Red State Green

This is one of the better conferences I’ve been to so far. They have five tracks (plus a kid’s track tomorrow) for each day. Today I picked the food/permaculture track.

But before that, today I fed and watered bunnies, made breakfast for three teenagers, got said teenagers to school, had to go home and change bunny cage, then a shower, then to two stores (on the way, gotta combine trips to save gas!) … so I got to the conference late and missed the first session, which turned out to be about wild food!

Major disappointment. But, I’m going to a foraging walk near Stillwater next weekend, so all is not lost. More on that later.

The second session was about community gardening, which turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would be. I didn’t have a pen so I didn’t take any notes for that one.

Then we had an excellent lunch, with all the ingredients Oklahoma-grown. Best lasagna I’ve ever had.

I managed to get a pen (the OSU table had one left when I went back to the exhibits), which was great, as I took tons of notes of the keynote speaker’s speech (which deserves its own post).

Then a man talked about his work helping others start their own “Victory Gardens”. This would make a nice business.

After that, the lady who made lunch talked about “value-added” agricultural products (which is anything that you do something you grow to in order to make it more valuable: cooking, slicing, growing organically, etc., but if you think of it as processed, you have the main idea).

One thing she said that I thought was useful is that she built a professional kitchen, and decided to open it up to rent from people who would be considered ‘competitors’.

“Best thing I ever did,” she said, (even though the bank thought she was nuts) because she got rent from them, and they got a place to process their foods. In some cases, people who used the same ingredients as she did led to them going together to buy things in bulk, leading to increased savings (and profits) for them both, and increased locally-made products for Oklahomans. Sounds like a win-win situation!

Last thing for today was a man from the national “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” campaign, which was started in the Tulsa area and people are looking to start here in the Oklahoma City area!

A fun day, and I got to meet a lot of interesting people, including the keynote speaker for today, which was Julie Frieder of the Calvert Group. More on her speech later.