Welcome to the 37th annual California Small Farm Conference, a week-long event featuring over 40 online workshops as well as a dozen in-person gatherings around the state. Whether you’re a beginning farmer or a seasoned grower, a local food advocate or a farmers market manager, you’ll find something here for you. This year’s theme, "Rooted in Place", honors the vital relationship between farmers, communities and the land they steward.
Check out the schedule below for event times and locations. Click "Reserve Tickets" to register. Admission is on a sliding-scale, to ensure everyone can attend. Please select the amount you’re comfortable paying. Enjoy the conference!
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This virtual workshop will provide a big-picture overview of key management strategies to promote apple orchard health. We will start with a 30-minute presentation that covers soil, nutrient, and water management and Integrated Pest Management strategies for insect pests and diseases focusing on organic/agroecological approaches. This will include examples and helpful photos of visual symptoms of different issues. At the end of the presentation, I will share a quick poll with the audience to ask them to rank which aspects of orchard health they'd like to hear most about from experienced apple growers. I'll share the results with everyone so we can all see which topics are highest priority. For the remainder of the time, we'll hear from a panel of small-scale commercial apple growers to learn which strategies they use in their orchards to promote orchard health, what works best for them in their context, and why. This will help show attendees what these strategies look like in practice and how strategies can be tailored to different orchard situations. After panelists feel they have covered the attendees' identified priority topics, we'll open it up for Q&A to help attendees explore how to effectively apply these strategies in their own orchards.
