Join us as Rand Burkert discusses the work of the Food Forest Initiative of Cape Cod, a non-hierarchical eco-action group. Since 2016, FFI has planted and tended public food forests, inspired by the vision of permaculture and its outgrowth, Restoration Agriculture. Rand will give practical knowledge to enable home gardeners to apply these approaches. He will also present the global scope of the method and its usefulness in mitigating climate change and building local food security, with some discussion of its application in Africa.
In addition to being a founding member of the Food Forest Initiative of Cape Cod, Rand is a folksinger, a children’s author, and a middle school teacher of applied ecology at Nauset Middle School. In the 1990s, he and his friend Mark Shepard helped launch New Forest Farm in Wisconsin, an early large-scale permaculture project that later became known as Restoration Agriculture and was documented in Shepard’s book of the same name. After a period of farming in Italy, Rand returned to Cape Cod and, with friends, founded the eco-action and food sovereignty group Food Forest Initiative of Cape Cod.
