Free online farm conference in English “Launching Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) in Ukraine” will be organized on February 27th by the NGO “Permaculture in Ukraine” in collaboration with the “Visegrad and Beyond Permaculture Partnership”, The Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF) e.V., The Department of Agriculture, South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences, and German CSA network SOLAWI.
We invite CSA farmers and customer groups to share their experience with their colleagues from Ukraine. During the conference we would like to discuss main aspects of CSA, such as launching a network, economic, regulatory, agroecology aspects, as well as multiple dimensions of CSA. Regional CSA initiatives will be created in Ukraine, and international peer support groups will be established for vegetable producers, horticulturists, and animal farmers.
More information on the conference web-page. See also Facebook event and the link to the registration form.
Within the project the European Handbook on Community-Supported Agriculture will be translated into Ukrainian to provide the first guideline for Ukrainian CSA farmers and customers.
In addition, polyculture schemes for vegetables and leafy greens will be developed for temperate climate based on a survey of CSA farmers and review of research and professional literature. Previously we have summarized main principles of designing crop polycultures in video lectures developed for growers and for the university students. We are developing an integrated approach for designing crop polycultures based on optimizing diversity of crop traits and on multifunctional (of permaculture) system optimization based in crop integration within farm functional zones, management requirements, similar processing, resource needs and growth characteristics. We invite growers, researchers and extension specialists (designers) to participate in our survey and to follow project updates on Facebook project page Polycultures and Permaculture and on web-page.
The project is supported by the Michael Succow Foundation and German-Ukrainian Cooperation in Organic Agriculture
