SFA Soil Health Conference

Earlier this week Jaron, my dad, and I went to a two day soil health conference.

As you can see, Jaron was riveted by the speakers. Or maybe that was his food...

I packed a ton of snack, books, and toys to keep him occupied for the two days of listening to speakers. That plus my handy baby carrier for naps kept him occupied. 

Oh, and Boppa too. 😅

A few speakers focused on the importance of cover crops. 

I'd like to improve our pasture for better grazing, so some of the information was relevant to Havenacre. 

A different breakout session discussed pasture pigs, something we'd like to do at some point. Probably not on this homestead, but you never know! 

The coolest part of the conference was hearing Temple Grandin- famous for redesigning animal working facilities to be more humane for the animals. Not only was she one of the first women involved in this industry, she's also autistic. 

The first night of the conference they had a book signing followed by a screening of a new documentary about her followed by a Q&A with her and the movie producer. Unfortunately, the signing started at 7pm, movie at 8pm, and went to 9:30pm. Fortunately, Jaron was pretty happy and handled the late night okay. Unfortunately, he stayed awake the entire time. Too many cows in the documentary. 😂 He even stayed awake for the Q&A afterwards!

It's fascinating to listen to Dr. Grandin. She's very straightforward and refreshingly blunt, loud and passionate about her topic. Also not afraid to share her phone number; she announced it to the whole conference audience at the end of her last speech. Don't ask me for it; I didn't have any paper handy to write it down. 😅 She shares some of her facility designs in her books and for free on her website: https://www.grandin.com/.

One thing that annoyed me after her first presentation at the conference was that the people who raised their hands to ask questions didn't actually have a question. 🙄 Seriously guys! (Actually, they were all women).

Almost all of them led with something along the lines of, "thank you for being here, I so appreciate your work, it's been impactful in my life because..."  If they did have a question, they gave waaaay too much background information leading up to the question so that Temple got sidetracked, went off on a tangent, and they never had a chance to ask their original question. You'd think people would learn and just get to the point, haha. 

It was pretty tough keeping Jaron entertained both days. He's going through his terodactyl phase and screams at the drop of a hat, so I had to step out of the room a few times to not disrupt the speakers any more than we had already done. Thankfully, people were gracious and we had a lot of good interactions with people who clearly loved having a baby around. 

Will we go to the conference again next year? Time will tell!