Curated Journey - Extension Agent

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Farmers not only need technical assistance on how to grow more sustainably but also how to respond more quickly to the demands of an increasingly knowledgeable public.

Farmers looking for price premiums for what they grow are exploring all sorts of new approaches. The Lexicon partnered with USDA on Growing Organic, a farmer-driven initiative that provides pathways for transitioning to organic certification. The Lexicon also assembled a community of experts to develop a place-based model for regenerative agriculture as well.

As farmers and ranchers adopt new principles and practices, they often need to technical assistance to understand the outcomes generated by their work. The Ecological Benefit Framework (EBF) has emerged as a concise way to talk about these positive impacts.

Other Lexicon of Food initiatives for farmers and ranchers include MEAT OS, which provides a model for developing Cooperative Regional Supply Chains for meat, and Toppling Goliath, which shows how communities rise up in support of a pesticide free future. Finally, Lexicon of Food offers the ALBA story, which shows how traditional farm workers in California’s Salinas Valley are trained to become organic farmers.

The United States imports more certified organic food than it exports. How can conventional farmers be assisted in their transition to organic practices?

To promote a better understanding of the economic, environmental, and social advantages of organic agriculture, the USDA’s Nature Resources Conservation Service partnered with The Lexicon to develop Growing Organic.
Expert farmers across 30+ states offered their insights and experiences which have become short films, artworks, books, and exhibits designed to expedite the transition to organic agriculture.

As the demand for food grown using regenerative practices increases, how will farmers find the necessary guidance and support?

The Lexicon gathered hundreds of experts across the regenerative agriculture value chain—from farmers to ranchers, wholesale distributors to grocers, and even non-profits working to grow the next generation of farmers.
This collection of experts offer valuable insights about the complex challenges facing any community that wants to support greater accountability, resourcefulness, and sustainability in the way food is grown.

Regenerative agriculture. Agroecology. Nature-positive solutions. Permaculture. Organics. Each offers a set of principles and practices (till or don’t till, spray weeds or don’t spray weeds, irrigate or don’t). But what do they say about outcomes?

While their practices may differ, the Ecological Benefits Framework (EFB) offers a standardized approach for talking about the outcomes (and impacts) of farming, which ironically is what we should care about most.

Food moves through supply chains that are mostly blind. As a result, purchasers have scant visibility into who grows our food, the practices they use, or the communities they support. How can we cure the blindness in supply chains?

Lexicon of Food’s Connected Markets tools help everyone across the value chain—even technical assistance providers—better understand what questions purchasers want answered to more sustainability in the animal proteins sector.

What happened when a village in the Italian Alps decided to stop the use of pesticides in their community?

In the past thirty years, climate change has completely transformed Südtirol, a German-speaking South Tyrollean province in Northern Italy. Once known for its agricultural diversity, today the region is dominated by a single monoculture: apples. One out of seven apples grown in Europe comes from here.
With conventional apples, come pesticides, and with pesticides came a community’s battle to ban these harmful chemicals.

Standing on a 100-acre organic farm in the heart of California’s Salinas Valley, ALBA has become a model for bringing about equity and sustainability in agriculture.

Their innovative program helps establish medium-scale, organic family farm businesses, over 90% of which are owned and operated by BIPOC farmers. In contrast, less than 20% of a declining number of American farms are medium-scale, just 7% of farms are minority-owned and under 2% are organic.

READY TO START YOUR CURATED JOURNEY?

I. To begin, click on the blue button below.

II. This will bring you to the first of six pages in your journey. At the bottom of each page, you will discover a blue capsule with the words EXTENSION AGENT CURATED JOURNEY.

Continue your

Learn more about Curated Journeys here.

III. Clicking on this button will take you to the next page in your journey. Visiting all six pages can be as short as five minutes, or as long as your explorations take you!