NACUFS National Conference - Dallas, Texas

This past week (Tuesday through Sunday), I was lucky enough to be able to attend the NACUFS National Conference held at the Gaylord Hotel and Conference Center in Dallas Texas! I had never been to a conference before or to Texas so this was an all new experience.

The conference consisted of many networking events, banquets, interest sessions, and one huge vendor showcase. The showcase was awesome! It was basically a giant room that held over 200 different vendors. The products the vendors promoted ranged anywhere from gelato, soy milk, burgers, to dishwashing machines, food containers, and food management systems. The best thing about the vendor show was the amount of free food and giveaways that were offered. On both days, we would skip lunch and go straight to the vendor showcase because of all the free food that was there.

During the stay at the conference, four different interest session timeslots were offered. Each time slot had about five to ten separate sessions to attend. I went to three of the four sessions. The ones I attended were titled: Grow Food Sustainably: Permaculture on Your Campus, Food Trends: What’s Hot and What’s Not, and the Culinary Forum.

While all three were extremely interesting, the most inspiring was the Grow Food Sustainably session. It was hosted by Ryan Harb, the Chief Sustainability Specialist at UMass-Amherst. Harb, along with the help of hundreds of volunteers, created the first permaculture garden to be formed on a college campus. It currently offers the school about one thousand pounds of produce each year that are used directly in their dining commons. The garden is so beneficial to Umass and really brought the school together as a whole to create this one-fourth of an acre garden. While it is great as a school activity, it is also an amazing way to teach students and faculty the importance of sustainability and how a school can help promote this. Check out this video about it at: http://permaculture.tv/umass-amherst-permaculture/ J Hopefully we can all start creating these at our schools!

Peet’s Coffee and Tea sponsored our dinner on Friday night. We were taken to the Dallas Cowboys football stadium and had dinner inside!! After dinner, we had a tour of the entire stadium and were able to walk on the field and view the locker rooms. The stadium was huge!!
Overall, the conference was amazing! I am hoping to help out at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference this coming fall since it will be held at my university, Penn State. The National Conference for next year is also going to be held in my hometown area of Boston so I would love to volunteer for this as well!