How We Come Together for a More Diverse Midwest Ag Landscape
Green Lands Blue Waters CLC Conference 2025
April 7th-9th, 2025
Pyle Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Green Lands Blue Waters is excited to bring our community of continuous living cover (CLC) agricultural enthusiasts together again! Join other ag practitioners in a peer-rich environment with timely educational opportunities, lively dialogue, and open networking time. The conference is intentionally designed to balance information delivery with engaged working time and peer connections across a diverse, multi-sector mix of researchers, technical service providers, students, farmers, and advocates committed to actualizing CLC on the Midwest landscape. Our intention is to gather to support one another in cooperation, possibility, and positivity.
SCHEDULE –
Monday, April 7: optional courses and meetings, 1pm to ~5pm, followed by an opening reception
Tuesday, April 8: 8am to 6pm, breakfast and lunch provided
Wednesday, April 9: 8am to 1pm, breakfast and lunch provided
AGENDA – We are building an agenda with sessions related to:
- Coalitions and networks
- Diverse ways of knowing
- Markets and value chains
- Next generation farmers, researchers and ag practitioners
- Policy approaches
- Research updates and future directions
- Technical assistance
- Transdisciplinarity, cross-sector approaches and systems thinking
… and through grounded examples of successes and opportunities with CLC practices like agroforestry and silvopasture; perennial grains, forages and biomass; living cover through cover crops and diverse annual rotations.
Additional agenda details coming ASAP.
MONDAY EVENING OPENING RECEPTION!
We are excited to invite all attendees to join us at the Goodman Community Center in Madison on Monday evening for an opening reception and “Re-Rooting Kinship and Oneness” exhibition. The exhibition, co-organized by Green Lands Blue Waters and Dr. Akilah Martin of AM Root Builders, centers around the question, What can we learn from the soil about our fundamental interconnectedness? We invite artists, collaborators, and conference participants to explore that question along with others. The interactive, immersive exhibition will provide pathways for participants to individually and collectively experience multiple levels of soil via planetary thinking, healing modalities, sensory engagement, and a deepened connection rooted in noticing soil.
WHO WILL BE THERE?
Here are some of the partners rolling up sleeves and bringing their expertise and perspectives to session designs:
- AM Root Builders
- Agroforestry Coalition
- Artisan Grain Collaborative
- Climate Land Leaders
- Diverse Corn Belt
- Food Finance Institute
- Friends of the Mississippi River
- Grassland 2.0
- Iowa State University, Department of Agronomy
- KernzaCAP
- Native Governance Center
- Practical Farmers of Iowa
- Purdue University, Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture
- RegenPGC
- Renewing the Countryside
- Resilience CAP
- Savanna Institute
- State Innovation Exchange
- University of Missouri, Center for Agroforestry
- University of Minnesota, Department of Agronomy and Plant Genetics, Forever Green, MN Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, Department of Soil, Water, and Climate
- University of Wisconsin-Madison – Division of Extension, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, Department of Plant & Agroecosystem Sciences
- Wallace Center
Look for other ag colleagues at the Pyle Center! The UW Organic Collaborative’s Harvest of Ideas will be there April 8 & 9. We encourage you to meet others on Tuesday night, 7-9p, at a joint-conference informal Gathering at Camp Trippalindee.
SPONSORS! We thank you!
And the list is growing. Want to be included? See sponsorship information below.
