Heading to State College every February for the PASA conference is the beginning of spring on the farm.  This conference is full of info from Radical Homemakers to someone wanting to expand to a 2,000 member CSA.  Each session has something to offer. The PASA crowd "gets it" with sustainable ag.  Today, as I was sitting at the conference I was wondering how many people the PASA crowd feeds. If there are 2,000 attendees and 75% are farmers who feed at least 25 families (not hard to do - 1 ac. of vegetables will feed 25 families for a season), that is a LOT of people eating locally produced food.

We went to a session on using only biocontrol for our insect and disease pressure.  Peace Tree Farm 

is a USDA certified organic greenhouse operation relying totally on insects and nematodes to control their pest populations.  As an organic grower, there are organically approved pesticides we can use to control insects. Peace Tree Farm goes one step further and uses NOTHING but living organisms to control the bad bugs.  We learned a ton of info in this session and are motivated to keep pace with this philosophy.