Food & Farming
February 6 – March 27, 2025
Thursdays: 12 noon -or- 7 pm ET
Course Description
Food & Farming is an eight week online course (Feb 6 – Mar 27) that explores the impact of farming on our water, our wildlife, our climate, our health and our economy.
Unfortunately, much of the impact of farming today has been detrimental to our climate, our water and our wildlife. The purpose of Food & Farming is to explore how this works and talk about how we can make changes in our role as citizens and consumers, and also in our home landscapes.
We will study the Five Principles of Soil Health, as set forth by North Dakota rancher Gabe Brown, in Dirt to Soil: One Family’s Journey Into Regenerative Agriculture. We will learn the DO’s and DON’Ts of building healthy, carbon-rich soil. This will help us be better gardeners, shoppers and citizens.
Our farms could be carbon sinks, absorbing massive amounts of excess carbon dioxide. Instead, most farms emit carbon. Our farms could be water-rich oases of biological diversity preventing both flooding and drought. Instead, many contribute to both flooding and drought.
And only good soil is capable of delivering nutrients to our food efficiently and consistently. We will study how nutrients flow from our soil to our bodies, via plants and animals.
We will visit regenerative farmers such as Bryan and Anita O’Hara of Tobacco Road Farm in Connecticut and Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser of Singing Frogs Farm in California. And we will explore the world of Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Georgia and Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia.
What are these people doing, and why should we value it? How does it work? How can we apply the principles of soil health in our own gardens and home landscapes?
Finally, we will compare regenerative agriculture with organic agriculture, take a close look at how legislation impacts farming practices, and also how climate change is affecting our food supply.
Food & Farming reimagines our relationship with our land. No single industry impacts our world more than farming. And we can change our world decisively by how we connect with our land.
Format
- Online via Zoom for 8 weeks
- Thursdays at 12:00-1:30 PM -or- 7:00-8:30 PM (Eastern Time, US)
- February 6 – March 27, 2025
- Recordings available to students
- In between classes, connect with the instructor and other students via an exclusive email group
To register, click the button below:
Your Instructor
Hart Hagan is an educator, a native plant expert, and an environmental reporter who has produced nearly 400 radio shows and over 250 videos since 2018. He is the founder of Water & Climate, a Facebook group with over 4,500 members. Six years as a climate reporter has led him to focus on the value of ecosystems and water cycles as a key driver of climate, and the primary means of curbing extinction and providing habitat for our fellow species.
Hart has also studied marketing and communications extensively and currently trains environmentalists and climate activists in a program he calls Practice Your Pitch.
Hart is passionate about educating people that in order to understand flooding, drought, heatwaves and wildfires, we must look beyond CO2 and examine how we treat our land. He is an avid gardener with a focus on native wildflowers and creating landscapes that capture all the rainfall.
To review and subscribe to Hart’s important work, visit his:
YouTube Channel: @harthagan23
Blog on Substack: harthagan.substack.com
Facebook Group: Water & Climate
Whether this is your first course or your tenth course, please join us if you are curious about nature and its power to restore the soil and other ecosystems to abundance. Everyone has much to learn and share, and there is much to be done. We are all on a journey of expanding our knowledge on nature’s climate solutions, and we each bring something valuable to the conversation.
If you have any registration or general course questions, email us at staff@bio4climate.org. If you have specific questions about the course for Hart Hagan, you can contact him at nhhagan@gmail.com.