

Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association
by Lauren N. Ketcham
Sowing the Seeds of Our Food Sovereignty is the theme of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association’s (OEFFA) 33rd annual conference on Feb. 18-19 in Granville, Ohio. Drawing nearly 1,000 attendees in 2011, Ohio’s largest sustainable agriculture conference will feature keynote speakers Woody Tasch and Andrew Kimbrell, more than 70 workshops, local and organic meals, kids’ conference, childcare, a trade show and more. Workshop topics include gardening, homesteading, cooking, green living, livestock production, marketing and fracking.
Keynote speakers Tasch and Kimbrell, who are both challenging our current industrial food structure, will bring a focus on the need to create food systems that foster food sovereignty—the right of people to define their own food, agriculture, and livestock systems that put the needs of those who produce, distribute, and consume food at the heart of food systems and policies, rather than the demands of markets and corporations.
Tasch is the chairman of the Slow Money Alliance and inspired the Slow Money movement by writing Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered. The Slow Money Alliance is bringing people together around a new conversation about money that is too fast, about finance that is disconnected from people and place and about how people can begin fixing the economy from the ground up, starting with food. It is premised on the “alliance” between the people who produce food and the people who consume food.
Kimbrell is one of the country’s leading environmental attorneys and founder and executive director of The International Center for Technology Assessment and The Center for Food Safety, which has taken a lead role in fighting the deregulation of genetically engineered crops.
Kimbrell is author of 101 Ways to Help Save the Earth, The Human Body Shop: The Engineering and Marketing of Life, Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food and general editor of Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. His articles have appeared in numerous law reviews, technology journals, magazines and newspapers across the country, and he has been featured in many documentary films, including The Future of Food.
For more information or to register, visit www.oeffa.org or 614-421-2022. Registration open mid-December.