Wise Traditions 2012 Part II – The Friday Speakers

For the past two months on my Internet radio show on Green Earth Radio, I had been interviewing Wise Traditions speakers to let listeners know all about the upcoming conference.  After interviewing a number of the presenters, it was great getting to hear them share more of their wisdom.  I also had the chance to see presentations from some of the people that I didn’t get around to interviewing.  Here are the people whose panels I attended on Friday November 8.

Most of the sessions that I attended were in the farming track.  I started off with Rachel Kaplan, author of the book Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living.  Rachel spoke about how people can be sustainable while living in the suburbs or the city by doing things such as composting, gardening in your backyard, or joining a community garden.  And of course, this being a Weston A. Price event, people loved hearing about how she has backyard chickens to get both her own personal eggs and some tasty poultry.
The next speaker I saw on the farming track was Peter Ballerstedt as he talked about turning sunlight into animal products.  Peter is the product manager for Barenbrug USA, which is the world’s largest supplier of cool-season grass.  Peter explained how to have grass grow the most efficiently, so you can get the best meat out of your product and why it’s the grass that you need to focus on first when it comes to pastured animals.  Makes sense, since grass is the first word in “grass fed beef”.
For my last daytime panel on Friday, I decided to hop over to the cooking track.  My good friend Hannah Crum spoke about the health benefits of kombucha.  Hannah’s been one of the frequent guests on my show and has appeared on several other Green Earth Radio shows as well.  She has a business called Kombucha Kamp, which both brews kombucha and sells starter kits so you can make it yourself.  She’s becoming to kombucha what Mark McAfee is to raw milk.  She’s done presentations at numerous fermentation festivals throughout California.  This marked her first time as a speaker at the Wise Traditions conference.  Hannah gave a fun presentation letting us know the health benefits of kombucha as well as how to brew your own at home.
For the Friday evening activities, I saw a screening of the excellent documentary American Meat.  Director Graham Meriwether was the third guest ever on my show, way back in March of this year.  He made a solutions oriented documentary showing how pastured farming is a feasible solution to our environmental problems that we’re facing with farms and transportation of food.  Among the farms that Graham visited in the doc was Joel Salatin’s beyond organic Polyface Farms.  Graham followed the screening with a Q&A of what went into making this documentary, which covered so many different areas of sustainable livestock.

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