Keynote: Helen Atthowe
Taking Ecological Farming to the Next Level: Minimize Inputs and Maximize Crop Nutrition
Could ecological farming strategies create healthy and balanced, lower-input ecological farms with healthy soils that grow healthy plants with increased nutrition for humans?
Rather than striving to make more money by increasing yield and using lots of off-farm inputs to do it, can we instead focus on saving money by reducing inputs, creating systems that sponsor their own soil fertility and pest suppression, and eating our own highly nutritious food, while also saving us money by keeping us out of the medical system?
Ecological farming uses a systems-thinking approach to balance profitable yields with minimum soil disturbance, stacking ecological function by combining soil-building techniques for microbial abundance and diversity and habitat-building for enhanced biological suppression of pests. Helen Atthowe of Woodleaf Farm will share her 40 years of on-farm experiments, insights, and experience learning how to farm in harmony with nature and focus on the whole, rather than being distracted by constant tinkering with the parts.
Our lunch on Friday and keynote address are presented by the Non-GMO Project.
About the Speaker
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Helen Atthowe
Woodleaf Farm
Helen Atthowe has worked for 35 years to connect farming, food systems, land stewardship and conservation. She is the author of The Ecological Farm: A Minimalist No-Till, No-Spray, Selective-Weeding, Grow-Your-Own-Fertilizer System for Organic Agriculture.
She currently farms and does soil- and natural enemies’ habitat- building research on her new 5-acre farm in Western Montana. Helen and her late husband co-owned his 35-year certified organic, 26-acre orchard in California and then farmed their 211-acre organic farm in Eastern Oregon doing mainly orchard and vegetable production. They did on-farm biological disease and insect suppression research, created educational videos, and did video presentations about their ecological farming methods.
Helen has an M.S. in Horticulture from Rutgers University and has worked in education and research at Rutgers, the University of Arkansas, and Oregon State University. She was a Horticulture Extension Agent in Montana for 17 years where she taught an organic Master Gardener course. She has also owned/operated a 30-acre certified organic vegetable/fruit farm in Montana, where she did organic soil and weed ecology research. Helen was a board member for the Organic Farming Research Foundation from 2000-2005 and an advisor for Wild Farm Alliance in 2018 and 2019.