Here’s the release from the Colorado Farm & Food Alliance:
Paonia, CO. (April 9, 2024) – The Colorado Farm & Food Alliance is kicking off our Spring Workshops just as the growing season begins, this weekend (April 13) at our new learning center on Lamborn Mesa, just outside Paonia, Colorado.
Miles Filipeli will lead the inaugural offering this Saturday – Natural Farming with Local Amendments, April 13 – provided to the community by the CO Farm & Food Alliance on a gift model by donation with $20 suggested but none required. The following Saturday will showcase Building Soil and Families: Holistic Grazing, April 20, with Jason Wrich of Wrich Ranches.
Workshops continue May 4 with Cover Crops with Jon Orlando of Rock n Roots Farm and Colorado Farm & Food Alliance’s Elizabeth Agee, May 18 with Native Pollinators in the Market Garden with Paige Payne of Online Landscape Design, and May 25, with our final offering, Alley Cropping with Elizabeth Agee. Information on the series and the full schedule can be found at colofarmfood.org/blog.
Colorado Farm and Food Alliance is excited to bring this series to the Regenerative Agriculture Gardens and Classroom, which is back at its new location in partnership with our host, Arbol Farm, a working farm with a multi-generational legacy of hosting educational events as well as the early days of the local farmers market on-site. (The market has since moved but has kept the Arbol name).
The practices these workshops cover, and that will be demonstrated at our Gardens & Classroom, can offer many benefits to Colorado’s producers. These include market benefits like improved yields and nutrition, as well as more system resilience, habitat enhancements and boosted ecosystem services, and increased adaptation to and mitigation of the effects of climate change.
The Regenerative Ag Gardens and Classroom is the centerpiece of our Just Good Food program, and includes both an indoor and outdoor learning space. Workshops mostly feature a classroom component followed by a hands-on project or planting to solidify the learning in action. The Just Good Food program works to teach, model and advance practices and to promote engagement to further food security, farm resilience, and rural equity. Through these workshops, participants can creatively engage with and explore ways to incorporate some of these practices in their operations.
Colorado Farm and Food Alliance is grateful to continue the educational legacy of Arbol Farm by offering a fun and engaging space for learning, with demonstration and food gardens, workshops of regenerative agriculture principles, movie nights and pizza parties this summer, and more!
Learn about all our upcoming workshops and events at www.colofarmfood.org/events