The 4th of June the Department of Crop Production Ecology will launch a new concept for scientific seminars about crop production. The seminars are designed to attract a wide audience and stimulate scientific discussions at SLU. External participants are most welcome. The first seminar focuses on concepts for sustainable agriculture that we often hear but rarely know exactly what they mean. What are their common principles and practices? In what ways do they differ?
“It´s a big mess of technical terms. Organic farming, regenerative agriculture, agroecology, conservation farming, biodynamic agriculture. We will disentangle these concepts and find similarities between them”, says Alexander Menegat, who together with Dimitrije Markovic have planned for the new seminar series at the department of Crop Production Ecology.
The title of the first seminar is: Concepts and misconceptions of sustainable farming systems - The principles and practices behind organic farming, agroecology and regenerative agriculture.
Three guests
The department has invited three speakers, two of them from SLU (and the department of Crop Production Ecology).
Marcos Lana will focus on agroecology where one important principle is that farming systems shall be based on ecological processes. Maria Wivstad, from SLU Centre for Organic Food and Farming (Epok) will talk about Organic farming, conservation agriculture and agroecology. The third guest is Yichao Rui from the Rodale Institute, USA. Yichao will talk about principles and practices in regenerative farming and their effect on biodiversity, soil health, ecosystem services as well as the social and economic implications.
On zoom
This first seminar will take place on Zoom. Once covid-19 restrictions are lifted, the seminars will take place in at Ecology Centre; guest speakers and participants will have the possibility to join via an on-line platform. At least one of the guest speakers will be external – from another university or another department at SLU.
“Earlier we have had more specific seminars within a narrow field. Now we wanted to address a broad audience and provide a platform for scientific debates. There are a lot of things within agricultural research that need to be discussed. We hope that this concept can lead to better research”, says Alexander Menegat.
The seminar begins at 13:00 4 June. Each guest will give a 10-minutes presentation. Then there will be a discussion between guests and other participants.
The seminars are planned to be held once a month – you´ll find them in the SLU Calendar. Please contact the organizers if you have ideas or want to contribute in other ways.
See you 4th of June 13:00, more information in the Calendar
