On Today's KVNF Farm Friday Ann Duncan, Family and Consumer Science Agent for the Tri River Area of CSU Extension, talks about an upcoming event in Montrose. - Homesteading the Western Slope taking place Saturday, September 21, 2024. (Pre-registration is required by September 18, 2024)
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Lisa Young: Ann, tell us a little bit about the counties that the Tri River covers?
Ann Duncan: So we cover four counties. It's called tri because there's three rivers that convene in it, which is very confusing. But we cover four counties, so Mesa, Delta, Montrose and your Ouray Counties. We really serve the whole state, but those are our primary focus on the counties that we serve.
Young: Ann I want to talk about an upcoming event. It sounds like a really neat event Homesteading the Western Slope. Go ahead and tell me a little bit about the event.
Duncan: Homesteading the Western Slope event is a lot of extension and rural living skills all packaged under one. You know, we get a lot of calls to our office asking how do I irrigate or what do I plant or I have this pest problem or how do I canned foods? Or I went up to the mountains and was trying to identify this mushroom. We had all those kinds of questions.
Back East, they have a lot of homesteading conferences and events and I realized that we didn't have anything like that in Colorado. I didn't find anything in our surrounding states even. So , I thought it was a nice way to package up these topics that people can come to a one day event, learn some rural living skills that maybe have been kind of lost over time, such as canning and learn how to use their land, whether it's their backyard or larger parcels of land to to live off of or even just like supplement their groceries. So plant a small garden, plant a big garden, whatever that looks like, just to help decrease their living costs by growing or raising things themselves a little bit.
Young: You have the home food preservation, soil composting, gardening, fermented food, mushroom foraging, orchard management, livestock, poultry and then is says, " many other topics". So it sounds like a day that is packed with a lot of learning. Where is this going to take place?
Duncan: This event will take place at the Montrose County Fairgrounds in Friendship Hall. We have two great ladies. One's coming to do sour dough, another one's doing bread and those are both hands on classes. So some of the sessions, they'll have hands on components, but some of the sessions are fully hands on, like the bread baking one, like they will be in the kitchen baking bread or working with sour dough - some fun ones like that.
There's actually a fence building one and that one has been really popular and it's a hands class and we'll be on the fairgrounds building the fence or another one is building small structures and that one will be hands on fully as well.
Young: Yeah, this really sounds interesting. A lot of hands on opportunities for people who need a little bit of help. Maybe that's something they they don't want to go to YouTube, but they'd rather go and have somebody they can talk to. I've noticed with a lot of YouTube videos, they make it look so easy but then what happens if you have a problem? You know, how do you troubleshoot? And so it sounds like this is an opportunity to do some of these things with an expert. And if you run into a problem, you can actually troubleshoot and figure out what it is you're doing right or what it is you're doing wrong.
Duncan: Yes, absolutely. Will be a lot of times for questions and answers, a wide variety of people teaching the classes, and they're all doing so just as volunteers. We have some local business folks. We have some realtors there talking about how to find a piece of property that you can actually do this kind of work on what to look for, like water rights and mineral rights and things like that. Then we have construction company doing the fence building stuff. We have people from the Colorado Department of AG teaching about soils. We have another local lady teach about worm composting. So it's kind of a variety of speakers, which I find really interesting. I haven't seen a lot of trainings where it's such a big mix like that.
Young: Yeah, it really is. What what time of the day? When does this start? I don't know that I've seen a start time. Is this just like bright and early, 6:00 in the morning when the rooster crows or what?
Duncan: Check in will start at 8:30 and then we get started closer to around nine. We do a little introduction, then we jump right into those classes and then I think we are done at four, I remember right off the top of my head,
Young: Who knows how long it'll go? It really sounds like a very, very cool event for people who just want to increase their knowledge about, you know, these different ways to do things. And also, I notice you're talking about fostering community collaboration, you know, maybe Ann you could talk a minute about how important it is for the Ag community, whether you're in big production ag or maybe if you're just and you know, you want to know what to put in your backyard, fostering that community collaboration when it comes to agricultural products and producing.
Duncan: Yeah, you know, I think that we have an opportunity here to kind of bridge. A few different populations within our community. We have some of the folks here that have been in ag for a very long time and we have folks that are very new to ag and are wanting to get started in it, even if it's just AG in their backyard. I think bringing everyone together with an event is something that hasn't necessarily been done before. And just having those face to face conversations and asking the person sitting next to you, How do you do this at your operation or do you have any suggestions for this? I think just having that sense of community and that open dialog is a great starting place to bridging that gap in our community.
Young: You know, Ann you said something earlier that I thought was interesting about homesteading in the in Western Slope, Colorado. And you mentioned how you hear more about homesteading back East. What are you hearing about that? I'm really curious about why we don't hear so much about homesteading in Colorado. Is it because of the price of land here or what do you think? The the reason is we just don't hear about it as much.
Duncan: You know, that's a great question. I'm not sure how to answer that. I and what I found through this conference, too, is homesteading means a lot of different things to people. Some people look at it as, you know, pretty extreme. They want to live off the grid. They don't want to be tied to anything. They want to raise and grow everything and have that year round and not rely on modern conveniences.
Then you have another person who will come in and ask us about homesteading that really they want to just supplement their groceries by having a backyard garden and so and raise some chickens. So to them, that is what means homesteading. So we have a wide variety of definitions of that and I'm not really sure why we don't hear more about that in Colorado. But like I said, I know back East and I even think like Illinois, like some of the some of the central states have homesteading conferences, but we just have not seen it over on the side.
Young: Yeah, I think you hear more in the Midwest. Just the term just seems to be something you hear more about. I think you really explain that. Well, that there's kind of like this continuum. You know, it could be all the way to we want to live off the land and that's it. Or I just want to know if I'm in an area that's zoned that would allow me to have chickens, you know, that type of thing. So you make a great point. Is there anything else you'd like to add to the conversation?
Duncan: You know, just invite people to come out and if they have any questions, give our office a call. It's this event will really be great for anyone from beginning, like just playing with topics or even just wanting to bake bread in their own home all the way up to people who really want to get in depth about their soil health. So I think it can apply to a lot of different people.
I would just encourage people to reach out and we're happy to discuss some of the details with them or give them more of a sense of the event. But really, it's meant to be an exciting, fun event. We don't want a sit in your chair boring presentation.
We're really going to have a lot of hands on components and interaction between participants and and, you know, the educators, whether they're peer to peer or they work for an organization, whatever it is, there's going to be a lot of interaction during that day.
For speaker spotlights and event updates please go to our Facebook page. CSU in Montrose, Mesa, Delta, Ouray - FCS
