7pgs, Liberating Structures (LS) provide a user-friendly toolkit to shift group power dynamics and allow all stakeholders to contribute. We explored the novel use of LS in soil health extension to conduct high-engagement events with diverse stakeholders. Our goals were to promote social learning, networking, and to encourage innovation. Soil health themes emerged highlighting specific practices, and the necessity of addressing broader scope issues of education, economics, and policy. Participants reported increased knowledge of soil health, professional connections, and forecasted participation in soil-health-promoting activities. Participants also expressed a sense of community, expanded perspectives, and appreciation of the co-development process.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 166 Document Number: D11691
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2 pages., Online from website of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Paris, France., Description of the UNESCO Horizontes Program, through which young people from some rural schools in Peru learn to grow vegetables in their homes and farms. Youths work with their families, using audios and texts provided to them. Through the program, they can "implement their life projects and dedicate themselves to activities linked to the development of their communities inside or outside their locality without losing their identity."
17 pages, A significant effect of industrial capitalism on the modern Western world is the generation and perpetuation of a physical and discursive distancing between people and food – a result of what Marx termed the metabolic rift. Studies of alienated relationships often homogenize the rift experience. This paper explores how rural Ontario dairy farmers experience what John Bellamy Foster calls ‘metabolism’ and their perceptions of the alienated states of non-farmers. Results from on-farm semi-structured interviews suggest these farmers are aware of a distancing between non-farmers and food (milk) that is a different experience than that of farmers. Such perception of milk alienation involving an external group – or what I term third-party alienation – is accompanied by farmer-initiated interventions, such as on-farm educational visits and educational programmes, attempting to mend non-farmers rift experience. Third-party alienation exemplifies the ways in which metabolism can be diversely embodied – and possibly mended – within current human–food, and human–nature, relationships.
