which was awarded the Nautilus Gold Medal in 2011, was named by the Washington Post as one of the ten best gardening books of 2010, and for the last eight years has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world. Toby has been an adjunct professor at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and has taught over sixty 72-hour permaculture design courses. He has presented lectures and workshops at major sustainability conferences such as Bioneers, SolFest, and EcoFarm, and at Duke University, Tufts University, University of Minnesota, University of Delaware and many other educational venues. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review, and American Gardener. He has contributed book chapters for WorldWatch Institute and to several publications on ecological design.
After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife, Kiel, spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was the editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. He moved to Portland, Oregon in 2004, and spent six years developing urban sustainability resources there. Toby and his wife now live in Sebastopol, California.
Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
Gaia’s Garden has been the best-selling permaculture book in the world for the last 7 years. The enlarged, updated 2nd edition is the winner of the 2011 Nautilus Gold Medal Award.
The first edition of Gaia’s Gardensparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.
NATE DOWNEY – author of "Harvest The Rain"
WATER IS THE NEW SOLAR
Two- hour presentation; June 27, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm; $10
Richland College
Solar-electric sales have grown for decades, and it seems this trend will continue. Award-winning author, successful entrepreneur, and long-time permaculture practitioner Nate Downey says that the water-harvesting industry will soon join solar energy as an economic engine driving us toward real sustainability. As supplies of potable water shrink, providers of harvested roof-water and storm-water will have a huge and growing market. It’s not too late to be part of the water-harvesting revolution, and you don’t have to be a plumber either. In every water-challenged part of the world from Dallas to Dubai, an astounding variety of jobs will be created. The questions then become: How do we efficiently manage this new industry? How do we effectively finance it? And how do we encourage localized water harvesting on a massive scale—before we deplete our rivers, drain our aquifers, and devastate our estuaries.
TWO HOUR PRESENTATION
NATE DOWNEY – THE BOLD , NEW AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
PART 2: ACTIVE WATER HARVESTING WITH CISTERNS
Eight-hour workshop; June 28, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. $99
Richland College
When the rains do come, will you be ready? Tanks containing precipitation go back thousands of years. Now that we've found water on the moons of Jupiter, it’s bizarre that so few people know how to harvest the rain. Fortunately, it’s not rocket science.
Starting with an overview of three basic approaches—at grade, underground, or partially buried—we’ll move swiftly into a description of the five functions of cistern systems: collection, conveyance, filtration, storage, and distribution. By lunchtime, we will have explored types of tanks and various options and accessories. In the afternoon, participants will build a cistern system (Thanks to http://www.rainharvestingsupplies.com) at Richland College’s state-of-the-art recycling center. The day will end with an extended Q and A followed by Nate Downey's "List of Cistern Dos and Don'ts."
Given our years-long drought, it's hard to think of a more practical or important workshop. Why not get ready for the next big rain?
ALL DAY WORKSHOP
NATE DOWNEY – Author of "Harvest The Rain"
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW WATER ECONOMY
Two-hour presentation on Oct, 2013 – 7 pm to 9 pm. $10
Brookhaven College, W-102
Solar-electric sales have grown for decades, and it seems this trend will continue. Award-winning author, successful entrepreneur, and long-time permaculture practitioner Nate Downey says that the water-harvesting industry will soon join solar energy as an economic engine driving us toward real sustainability. As supplies of potable water shrink, providers of harvested roof-water and storm-water will have a huge and growing market. It’s not too late to be part of the water-harvesting revolution, and you don’t have to be a plumber either. In every water-challenged part of the world from Dallas to Dubai, an astounding variety of jobs will be created. The questions then become: How do we efficiently manage this new industry? How do we effectively finance it? And how do we encourage localized water harvesting on a massive scale—before we deplete our rivers, drain our aquifers, and devastate our estuaries.
Two-hour presentation
THE BOLD NEW AMERICAN LANDSCAPE: PASSIVE WATER HARVESTING
Saturday, Oc6, 2013 — 9 a.m.-5 p.m. $99
Brookhaven College, Room W-102
This workshop will focus on the new landscape that will eventually replace much of the great American lawn. Author and permaculture expert Nate Downey will describe principles, strategies and techniques of passive water harvesting. Passive systems use no moving parts to store moisture, control erosion, prevent pollution and conserve water. As a longtime permaculture-landscape designer who studied under Bill Mollison, and as an award-winning author of two books on the subject, Nate has applied these principles, patterns and techniques for more than two decades. If you've ever wanted to learn from a masterful creator of beautiful, productive, comfortable and water-conscious environments, now's your chance!
ALL DAY WORKSHOP 
REGISTER FOR 3 WORKSHOPS:
NATE DOWNEY
Nate Downey is author of "Harvest the Rain: How to Enrich Your Life by Seeing Every Storm as a Resource". He is an expert in both passive and active water harvesting systems as well as wastewater harvesting and community water harvesting techniques.
For over a decade, Downey has spoken, taught and written about permaculture practices.He owns Santa Fe PermaDesign, a landscape-design firm whose projects emphasize beauty, function and ecology. He is a frequent guest on public radio and writes a popular column called "Permaculture in Practice" for The Santa Fe New Mexican.
At home, in our backyards, in the workplace, regionally, nationally and internationally, his work addresses what he calls "changescapes," "permapatterns," and "permaDesign" — providing practical and visionary ways to be productive and add value to our lives, homes, communities and environment.
Downey says enough rain falls to provide ample water for everyone. "We simply have to collect, store, distribute and reuse a small percentage of that which falls from the sky. Fortunately, this way of saving the world comes with perks such as increasing your property's value, lowering your utility bills or simply creating a comfortable oasis for conversation just outside the kitchen door."
Learn how the power of precipitation can work for you. Attend Nate Downey's workshop, part of the Clean Economy Series.
For more information: