7 мая 2020 года в 18:00 часов по московскому времени состоится бесплатный вебинар о разнообразии покровных культур.
Ссылка на регистрацию: https://lali.teachable.com/p/resiliency-from-the-ground-up-how-diverse-cover-cropping-can-profit-your-farm-and-community/?preview=logged_out&mc_cid=e889662cba&mc_eid=7906f4d8e3
Ниже вы можете ознакомиться с обращением Диди Персхаус.
Hello friends,
I know many of you are planting your farms and gardens right now, and I wanted to let you know that this Thursday, May 7th, cover-crop guru Keith Berns and I are offering a free webinar on the benefits of diverse cover cropping. This is not just a farming issue, diversity in cropping systems has beneficial impacts on life, right up the food chain. Scroll down for a longer description of our webinar...
...and stay tuned for a mini-course coming up soon that I will be co-teaching with Fred Provenza, the author of Nourishment: What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom. Fred is Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University. While there, he directed an award-winning research group that pioneered an understanding of how learning influences foraging behavior and how behavior links soils and plants with herbivores and humans. Fred and I got to know each other's work while we were both teaching at Gail Fuller's Field School in Kansas last year.
Okay...back to this week's webinar with Keith! (Whom I also met at Gail's...it's the place to be, if you can get there from here, which you can't..obviously...that's one of many reasons I'm looking forward to the end of this pandemic.)
RESILIENCY FROM THE GROUND UP:
HOW DIVERSE COVER CROPPING CAN PROFIT YOUR FARM AND COMMUNITY
Thursday, May 7th, 11 AM Eastern (USA)
How do we address the extinction of so many bird, insect, and animal species at once? Why are researchers finding that a mixture of plants often performs better than a monoculture of the best performing plant in the mix? What makes a landscape resilient to flooding and drought? How do we deal with increasing pressures from insect pests?
Join Keith Berns and Didi Pershouse, two respected voices in the Soil Health movement, to learn why diverse cover cropping is key to resilient communities--both above and below ground.
The beneficial outcomes from diverse cover cropping defy “common sense,” and the practice runs contrary to how most of us were taught to farm (though Nature has been trying to teach us for millennia!). The secret lies in each plant species having unique liquid-carbon root exudates that provide a balanced diet of energy, proteins, and other nutrients to the soil's microbial population, allowing the soil’s functional microbiome to increase and diversify dramatically...with benefits right up the food chain.
Plants that are surrounded by healthy, abundant microbial communities are more drought-tolerant and better supplied with plant nutrients, making the plants (and those who eat them) more resistant to disease. All this microbial activity also improves soil structure, which improves the function of the whole watershed/catchment by offering underground water storage. Plant diversity reduces insect pressure on plants, by attracting beneficial insects and birds, keeping the circle of life going. Come learn about all this and more, and join in the discussion.
Diversity is a powerful force for people as well. Human communities benefit greatly from a diverse agricultural landscape, and from diversity in our food, farmers, and friendships. Here’s a chance to diversify your education by joining us for this interactive webinar!
Even if you are not a farmer, or are relatively new to the concept of cover cropping, you are welcome to attend.
This webinar is offered for free, but we encourage people to donate towards the work of the Land & Leadership Initiative to make more of these offerings possible.
When: Thursday, May 7, 2020 at 11:00 AM EST
Keith Berns combines over 20 years of no-till farming with 10 years of teaching Agriculture and Computers. In addition to no-tilling 2,500 acres of irrigated and dryland corn, soybeans, rye, triticale, peas, sunflowers, and buckwheat in South Central Nebraska, he also co-owns and operates Green Cover Seed, one of the major cover crop seed educators and providers in the United States.
Through Green Cover Seed, Keith has experimented with over 100 different cover crop types, and hundreds of mixes, planted into various situations and has learned a great deal about cover crop growth, nitrogen fixation, moisture usage, and grazing utilization of cover crops. Keith was honored by the White House as a 2016 Champion of Change for Sustainable and Climate-Smart Agriculture. Keith also developed the SmartMix CalculatorTM one of the most widely used cover-crop selection tools on the internet.
Keith has a Masters Degree in Agricultural Education from the University of Nebraska and teaches on cover crops and soil health more than 30 times per year to various groups and audiences. Keith was also recently appointed by Nebraska Governor Pete Rickets to be the chairman of the Nebraska Healthy Soils Task Force.
Didi Pershouse is the author of The Ecology of Care: Medicine, Agriculture, Money, and the Quiet Power of Human and Microbial Communities and Understanding Soil Health and Watershed Function. She is a lead author for the "Future Directions" chapter of the UN-FAO Technical Manual on Soil Organic Carbon Management, and a contributing author for Health in the Anthropocene.
Didi brings conservatives and liberals together into effective working groups with common goals: improving soil health, public health, water security, and regional resilience through simple changes in land management. Both online and in-person, her participatory workshops engage farmers and ranchers, policy makers, investors, and scientists in systems thinking and deep listening, to allow for emergent strategies. She was one of five speakers at the United Nations-FAO World Soil Day in 2017.
She is the founder of the Land and Leadership Initiative and the Center for Sustainable Medicine, and a co-founder of Regenerate Earth and the "Can we Rehydrate California?" Initiative. She is currently working on projects with the UN-FAO Farmer Field School program; the Climate Resilient Zero Budget Natural Farming Initiative in Andhra Pradesh, India; and the No Regrets Initiative. She is a member of the Vermont State appointed Payment For Ecosystem Services and Soil Health Working Group and is on the board of directors of the Soil Carbon Coalition and the Vermont Healthy Soils Coalition.
Hope to see you there. I've written all this while lying on my belly in the new green grass, watching the bumblebees visiting my daffodils.
Wishing you very well!
Warmly,
Didi
All of the Land and Leadership Initiative's past webinars are now available for FREE (though if you can afford to pay, please do.)
