Farmers, home-scale growers, students, food producers and eaters will gather at the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference—that is, over the internet. The pandemic has driven another year’s conference to the web, but this year the conference is more than twice the size. What hasn’t changed: a chance to network, share ideas and gain new skills that will make small farms in Michigan more economically viable and environmentally sustainable.
Now in its 23rd year, the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference regularly connects more than one thousand producers and growers from across the region, making it the largest gathering of its kind in the state. The conference is a program of Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology.
Pre-recorded content for the annual conference will be available tomorrow, with twenty live sessions occurring between February 2-6, 2022.
These twenty sessions include workshops on producing cold-hardy wine grapes, mastering fruiting vegetables and cucurbits, and transitioning to value-added products. Some of our favorite insects take the stage with Meghan Milbrath’s “Beekeepers Calendar” and with Connie Crancer’s session on supporting pollinators and other beneficial insects by creating habitat on farmland. A few of the online meetings focus on new important policies and resources, like a USDA overview of the new Micro Farm Crop Insurance, and sessions on simplifying organic certification records and a new “CultivateGrowth” program for young and beginning farmers offered by GreenStone Farm Credit Services. The full list of offerings is available here.
Like last year, the conference includes a resource page of pre-recorded videos and digital downloads, so attendees can get a head start and learn on their own time and at their own pace. Videos include hand-edited transcripts and caption files to make them more accessible. “By moving the slide decks and one-directional presentations to a pre-recorded format, we free up the live sessions for making connections.” notes Brad Kik, conference organizer and co-director of Crosshatch Center for Art and Ecology. “We also kept the ticket price low, so farmers feel ok with just attending two or three sessions—they still get their money’s worth.”
Tickets are available for only $25, and will be on sale throughout the conference. Purchase of a ticket includes access to all content, including recordings of the live sessions, through Feb of 2023.
About the Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference
The Northern Michigan Small Farm Conference is a program of Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology. The conference serves as a vehicle to promote and build a local vibrant agriculture community, to equip the small farm community with the tools to be successful, and as a forum for the open exchange of ideas within the small farm community.