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MOFGA's annual Farmer to Farmer Conference, November 2-4, is quickly approaching. Register as soon as possible to reserve your space.
Forty-plus breakout sessions and over 60 speakers from all over Maine and beyond will address a range of topics including:
- managing soil fertility
- organic pepper production
- winter greens production
- equipment and mechanization to optimize labor
- optimizing compost applications
- IPM for high tunnel vegetables
- irrigation tools and strategies
- strawberry pest management
- farm stand management and marketing
- pasturing pigs
- farm innovations
- cover cropping and crop rotation on low acreage
- nutrient management in pasture
- and much more!
Learn from and engage with speakers, including farmers and service providers from Maine, Vermont, New York and Massachusetts, and your peers and mentors from across the state.
Join us on Saturday, November 2, for tours of Snakeroot Farm, a mixed vegetable, fruit, and culinary herbs farm growing on 5 acres, and Balfour Farm, an off-the-grid, 100-acre, diversified organic dairy farm, both located in Pittsfield. A bus will be available from Point Lookout Resort in Northport; seats are limited so register early.
Interested in tarping for reduced tillage on small-scale acreage? Come to our Saturday Intensive on November 2, led by service providers from UMaine and Cornell. Tarping has emerged as a new practice for small farms - a tool being used to suppress weeds, manage soils and reduce tillage. This full-day, intensive, farmer-to-farmer workshop will address using tarps to advance reduced and no-till vegetable production. We'll discuss tillage, weeds and how to combine tarps with other soil building practices, such as compost, mulches and cover crops.
Keynote Speakers Christa Alexander and Mark Fasching of 150-acre Jericho Settlers Farm in Vermont produce 25 acres of certified organic vegetables, flowers and herbs for their year-round CSA programs, farm stands and wholesale customers. They manage long rotations between vegetable production and livestock forage on over 100 acres, and maintain over an acre of crops in their hoophouses and greenhouses year round. They specialize in year round vegetable production, primarily salad greens, tomatoes and root vegetables. They will talk about scaling up their business, their successes and failures along away, and how they've learned to prioritize to stay profitable.
For the complete schedule, session descriptions, information about accommodations and to register, visit https://www.mofga.org/MOFGA-Events/farmer-to-farmer-conference-2019. Please direct any questions to MOFGA at 207-568-4142 or amueller@mofga.org.
As always this conference features a unique 3-hour workshop session format: half dedicated to talks by farmers and other agricultural professionals and half to roundtable discussions that solicit and build on the accumulated knowledge of attending farmers. In addition to this long-session format, we have added more shorter sessions this year for those who want to attend more topics back-to-back.
We hope to see you there!
Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association
PO Box 170
294 Crosby Brook Road
Unity, ME 04988
207-568-4142
www.mofga.org
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