ENVX Symposium Blog

Farm working group, April 17 2025As we close the spring 2025 semester, our planning committee is proud to announce that we held three successful working group sessions in April. With help from our committee members, facilitators, ENVS faculty advisors, and Community Dialogues, we successfully brought together our members of the Farming, Livestock, and Forestry working groups.

The three sessions were structured the same, with slight tweaks to the dialogue script, timing, and discussion topics as we specialized the experience to each group. The first half of the meetings used the Community Dialogues approach, to become familiar and establish trust amongst each member. In a similar dialogue structure, the second half of the meeting integrated the Question and Hourglass frameworks of the ENVS program, with policy issues pertaining to the group. We certainly learned a lot in this experimental process of facilitating structured conversations, and our committee made several adjustments to the process along the way.

On April 17th, the Cropland Agriculture group met on the third floor of J.R. Howard, initiating our first working group session of the ENVX Symposium. This group consists of Oregon crop farmers, an Oregon Farm Bureau representative, a Bon Appetit representative, a CAS student, and the director of a food-based nonprofit. The cropland agriculture group was guided by the framing question: How might environmental regulations achieve their goals without putting farmers out of business? The discussion proceeded towards a more localized conversation around pesticide regulations, potential substitutes for pesticides, and how increasing farm regulation has affected yield.

Livestock working group Zoom, April 29 2025On April 29th, the Livestock Agriculture group met over Zoom, bringing together a more geographically dispersed group of participants. This group includes several livestock and dairy farmers, faculty from the CAS and Law school, and the director of sustainability for a commercial egg producer. The livestock group was guided by the framing question: How can livestock operations and animal welfare advocates work together? As the dialogue developed and became more situated, the group focused on California’s passing of Prop. 12, the process of defining animal welfare and wellbeing, and to what extent science plays a role in policy decisions.

On April 30th, the Forestry group rounded out our April sessions with another in person meeting in J.R. Howard. This group brings together faculty from the Law school, representatives of Mt. Hood forest collaboratives, and CAS students. The forestry group was initially guided by the framing question: What can we learn from fire history as we manage forests today for fire resilience? In the following discussion around management, the group emphasized climate change, increasing fire severity, and ‘managing for multiple uses’ as priorities to consider.

Forestry working group, April 30 2025Our committee is thrilled with how these meetings went, and we’re eager to showcase the relationships and conversations being had during the fall ENVX Symposium events. Each conversation is progress towards establishing a culture of finding Common Ground.

I’ll now leave you with a quote from one of our working group members reflecting on the experience:

“As a farmer, I feel heard. I just wish I could do this all the time.”