Ask an Agroforester
Our Ask An Agroforester webinar series will continue this fall. Make sure you get notified when the new schedule comes out!
Appalachian Sustainable Development’s “Ask an Agroforester” Webinar Series is back for 2024! This monthly series is an opportunity for us to come together for a deep dive into detailed information about specific Agroforestry topics. Bring your questions for our regional Agroforestry heroes.
All webinars are from 6:30 PM – 8:00PM EST unless otherwise noted.
Registration is live for our first webinar for the year! See below for details and to register, and check back often because we’ll be adding the full schedule with registration links very soon!
New to Agroforestry? Visit ASD’s Agroforestry page to learn more.
Sign up to learn more about the Ask and Agroforester webinar series.
Webinar Schedule
January 25: Funding Edition
February 28, 2024: Duron Chavis
March 27, 2024: Adam Taylor
Are you wondering how to manage complex Agroforestry systems like Silvopasture and Alley Cropping? Join us and learn from a pro! Adam Taylor manages Virginia Tech’s Catawba Sustainability Center farm, which implements all kinds of Agroforestry projects and practices. If you’re a farmer or land manager – this one’s for you!
April 25, 2024: Dana Beegle and Ryan Huish
Mark your calendar for Thursday, April 25th at 6:30. We’ve got a great panel for you, all about Youth Engagement in Agroforestry. Dana Beegle and Ryan Huish are joining us for a deep discussion about how to get young people involved and keep them coming back for more. If you’re working with youth, you won’t want to miss it!
Dana Beegle is a mother, educator, and practicing agroforester from Floyd County, Virginia. She owns and operates Stone Root Farm with her husband and children where they specialize in silvopasture-raised beef and forest farmed shiitake mushrooms and ramps. She has a master’s degree in Agroforestry from Virginia Tech, where she developed the Tree Selection Guide for Mid-Atlantic Silvopastures. Dana is also a former high school teacher and passionate about educating the next generation of agroforesters. She has worked with local high school agriculture programs and student groups at Virginia Tech to create hands-on, agroforestry-based service learning opportunities on her farm.
Ryan Huish is an ethnobotanist and associate professor of biology at The University of Virginia’s College at Wise, deep in the Appalachians of far southwest Virginia. With a background in botany and sociocultural anthropology, his research interests incorporate an interdisciplinary approach to address basic and applied questions in ethnobotany, ecology, plant conservation, and the preservation of biocultural knowledge. Some of his research topics include Appalachian ethnobotany, native food plants, and forest farming of medicinal/edible plants. He and his family are stewards of Appalachian Cove Forest Farm and Homestead where they practice and demonstrate various agroforestry principles, including silvopasture, alley cropping, forest farming, multifunctional riparian buffer zones, and native plant agriculture.
May 29, 2024: Land Access for Agroforestry
Our next Ask an Agroforester session will dive into Land Access for Agroforestry. Join us for a live panel with Ebonie Alexander of the Black Family Land Trust, and Zev Friedman of Cooperate WNC. We’ll be discussing land access, historic precedent, equitable models, mutual aid and more! You don’t want to miss it!
Ebonie Alexander is the Executive Director of the Black Family Land Trust, Inc. (BFLT). The BFLT is a niche land trust and one of the nation’s only regional land trusts dedicated to the preservation and protection of African-American and other historically underserved landowners’ land assets. Since joining the BFLT in 2009, Ebonie designed and implemented the African American Land Ethic and Wealth Retention and Asset Protection (WRAP) programs. Together these two programs have assisted landowners to retain family ownership and control of more than $12.5 million of their land assets and deployed more than $500,000 USDA-EQIP funding to landowners during the past five years. Ebonie currently serves on boards of the American Farmland Trust, the Sustainable Forestry Initiative, the North Farm Stewardship Association and is an advisory group member of our SARE Agroforestry Regional Knowledge Exchange Project. A native of Maryland, Ebonie lives in rural Virginia on land that has been in her family for generations. She is a proud Virginian, avid reader and lover of history and grandmother of two. Ebonie can trace her family’s history in Virginia to the mid-1730’s.
Zev has lived and worked since 2006 as a grassroots agroecology researcher and educator in southern Appalachia. He grew up in a patch of kudzu in Sylva, NC, received his B.S. in Human Ecology from the University of North Carolina Asheville in 2004, and has lived at Earthaven Ecovillage since 2012. Zev specializes in hands-on, transformational education in Permaculture and focuses on residential and community-based professional design and installation throughout Western North Carolina. Since founding Cooperate WNC (www.cooperatewnc.org), his main focus is now as Director of this regional mutual aid network that’s harnessing the power of cooperation to meet human needs and address our most pressing ecological and social challenges. Almost a decade of study with indigenous teacher Martín Prechtel was formative for Zev’s vision of how we might collectively regrow our own diverse indigenous lifeways through a combination of somatic healing, collectivism, and agroecological learning.
On This Page