NOFA-VT's 2024 Winter Conference: Opening remarks and Keynote with Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin

At the 42nd Annual NOFA-VT Winter Conference, hosted at the University of Vermont in February of 2024, we gathered for a day of deep learning, shifting our attention upstream to address food system issues at their source. This clip shows NOFA-VT's Executive Director, Grace Oedel, delivering opening remarks, followed by a keynote meditation by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin.

The opening meditation focused on what is possible when, together, we shift our attention to the source of our current food system’s failures, calling us to reframe the narrative of communities struggling for food sovereignty as an opportunity for an intellectual insurgency centered on rethinking the concepts of ownership, control, and governance in agriculture. This provided a call to action: a roadmap to mobilize our resources – land, people, networks, supply chain infrastructure, capital, and knowledge – in order to center those who produce, distribute, and consume food. The conventional narrative tells us that we need the existing system to feed the world. However, this approach is effectively destroying the ecological, community, and economic foundations on which we depend to sustainably feed the world. It is time to take back the narrative and organize for impact upstream.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin has spent a lifetime working toward transformative food systems change. He began his work in his native Guatemala, collaborating on economic development projects with Indigenous communities while serving as a United Nations consultant and advisor to the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. After moving to the US, he continued his support of responsible, land-based economic development by helping launch several food and land-centric social enterprises and co-founding the Fair Trade Federation. Today he is one of the foremost leaders and innovators on climate-smart, scalable agriculture. He is the founder and former Executive Director of the Regenerative Agriculture Alliance, a nonprofit working on a scalable, systems-level regenerative poultry solution. He now lives in Northfield, MN, as the co-founder and CEO of Tree-Range Farms, an aggregator, marketer, and distributor of regenerative poultry products.