Vandana Shiva is an Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author. Based in Delhi, Shiva has written more than 20 books. She is a leader and board member of the International Forum on Globalization, and a figure of the anti-globalization movement. Her newest book is “Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth.”
Marianna was born and raised in the Napa Valley, where growing up she spent much of her time following her Dad in the vineyards, or running through creeks on her Grandparents’ small ranch. As she grew older she began to recognize the disparities that existed in these two worlds, many of them reflected through her own experience as a mixed race self-identified Chicanx. With a desire to learn more about her own heritage, and the intersection of agriculture and food justice, Marianna has since earned a degree in Agriculture, dabbled as a writer and educator for farmer’s markets throughout the Bay Area, and has worked on several ranches in California and Colorado (and is a former New Agrarian Program Apprentice). Marianna is currently an apprentice at TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, California, where her time is spent managing the ranch’s grass-fed beef business, and working with local community members to better understand and address food security needs in the area.
Shalini is a California native who found a love for agriculture during her college years. She spent a year WWOOFing in Ireland after graduating and came to the realizations that a career in Ag was the path she wanted to take. After returning to the States, she was a NAP Apprentice on the San Juan Ranch with George Whitten and Julie Sullivan.
It was extremely fortuitous that at the Quivira Conference that year (2014), Gabe and Paul Brown held a half-day workshop about their ranch. Shalini knew that she wanted to be on an operation with a diversity of enterprises so she applied for the Brown’s Ranch summer internship. 5 years later with a love of the prairie (and Paul) cemented, Shalini continues to work with Gabe and Paul providing healthy, nutrient-dense proteins to their customers in North Dakota, and recently, shipping all over the United States.
Twila Cassadore has been working with San Carlos Apache, White Mountain Apache, and Yavapai peoples for the past 25 years, conducting interviews with elders to bring information back into the community to address health and social problems. With the Western Apache Diet Project, Twila has documented the importance of foods like grass seeds and acorn seeds to the diets of Apaches before people were moved onto reservations and became reliant on rations, and later, commodities.
There is already vast knowledge in our collective histories to guide us out of climate disaster, racial inequity, and land degradation. This panel will include discussion among Indigenous and BIPOC leaders of ways we can reframe our relationship to land and how we can work together to heal soils and other natural systems, grow healthy crops and livestock, and along the way also heal ourselves. We will explore the reintroduction of Indigenous frameworks for psychological connection and relationship with our lands, with a focus on recognizing and dismantling the current extractive systems and structures that continue to colonize the minds of land stewards.
Raiford grew up breaking the dirt and trading crookneck squash for sweet potatoes, raising hogs and chickens, and only going to the grocery store for sundries. After a military career then graduation from the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, Raiford returned to the farm in 2011 to continue the traditions of his Gullah-Geechee heritage and to create an authentic farm-to-fork experience for locals. He received certification as an ecological horticulturalist from the University of California’s Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.
He served until recently as the program coordinator and associate professor of culinary arts at the College of Coastal Georgia. In 2015, Raiford, the former executive chef at Little St. Simon’s Resort, and his partner, Jovan Sage, a food alchemist, opened The Farmer and the Larder on Newcastle Street, helping jumpstart the revival of Brunswick’s historic downtown. Raiford has appeared in Southern Living, Golden Isles, Paprika Southern, and Savannah magazines, and is a frequent presenter at food and wine festivals throughout the country.
Joining us from the Berry Center in Newcastle, KY and Gilliard Farms in Brunswick, GA, Mary Berry will talk about new initiatives at the Berry Center, including the Our Home Place Meat project with Chef and Farmer Matthew Raiford.
Our Home Place Meat, an initiative of The Berry Center, is offering exceptional meat to customers, ensuring stable income for small family farmers through good farming practices and a cooperative culture, and continuing the legacy of Wendell Berry’s agrarian vision.
The Berry Center Executive Director Mary Berry and her brother, Den Berry, were raised by their parents, Wendell and Tanya Berry, at Lanes Landing Farm in Henry County, Kentucky from the time she was six years old. She attended Henry County public schools and graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1981. She farmed for a living in Henry County starting out in dairy farming, growing Burley tobacco, and later diversifying to organic vegetables, pastured poultry and grass fed beef.
Mary is married to Trimble County, Kentucky farmer, Steve Smith, who started the first Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farming endeavor in the state of Kentucky. If daughters Katie Johnson, Virginia Aguilar and Tanya Smith choose to stay in Henry County, they will be the ninth generation of their family to live and farm there.
Mary currently serves on the Boards of Directors of United Citizens Bank in New Castle, Kentucky, the Schumacher Center for a New Economics in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Sterling College in Vermont. She speaks all over the country as a proponent of agriculture of the middle, in defense of small farmers, and in the hope of restoring a culture and an economy that has been lost in rural America. Her writings have appeared in various publications and collections, including “Letters to a Young Farmer: On Food, Farming, and Our Future” (Princeton Agricultural Press, 2016) and the introduction for a new edition of essays, “Our Sustainable Table”, Robert Clark, ed.
Joining us from the Berry Center in Newcastle, KY and Gilliard Farms in Brunswick, GA, Mary Berry will talk about new initiatives at the Berry Center, including the Our Home Place Meat project with Chef and Farmer Matthew Raiford.
Our Home Place Meat, an initiative of The Berry Center, is offering exceptional meat to customers, ensuring stable income for small family farmers through good farming practices and a cooperative culture, and continuing the legacy of Wendell Berry’s agrarian vision.