Whether you’re wrapping up a full day of Pre-Conference acti­ vities or arriving early for the main conference
festivities, the Thursday Evening Winter Picnic with Joel Salatin is the perfect dinner solution!

We’ll start you out with a satisfying hors d?oeuvres reception featuring cheese tasting with over a dozen renowned cheesemakers. Next, the beautiful picnic buffet dinner will highlight the best of regional and organic fare — it has become one of the favorite meals of the conference. Feast at our winter picnic featuring five entrees, a slew of fantastic vegetable sides and salads, and many desserts. Fit for both meat-lovers and vegetarians!

Save room for inspirational food for thought as Joel Salatin cooks up a delicious account of what farming to serve the common good really means.

Joel Salatin is one of America’s premier grass farmers. As owner/operator of Polyface Farm Inc., Salatin lives the farm’s mission: To develop agricultural prototypes that are environmentally, economically and emotionally enhancing and facilitate their duplication throughout the world.

Beginning with just pastured poultry, Salatin and his son Daniel have developed models for cattle, pork, and rabbits. They began with on-farm sales, and now also have home buyers’ clubs in Maryland, restaurant accounts in Virginia, and sales all over the region via EcoFriendly Foods. Salatin’s ability to communicate complements his creativity and business sense, enabling him to write about the models he has developed and made profitable. He speaks all over the United States each winter, encouraging other entrepreneurs to take up the tools he has forged and make clean food for their own communities.

James Howard Kunstler says that he wrote The Geography of Nowhere, “Because I believe a lot of people share my feelings about the tragic landscape of highway strips, parking lots, housing tracts, mega-malls, junked cities, and a ravaged countryside that makes up the everyday environment where most Americans live and work.”

His latest book, The Long Emergency, published by the Atlantic Monthly Press in 2005, is about the challenges posed by the coming global oil crisis, climate change, and other “converging catastrophes of the 21st century.”

Kunstler spent most of his childhood in New York City. He graduated from the State Univer­ sity of New York, Brockport campus, worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. Though he has no formal training in architecture or related design fields, Kunstler is frequently invited to lecture on these topics for distinguished universities and renowned organizations.

SATURDAY KEYNOTER Michael Ableman

Michael Ableman is the founder and executive director of the Center for Urban Agriculture at Fairview Gardens, a nonprofit organization based on one of the oldest and most diverse organic farms in southern California where he farmed from 1981 to 2001. The farm has become an important community and education center and a national model for small scale and urban agriculture, hosting up to 5,000 people per year for tours, classes, festivals, and apprenticeships. Under Ableman’s leadership the farm was saved from development and preserved under one of the earliest and most unique agricultural conservation easements in the country.

Ableman’s first book, From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World (Abrams, 1993), has become a timeless classic that challenges us to participate in the marketplace, our kitchens, and in our own backyards.

Ableman’s second book, On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm, is the emblematic story of his fight to preserve a piece of what was once some of the richest farmland in the world, and a tribute to the sweet obsession of growing food. His third book, Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It, was released with an accompanying PBS film in the fall of 2005.