RISON - Gardening, herbal folk remedies, tanning animal hides, hydroponics and worm farming are among the topics that will be presented at the Arkansas Homesteading Conference to be held this Saturday, March 25, at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds in Rison.
Gates open at 8:30 a.m. with educational sessions beginning at 9 a.m. Admission is $15 for adults age 18 and over, and free for youth age 17 and under.
Britt Talent, editor and publisher of the Herald, has been putting on the Arkansas Homesteading Conference since 2014. While the Pioneer Village has primarily served as its home since the beginning, Talent said he decided to make the move to the fairgrounds this year to give the Share Grounds processing kitchen located there some more publicity.
The Share Grounds kitchen, operated by the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, is a certified kitchen that can be rented out to aspiring food entrepreneurs to make a retail food product. The program (continued from page 1) itself takes people to the entire process of developing a retail food product: from up-scaling recipes for mass product to acquiring a nutritional food label.
“Homesteading is all about sustainability, and a lot of the people who homestead make cottage foods to help supplement their income,” Talent said. “I thought it would be a natural fit for the homesteading conference since a lot of those people may want to take the next step to develop a retail food product.”
Talent has taken the show on the road through the past nine years. He has held events at Mountain View, Harrison, North Little Rock and Mena.
“There is a lot of interest in this subject,” Talent said. “A lot of the feedback I get on our Facebook page is from people wanting to know if it will be held in other places.”
The registration list for Saturday’s event reflects that. As of Tuesday evening, more than 300 adult and youth had registered fr...
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