Who is Your Farmer?

On Monday, March 28, Happy Dancing Turtle hosted a kickoff meeting for the Food and Water Security Advisor Corps. Local farmers, permaculture experts and local educators were in attendance. The goal of the advisor corps is to be a sounding board for Happy Dancing Turtle in their endeavors to promote education and best practices surrounding sustainability.

Talks swirled from previous HDT events and their outcomes to possible future ventures that HDT should focus their attention on. The majority of the discussions gravitated around the possibility of an online organic gardening symposium. HDT's goal is not to enrich only those in the local area and hosting an online event would bring the ideas of sustainability and permaculture to many more people.
The final goal of fostering these ideas across a much larger geographical area was decided on being an attainable goal.

The main outcome of the meeting was the decision to embrace technology to foster these goals. An idea engaged in was to create an iPhone app to instruct what food was growing when and where. Another idea was to find a way to use Facebook to encourage outside learning. One of the most popular interactive games on Facebook, Farmville, has over 50 million active users. If HDT could promote sustainable practices through this same method, many more people, it was figured, would be open to the ideas of organic gardening or starting their own square foot garden.

But, regardless of how these sustainable ideas get out there, the main goal decided upon during this kickoff meeting was that education and action are the primary goals.