This past Friday, Stephen and I attended the Future-Harvest Chesapeake Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture (FH-CASA) Annual Conference held in College Park, Maryland. We love FH-CASA and the amazing work they do, and we were so happy to be able to attend the conference again this year!
Because of the forecast of snow, and because we had decided to bring our children with us to the conference, we also decided to stay over night in the hotel where the conference was being held. We knew it would be hard to get the children up and ready to go early enough to make it to the opening session at 8:30 am, so we made the decision to pay a young neighbor to do morning chores and watch the farm for the day.
And so we left Thursday evening to head to the big city! The drive was mostly uneventful, and we got some good reading in for our homeschool art history class. The excitement began when we arrived at the hotel.
When we made it out of the parking garage into the hotel, we had to go down the escalators to the main lobby to find the proper elevator to go back up to our room (turns out, we could have skipped the escalator and gone straight to the elevator, but then the hilarious part would have been missed).
We were all carrying luggage and backpacks, and I was also holding the one-year-old. Even Isidore was carrying a bag or two. And it turns out he has never seen an escalator before and we should have prepped him a bit! Don’t worry, no one was hurt!
As our not-quite-4-year-old stepped onto the escalator next to me, his eyes widened and he simply laid down! I quickly stepped back up a step or two and grabbed his arm, pulling him up to a standing position, and we carried on. Once we got off the escalator, I could not stop laughing! The image of that little boy just kept coming back into my mind and it was so hilariously ridiculous! This little farm boy can handle ANYTHING that comes his way! But, he had never seen an escalator before and it just caught him off guard!
Whenever us country people go to the city, we try to look like we fit in, but this was just not possible in this situation! And that really struck my funny bone! I am sure that this will not be as funny to read as it was in person, unfortunately!
On Friday, the children all mastered riding the escalator, and we even used it as a bit of entertainment when energy was high from children being bored at a conference!
In addition to learning to ride an escalator, we learned many more things–things that are more relevant to farming! Here is a list of the sessions Stephen and I attended, which will give you an idea of some of what we learned:
- “On-Farm Composting & Compost Use in Maryland”
- “My Best CSA Marketing Strategy”
- “Leveraging Online Sales for Collaboration and Profitability”
- “Building Your Fertility Plan: Soil Health, Fertigation, and Foliar Feeding”
- “Four Season Carrot Production”
- “Profitable Meat Marketing”
- “The How, What, Why, When, and Where for Grazing Cover Crops”
- “Serving Small Farmers” Maryland Department of Agriculture”
We learned SOOOOO much at the conference and we are excited to start using what we learned as we enter our seventh CSA season! It was also so wonderful to see some farmer friends that we haven’t seen in years!
We are super grateful for all the educational opportunities that FH-CASA has provided us with in our farming journey–they are a great resource for anyone who farms or who wants to be a farmer!
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