The organic association of kentucky's (OAK) overarchinggoalof the 2024CONFERENCEADVANCING organics in kentucky: adopting practices, increasing resilience and strengthening systemsis to promote organic…

The organic association of kentucky's (OAK) overarchinggoalof the 2024CONFERENCEADVANCING organics in kentucky: adopting practices, increasing resilience and strengthening systemsis to promote organic production as a changemaking system backed by research and on-farm evidence. The conference will engage an estimated 450 farmers, researcher and agricultureal professionals. The three day organic farmingconference will be rooted in the idea that increasing the understanding, adoption and continual improvement of organic solutions as mainstream practices will make organic farming systems productive, profitable and accessible in kentucky and across the region.broadly speaking, there is a critical need for investment in organic agriculture education, training and resrouce sharingin kentucky and the southeast region. Dominant narratives in education, technical assistance and research in regional agriculture continue to default to conventional farming systems, constricting access to organicknowledge and systems based decision-making modles that could improve the productivity, profitability and resilience of farms. OAK'sconference will bolster the capacity of regional farmers aligned with organic standards to transition operations to organic certification, improve and scale current organic production, access current and emerging markets opportunities, identify production and market challenges to growth and connect farmers who can serve as peer mentors to other farmers to advance the organic industry in the region. The project activities will include in-person pre-conference workshops as well as conference sessionsacross four tracks, allowing participants to choose programming relevant to their farms or careers.roundtable discussions will be integrated into conference programming to capture feedback from producers on bottlenecks, challenges and desired research.in-person networkingwill facilitate farmer-to-farmer mentoring and increase connectivity between producers, researchers, cooperative extension and agricultural practitioners.presenters will be encouraged to incorporate demonstrations and adult learning strategies best practices to ensure content is relatable, engages positive emotions, offers choice, shares mental models and supports opportunities for application.collaborating researchers will package findings of the conference's farmer roundtable and subsequent surveys of farmer segments into awhite paper and potential publication, providing a synthisis onproduction bottlenecks and barriers and will be used to make recommendations to researchers and farmer-support organizations.project impacts will include improved knowledge about organic farming practices and new technologies and tools to implement on farms resulting in theadoption OG management skills toimproved plant, soiland animal health. Additionally, participants will have an increased fwareness of and connection to the broader network of organic stakeholders in the region. Long-TER, m impacts include changes to farming conditions that include increased farm productivity, resilience and revenuefromusing organic practices.