If your answer is a resounding YES!– we all do have a right to nutritious food for our bodies and souls, then join us in reclaiming our health, our land, and our communities, and help us to sow seeds for the future!
Sowing Seeds Here and Now!: A Chesapeake Area Urban Farming Summit
Featuring Will Allen of Growing Power
Friday, June 18th, 2010 at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, 10300 Baltimore Ave., Beltsville, MD 20705
Urban Farming is a movement to return the cultivation of our meals to our neighborhoods and cities, revitalizing vacant lots and abandoned properties, productively employing local residents, uniting communities, and ensuring greater social justice. Urban agriculture efforts speak to the well-being and health of our bodies, our society, our environment, the Chesapeake Bay, and our County. It also speaks to our basic right to choose good and have access to good safe nutritious food.
What we put in our bodies is integral our immediate and long term health, and has also greatly impacts the world in which we live. Industrial agriculture has been implicated in many of the world’s ills, from reducing biodiversity due to corporate patenting and genetic engineering, water and ground pollution and contamination due to overuse of pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, and depletion of forests, water and soil resources. Many express concern about working conditions of agricultural workers and the abusive conditions of raising and slaughtering poultry and livestock. Others wonder about the additional expenses and environmental costs of the transportation, packaging, and over-processing of many foods we eat daily.
With fewer than 2% of our nation’s people working as farmers, many people wonder how our food system got so far away from US. With the return of the urban agriculture and farmers market movement, we all are beginning to look again at creating a more efficient and ethical food system that can employ more people to sustain our basic needs by (re)turning to small scale safe and local production of food.
As more of us significantly question who decides and produces what we consume, we also see an escalation of food deserts in inner cities– places where food of any kind is hard to come by anywhere, other than a few limited convenience stores and fast food establishments.
We’re asking for three things of you:
- We are actively looking for the best presenters about food justice, public health, planning, and regulations in an effort to identify and break down the barriers to urban agriculture. Go to SowingSeedsHereandNow.com and on the right side of the front page is a little blurb and a link for presentation proposals. Go there, check it out. Consider being a presenter, and fill out that form yourselves. We have funding for travel costs, and would love for you to present and use your knowledge of the subject to lead a rich dialogue. If you’re not interested in presenting, please think for a second about the best presenters and session leaders that you’ve experienced at farming and food systems summits, conferences, or workshops. Let us know their names and contact information, we’ll gladly reach out to them to ask them if they want to present.
- We need your help getting the word out about this summit. Please consider posting a short blurb on your website, blog, twitter or facebook account. We are happy to write it or help you write it to best fit your audience. And, fill out this form and we’ll send you printed postcards to hand out to your friends or constituents.
- We are looking for sponsors for this event. Please contact us, we’d love to build this coalition!
All this is summarized on this page, which clearly details our needs.
If you have any questions, please email christopher@ecoffshoots.org.
