Hometown: Cincinnati, OH
Major: Biological Engineering
Favorite LC event: Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) conference

My name is Nathan Horstman, and I’m currently a first year biological engineering major. I was originally majoring in environmental science, but switched once I realized that I could incorporate the study of biology into a degree that would allow me to develop more sustainable technologies. This was of a particular importance to me because I am very interested in where our food comes from and the sustainable, or in most cases unsustainable, farming practices that most American farmers use. This lead me to the SUSTAINS learning community, and the chance to attend this year’s Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA) conference.

This was an extremely cool experience for me because of my interest in sustainable and organic farming, something that is at the heart of the OEFFA, and one of the big topics of the conference. Having never been to anything like this, the amount of topics I could explore astonished me. There were four workshop sessions for the day we went, (the conference was over a saturday and sunday, we went on saturday) and each session had as many as ten workshops to choose from. They ranged in topics from a lecture on the basics of raising bison, how to eat locally grown food year around, and everything in between. The day closed with a keynote speech about shaping the future of our food system by agriculture journalist Alan Guebert, author of the column Farm and Food File, and the soon to be published book, The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey: Memories From the Farm of my Youth. He analyzed how farming has evolved in the past 50 years and how it will continue evolving in the coming 25 years, hopefully into a more sustainable and environmentally friendly practice. The entire conference was extremely interesting, and I am so happy that I had this opportunity through SUSTAINS.