PASA 2010

A couple weekends ago, I attended the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) Conference along with several others from Slippery Rock University. As an undergraduate, I’m involved with the RAMC Market Garden which gave me the opportunity to attend the conference, and I was thoroughly amazed by the immense amount of people that were there Friday morning when I arrived. Over 2,000 men, women, and children from thirty states had gathered to attend two much fulfilled days. If there was one general thing that I learned, it is that a foot and a half of snow does not stop farmers from learning how to be better farmers. It was a very powerful experience to see so many people, in one room, join together for the same cause, and it is a cause that we need every day in order to eat the food that we do.

As part of the PASA experience, I attended several workshops that were part of the conference. These workshops included topics such as farming rabbits for meat, managing a weedless garden, and SPIN farming. They consisted of eighty minutes of combined lecture and question-and-answer sessions and they were all very informative. In the workshop on farming rabbits for meat, Daniel Salatin spoke to us about the Polyface System and how he had been farming rabbits since he was seven years old. He taught the group how chickens work excrement into the soil to eliminate smell, how to breed the rabbits, and how to remove the skin of the rabbit when you’re getting ready to sell them.

Lee Reich, the speaker in “My Weedless Garden” workshop, spoke about how to manage a garden with far less weeds than normal by not tilling the soil because, when you turn over the soil, you are bringing weed seeds to both air and light which causes them to germinate. He has a simple four step procedure that he uses in his garden and that he goes into further detail about in his book. He also spoke about how to begin a garden with newspaper, water, and compost. It is a way to turn an area of lawn into a garden in about six hours or less. It was a very interesting workshop and I’m excited to try it out on a few garden beds this summer at the RAMC.

Overall, my first PASA experience was very intriguing and I’m excited to try some of what I have learned on the market garden this spring and summer at the Macoskey Center. I began at the Macoskey Center last January and believed that only Graduate Assistants were able to attend the conference, so I was very excited when I was told that I would be going this year. While I am not in an environmental field of study here at Slippery Rock University, the topics that are presented at PASA can be used by anyone whether for practical uses, as they are presented, or for being informed and having knowledge that is essential.


Carolyn Michael
Undergraduate RAMC Office Support