Topic Area: Food & Agriculture

Session C – Sustainable Agriculture from Kittery to Caribou

Co-chairs: Kourtney Collum, College of the Atlantic; Tim Waring, University of Maine

From York County to Aroostook County, Maine farmers are working to expand farming techniques that produce nutritious food and quality fiber while protecting the environment, supporting healthy communities, ensuring animal welfare, and sustaining agricultural livelihoods. This session seeks to integrate insights from practitioners and researchers and the natural and social sciences to examine sustainable agriculture practices across Maine.  We welcome proposals that focus on agroecology, conservation and sustainable agriculture, seeds, soil, land, labor, farm policy, pest management, biodiversity, or any other dimension of sustainable agriculture. Overall, the session seeks to encourage systems thinking and collaboration among the various people working to rebuild Maine’s food system in a way that is environmentally and socially just.

Session D – Building a Sustainable Food System for Maine

Co-chairs: Tim Waring, University of Maine; Kourtney Collum, College of the Atlantic

This session combines perspectives and research from practitioners and scholars across Maine working to build a sustainable food system. Topics include local food, food sovereignty, food justice and equity, the economics of the Maine food system, and more. The session will focus discussion on the status and challenges in achieving a food system for Maine that is sustainable ecologically, economically and culturally, and participants will be asked to identify the challenges to achieving that goal in the context of their own work.