Southern SAWG’s Practical Tools and Solutions for Sustaining Family Farms Conference is incredibly popular for the remarkable selection of useful sessions it offers and the wonderful opportunity it provides to interact with forward-thinking people from across the region. Over 1,200 participated last year! 

Pre-conference attendees soak up materials at one of the intensive courses.

Field trip attendees eagerly board the tour buses.

For those who want more intensive learning experiences, our PRE-conference offerings are quite the hit too. So, we’ve added a few more this year. The 2008 line-up includes:

Full Day Short Courses (Wednesday afternoon-Thursday morning):
- Cut Flower Production and Marketing
- Farm Website Design
- High Tunnel Production
- Beekeeping
- Business Planning
- CFS Organizational Development
- Organic Horticulture #1 (start-up)
- Organic Horticulture #2 (advanced)

Half-Day Mini Courses with hands-on demonstrations (Thursday afternoon):
- Farmers’ Market Displays
- Tractor Maintenance
- Chicken Tractor Construction
- Using the Internet
- CFS Policy
- CFS Evaluations

Field Trips (Thursday afternoon):
- Permaculture
- Sustainable Vegetable and Pastured Poultry
- Sustainable Livestock (2 and 4 legged)
- Winery and More
- Louisville’s Community Food Systems

We’ll post full descriptions of these and the rest of the conference offerings on the Southern SAWG website in early October.

Fall crops at Woodland Gardens,
Winterville, GA


From the pumpkin patch at Serenbe Farms, Palmetto, GA

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During September, Southern SSAWG is launching our Take Back Our Food Campaign. With this campaign we aim to raise $25,000 by the end of the year to support our exciting work.

Thanks to a generous donation from an anonymous donor, individual gifts received through December 31, 2007 will be matched up to a total of $10,000!

Southern SAWG is seeking support from individual donors to help us build more community food systems and support changes to our nation’s farm and food policies. Our goals include:

• Greatly expanded funding for Community Food Projects that open new economic opportunities for family farms and improve food access for low-income Americans

• Increased funding for organic farming research and technical support, commensurate with the rapidly growing consumer demand for organic food

• Sufficient funding for a nationwide conservation program for working farmlands

• A comprehensive program to assist new and aspiring farmers to get off to a successful start
  

We invite individuals who are directly involved in the agricultural community and those who simply want to ensure that their family has good food to join us.

When everyone in the community takes part, a little goes a long way. Be a part of Southern SAWG’s movement to Take Back Our Food!  

For more information and to donate click here!

Southern SAWG’s Community Food Systems Program has been ably and inspiringly developed and directed for the past several years by long-time core staff person Keith Richards. We are sad to be bidding farewell to Keith, who is leaving the organization for a new, more local direction, and to spend more time with family. Southern SAWG is losing a skilled individual, a pragmatic as well as visionary thinker, and a well-respected national professional in the field of sustainable food system development.

Born and raised in northeast Iowa, Keith came to the work of Southern SAWG just as the organization was getting on its feet. Since 1993, Keith has held numerous positions and led a host of initiatives. He served as Program Manager for Enterprise Development for twelve years, beginning with an assessment of farmers’ needs that led to more emphasis on direct marketing and enterprise development. His degree in Communications served him well as editor of the print newsletter Southern SAWG issued regularly for eight years. Keith also authored three publications for Southern SAWG: Farming More Sustainably in the South, Volume 1 (1994) and Volume 2 (1996), and Making It On the Farm: Increasing Sustainability Through Value-added Processing and Marketing (1996; co-authorship). You can order any of these booklets here.

After serving as Coordinator from 1996 to 2001, Keith became our first Executive Director. During his two years in that role, he helped establish some of the important infrastructure the growing organization needed.  

Keith took on the leadership in 2003 of the new Community Foods System Training and Technical Assistance project, funded by the USDA, and he’s now brought Southern SAWG to the forefront in this work nationally.

Though Keith is leaving, the Community Food Systems program is in a very positive transition. Southern SAWG is fortunate to have Keecha Harris of Harris & Associates, in Birmingham, AL, stepping into the Project Director role for our current Community Foods Training & Technical Assistance Project, funded by USDA-CSREES. Keecha, a 2001-2003 Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow, has worked closely with Keith over the past two years, managing many aspects of this important work.

Southern SAWG is also launching new CFS projects and we look forward to building solidly on the strong foundation that Keith helped us achieve.

Thank you, Keith, for your wonderful contributions to Southern SAWG. We will miss you and wish you well in your future endeavors, though we also expect to see you at future events.

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Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, Inc. (Southern SAWG) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization founded in 1991 to promote sustainable agriculture in the Southern United States.