Gearing Up for the OEFFA Conference

I see by the calender on the wall that the OEFFA conference is less than 2 weeks away. Eugene and I will be doing our Pastured Poultry Workshop at 2:15 Saturday Afternoon.

True to my nature I have been procrastinating on putting together an informative handout for the workshop but I feel the handout muses getting close and this will likely be done and 45 copies printed out by Monday.

There is a lot to cover in less than 40 minutes (the workshops are about 60 minutes but you must leave ample time for questions and the Q&A part is often the best part of the workshop). We will do an overview of what we do and than discuss things like what are the pros and cons of various breeds for pasturing chicken for meat, feed, keeping the birds cool in hot weather, etc.. I'd write out the whole thing but as I mentioned the workshop handout muses are near but not yet here.

Eugene thinks we should just go in cold and wing it. Silly boy, doing that usually makes for a bad workshop. You got to at least write up an outline to keep your talk on track, even if you are not going to make handouts for the attendees. I have done enough lectures and workshops in my life to know better than to go in cold, no matter how well you know the material. What usually happens to a person doing this sort of thing unprepared is they will get knocked off track early on by a question from the audience. the question may be an excellent one but I have found without a map of what you intend to do one questions leads to another and another and suddenly that pastured poultry workshop has become a hoophouse lecture. Interesting to be sure but not what the folks paid their money to see.

Fortunately for Eugene I am a good writer and I love to write handoutty sorts of things so he does not need to do anything other than familiarize himself with the order of go before we are in front of an audience. Oh, and put a chicken tractor in the van and than when we get to the High School in Granville haul it to the room we will be doing our gig in.

I'm getting pretty excited about doing this conference. It's been years since I have been in a building with several hundred other organic foodies and farmers. I am looking forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones