Tri-State Locally Grown Conference

The Tri-State Locally Grown Conference is designed for farmers, consumers, chefs, retailers, educators and others who are interested in building and supporting a sustainable local food system. Experts from Illinois, Iowa, Missouri and beyond will share their research and experiences in local food system work.

Displays on marketing tools, local food system work and interesting topics will be available throughout the day. Lunch will be prepared by Chef Michael Mitchell of Busy Bistro and will highlight local foods.

The conference will be held on Thursday, November 29, 2007 from 9 am- 4 pm at John Wood Community College in Quincy, IL.

Click here for a pdf of the brochure
Click here to register online

Keynote speakers:
Rich Pirog from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State Universityhas been Program Leader for the Center's Marketing and Food SystemsInitiative since 2001, and became Associate Director in February 2007. Pirog directsthe Value Chain Partnerships for a Sustainable Agriculture (VCPSA) project,a multi-organizational effort that provides technical assistance to farmer-led food,fiber, and energy businesses.Pirog's work on food miles, ecolabels, and place-based foods has been publicizedin magazines and media outlets across the globe and is often cited in collegecourses that focus on food systems and sustainable agriculture.

Alisa Smith Co-author of Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year ofEating Locally is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in Reader’s Digest,Outside, Utne Reader, and many other publications. Based in Vancouver, shespends her summers in a wilderness cabin in northern British Columbia.

J.B. MacKinnon Co-author of Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Yearof Eating Locally is the author of the acclaimed Dead Man in Paradise, which wonthe 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction. He is the winner of three nationalmagazine awards as a freelance writer, and is a former senior editor at Adbusters.He lives with his co-author in Vancouver.

Also, check out the Locally Grown Blog site!