The Radical Root Farm is a small family farm located in Libertyville, Illinois north of Chicago. Radical Root Farm has a unique story because they got started by graduating from the Farm Business Development Center at the Prairie Crossing Farm and the Liberty Prairie Foundation.

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Buggy Road Farm is a microfarm specializing in duck eggs, asparagus, plant starts and microgreens. They use growing methods in line with their ethics: No chemical sprays, pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, antibiotics, hormones, or cages.

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Ryan Pesch is the extension agent for the University of Minnesota as well as a husband and father of 3 children and owner of Lida Farm. Ryan shares his extensive knowledge after over a decade of farming organically and providing produce for multiple Farmer’s Markets, CSA shares and building community. This year he even added a new passive solar greenhouse which he describes how to build in detail. He shares great resources, expert advice and first hand knowledge of how to succeed on a small farm. See Full Show notes at www.organicgardenerpodcast.com

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I connected with Neva at the AERO Expo after hearing the EVST students sing her praises! Neva brought the EVST (environmental studies) students from the University of MT who are more of the amazing millennials who are making positive changes in our world today.

Many of which are part of the Food Corps program.

From the UMT EVST Sustainable Agriculture Emphasis home page: "The study of food systems lends itself beautifully to true interdisciplinary learning and problem solving. It also has the capacity to profoundly connect us with nature and the place we live. Students will discover our food system's complexity and vulnerability, and they will be able to ask informed questions. Students often learn a lot about the serious environmental problems confronting society, but they hunger for the opportunity to do something about it, something tangible and real. Accordingly, the Sustainable Food and Farming emphasis will give them the tools to do so. Educated, our graduates will be more to able to exercise the privileges of citizenship, more able to care.

Our vision is to provide students at the graduate and undergraduate level with the opportunity for (1) intensive interdisciplinary study of our food system; (2) hands-on experience growing organic food for low-income people on an urban farm; (3) community-based action research; and (4) active civic engagement."

Tell us a little about yourself.

AERO MT (Alternative Energy Resources Organization) one of the groups in Montana working to promote sustainable agriculture and food systems and communities. So it was a pleasure to be there this year and enjoy the company of people from across the state who are thinking about how to build a more resilient and sustainable future. My work has encompassed a variety of things including, I lead up our emphasis on sustainable food and farming which we really developed about 12-13 years ago and it has become very popular aspect of our program.

Do you want to tell us, I told listeners, I didn't know, when I went to school in 1988 that there was an environmental studies major, I didn't know what an environmental activist was do you want to tell listeners what an environmental studies (EVST) major is and what they would study?

We have a program at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. Environmental studies basically tries to take an interdisciplinary disciplinary look at environmental problems. We’re basically convinced environmental problems are not going to be solved with narrow technical solution, or at least in very few cases will that happen,  instead environmental problems encompass economical. social, economic, political, the arts, and humanities, a whole variety of perspectives need to be brought to bear in order to solve our environmental problems.

We require our students to take courses in the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities and they go a little deeper in particular areas that interest them. For instance, a lot of my students are working on food and agriculture, they look at it from a whole host of directions.

Some are very interested in farming, they look at very practical hands on topics, others are interested in agriculture,  more generally, for instance how farmers are adapting to drought and climate change. They also end up looking at the other end of the food system, where is our food going?

Here in Montana, we have a well developed farm-2-school program, I recently had a students who studied the impact of those programs on Montana. So our students pursue a whole range of topics. We as professors see our job as seeing help students identify their interests and then supporting them in pursuing what they want to do in a variety of ways. That's the basic philosophy of our program, we incorporate both traditional academics as well as hands-on learning or experientially learning, because we know that especially as adults,

93. Dayna Reggero | Climate Listening Project | NY, NY Dayna is another guest I met at the AERO Expo in Great Falls this past fall. Dayna is the creator and  producer of the Climate Listening Project.  You can read about Dayna’s trip to Montana at her blog and see the beautiful and informative clip on Resilient Agriculture she worked on with Dr. Laura Lengnick. One…

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