March 1, 2005

1. RAW MILK, LOCAL PRODUCE, PASTURED LIVESTOCK…Reconnecting Farmers and Consumers, March 19, Slippery Rock, PA

2. FERTILITY AWARENESS: Charting a Woman’s Waking Temp and Cervical Fluid to Gauge Gynecological Health and for Natural Birth Control or Pregnancy Achievement, March 14, Philadelphia, PA.

3. EFFECTIVE MICROORGANISMS (EM) in AGRICULTURE, April 2, Shepardstown, WV.

WORKSHOPS

1. THE WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA WAPF CHAPTERS Present:
RAW MILK, LOCAL PRODUCE, PASTURED LIVESTOCK… Reconnecting Farmers and Consumers

McKay Education Building – Slippery Rock University
Slipper Rock, PA
Saturday, March 19
10:00am – 5:00pm
Cost: $5.00

Repairing the Links of a Broken Food Chain
By Mark McAfee
Founder and Managing Member of Organic Pastures Dairy Corporation and McAfee Farms, Fresno, California

Whatever Happened to Our Food Supply?
By Bill Sanda
Executive Director of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Washington, D.C.

The Green Chef Deli …Organic To Go of Sewickley Is offering a local foods brown bag lunch for $8 when Ordered in advance. Or you may bring your own.

Don’t miss this educational and eye-opening seminar!
Space is limited – call today to reserve your seat and get directions

Elise Stephinson, Western Pa. Chapter Leader
814-227-2219 or estephinson (at) aol.com

Carrie Hahn, Greater Pittsburgh Area Chapter Leader
412-531-4485 or bchahn (at) verizon.net

Co-Sponsored by The Robert A. Macoskey Center Sustainable Systems Education and Research at Slippery Rock University

Mark McAfee, Founder and Managing Member of OPDC and McAfee Farms Mark McAfee has managed the 600 acre diversified family farm for 24 years. In 1998 Mark was selected as the “Best of the West” fruit grower out of 20,000 US fruit growers for innovations in food safety. He was featured on 20/20 with Lynn Sherr for food safety and organic innovations in 1998. He invented the nation’s first Grade A Certified, 20-station mobile milk barn. Mark served as Operations, Marketing and Human Resources Director for $30 million dollar emergency medical company for five years while maintaining certification as a Paramedic over a 16-year period. He also completed premed education course work at FSU, Chapman and Merced JC. Earned certificate from California Poly Tech University in cheese production technology.

He personally invented all organic raw dairy products at OPDC. Mark McAfee has been interviewed by countless magazines, radio stations, and TV stations, and is considered an organic and raw dairy expert. He has spoken in California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Nebraska as an expert on organic raw milk issues. He is an accomplished high performance private pilot with extensive medical mission work in remote central Mexico serving as a mission pilot for Flying Doctors. Recently, he has been selected to sit on the National Organic Dairy Advisory Board. (This is a University of California research based organization that provides funding for the advancement of important organic milk research projects.) Is commonly referred to as “director of excitement” by OPDC team members.

Mark will explore various opportunities available to fix the broken food chain, and rebuild that bridge between farmers and consumers and return the family farm to profitability. Because of the overwhelming interest and demand for raw milk that is sweeping across America, Mark will focus part of this presentation on how to reliably produce safe, organic raw milk and will explain the raw milk nutritional values and why it can be a safe alternative to pasteurized milk.

Bill Sanda – Executive Director of the Weston A Price Foundation “I love tenderly prepared, nutrient-dense, not manufactured, highly processed, foods. As such, I serve as the Executive Director of the Weston A. Price Foundation, a food and nutrition education, a research and advocacy, non-profit organization, dedicated to reinstituting nutrient-dense foods into our food supply and to developing sustainable agricultural practices.” Bill will explore the pioneering nutrition research of Dr. Weston A. Price, whose studies of traditional peoples established the parameters of human health and determined the optimum characteristics of human diets. He will focus on what nutrient dense foods are and their significance, and answer the question of how to obtain and prepare them.
2. FERTILITY AWARENESS
Charting a Woman’s Waking Temp and Cervical Fluid to Gauge Gynecological Health and for Natural Birth Control or Pregnancy Achievement

A talk by Katie Singer, CFE

Monday, March 14, 5:00 – 6:30pm
Huntsman Hall G60, 3730 Walnut Street
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA

Women who chart their waking temperature and cervical fluid can know when they are fertile or infertile, and whether they are ovulating, prone to thyroid problems, polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), and/or progesterone deficiency. Charting (also known as Fertility Awareness and Natural Family Planning) can be used for birth control, pregnancy achievement, and as an introductory indicator of a woman’s health.

This talk will explain how to determine a woman’s fertile and infertile phases by charting and how to identify common GYN problems before serious problems arise.

Katie Singer is a Certified Fertility Educator and the author of The Garden of Fertility (Penguin, 2004). She also co-authored “Gauging a woman’s health by her fertility signals: an introductory synthesis of western and Chinese medical principles” in the peer-reviewed journal Alternative Therapies. Katie was also one of our speakers at the 2004 Weston A. Price Foundation Annual Conference in October 2004.

For more info, contact vwalbek (at) nursing.upenn.edu , or go to GardenofFertility.com.

Sponsored by Nursing GSO and GAPSA
3. EFFECTIVE MICROORGANISMS (EM) in AGRICULTURE

A Full Day Workshop featuring Steve Diver and Vinny Pinto on how to use inexpensive farm-made ferments to boost soil fertility and control disease (with a postscript on EM applications for human nutrition).

WHEN: 9AM to 4PM, Saturday, April 2, 2005
WHERE: Reynolds Hall in Shepherdstown, MD
COST: $35.00 (includes lunch. See below)
CONTACT: For More Information, Contact Allan Balliett 304.876-3382, or emworkshop (at) gardeningforthefuture.com

Effective Microorganisms (EM) is a method of inoculating agricultural soils with beneficial microorganisms that contribute beneficial soil effects such as improved soil aggregation, nitrogen fixation, mineralization, humus formation, disease suppression, and decomposition. EM is
also used to enhance the nutrition and digestibility of livestock feeds and to control odors and insects problems in livestock enterprises.

Elaine Ingham has done much to educate sustainable farmers about the importance of promoting diversity in the soil food-web. Dr Ingham advocates almost exclusively for the value of aerobic microbiology. Unfortunately, when done properly, producing an viable batch of aerobic compost
tea can be both expensive (lab tests, equipment outlay) and time consuming. Using EM, on the other-hand, requires virtually no extra equipment and needs no lab tests. Ironically, EM is an anaerobic innoculant which brews itself in a closed container and yet provides such a significant boost to soil biology that it not only brings “rare’ beneficial microbes to farm soils, it also creates a soil environment that allows idigenous bacteria, fungus and beneficial nematodes to flourish.

Furthermore, in the world of microbial agriculture, EM is far from a new idea. EM has been used in Japan for more than 70 years. As a point of fact, Steve Diver says that there are more research papers and reports on EM than any other microbial inoculation system in organic agriculture.

Steve Diver, who has presented on microbial inoculation at both the ECOFARM and Upper Midwest Organic Conference in the past year, will give an introductory lecture to orient the prospective learner on the place of on-farm beneficial microbe cultures: compost teas, effective microorganisms (EM), and related biological farming. This lecture will review the practical applications for bioaugmentation of the rhizosphere and phyllosphere, including the production and use of compost teas, effective microorganisms, indigenous microorganisms, fermented plant extracts, cow patty pit from Biodynamics, and mass-produced mycorrhizal inoculates.

Vinny Pinto, an expert on agricultural applications for EM will speak on the following topics:

Basics of EM
How to use EM for composting
Using EM for ag soil
How to make high quality AEM
How to use EM for cattle, poultry and swine
Value of EM products in human and livestock nutrition

In addition, a hands-on EM Compost (“Bokachi”) demonstration is planned.

The goal of this conference is to give the potential user a background on the theory and science of microbial inoculation in general and a working knowledge of how to economically use EM effectively in their farming enterprise. Furthermore, once in the field, attendees of this workshop can rely on support from Mr. Pinto through his “EM-AG” internet discussion group.

Seating for the workshop is limited, so register early. Register by sending a check made to “GFTF” to Gardening for the Future, POB 3047, Shepherstown, WV 25443 or at the door. Registration fee includes lunch; please register before March 25 and please state your vegetarian/other preference at that time.

Bio for Vinny Pinto
Vinny Pinto is a consulting scientist who performs research on use of beneficial syntropic (anti-entropic) fermentative microbes, including EM and related microbial consortia, in a variety of fields ranging from soils for crop agriculture to livestock to odor management and pathogen reduction in industrial and waste treatment settings. He also operates a small zero-odor egg-producing operation using EM microbial technology.

Vinny is a degreed scientist with a Master’s degree in the health-related sciences and in research methods in the health sciences. He has a strong background in devising and guiding scientific research studies. He has been working with and researching uses of EM for over two years, particularly in the realms of livestock and human uses, and health-related applications using EM fermented antioxidant beverages as a nutritional supplement for humans and animals; he performs consulting for clients in a number of foreign countries as well as in the USA. One of his recent large agricultural livestock consulting projects involved implementation of EM for odor control and animal health in a large “factory” poultry farm containing about 50,000 chickens in a 6,000 sq. ft. barn, where the poultry density was roughly 10 lbs per square foot.

He has presented lectures and seminars on the usage of such beneficial syntropic microbes in many venues, including the international EM Sustainable Community Festival held in Kansas City, MO in November 2004 which attracted attendees from around the world. Vinny operates two popular informational websites on EM and its uses http://www.eminfo.info/
and he operates five e-mail list groups on various applications of EM and similar beneficial antioxidative microbes. Vinny is the author of an encyclopedic 200+ page book entitled “Fermentation with Syntropic Antioxidative Microbes: An Advanced Guide to Brewing EM Fermented Secondary Products”, and is currently working on an introductory book offering an overview on the use EM across many fields and a second book which will offering basic guidelines for using EM and related beneficial microbial cultures in agriculture. Vinny is also the publisher of the fee-based “Advanced EM Newsletter”, a newsletter devoted to advanced uses for EM across various sectors.

Bio for Steve Diver
Among other things, Steve Diver is an internationally known expert on on-farm beneficial microbe cultures. He as has been a researcher and advisor for ATTRA, the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service, for the past fifteen years, with a focus on alternative farming systems, soil biology, humus farming, food quality, and organic agriculture methodologies. ATTRA’s Steve Diver has focused on alternative farming systems, soil biology, humus farming, food quality, and organic agriculture methodologies during his fifteen years of outreach to farmers.

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