It seems every year after attending the PFI conference, something gives us pause to re/consider changing part of the farm or what/how we farm, meet some new innovative people, and get a chance to swap stories. This year was no exception.
There was a great variety of topics – I attended sessions on nut trees, farm energy, imagining the farm and farming 25 years from now, a workshop centered around writing about your farm from a noted writer, Mary Swander, and of course met some new people, some not so far from our place.
One thinking point that came across is partially summed up with the following quote, “We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”- Charles R. Swindoll.
Fred Kirschenmann was one of the speakers and what follows is a distillation of his presentation, after which he asked how all the farmers in the room could change their operations in light of future oil costs at $300 barrel (China now has more cars than the US) and more frequent severe weather events, (see 500 year Iowa floods in 1993, 2008). The answers, of course, lead to the thought of crisis disguised as opportunity.