PRAIRIE VIEW, Texas (Sept. 27, 2022) – Prairie View A&M University and University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff recently held the 2nd Annual Sustainable Forestry and African American Land Retention Joint Regional Conference. The purpose was to provide sustainable forestry and land retention information to farmers, ranchers and landowners with property located in the States of Texas and Arkansas.
This year’s conference, which attracted nearly 300 participants, featured stellar speakers, including PVAMU President Ruth J. Simmons, who shared her experiences with agriculture and land retention while growing up in East Texas.
Speakers from the national, regional, state and local levels of the United States Department of Agriculture included the Office of Dr. Homer Wilkes, Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Dr. Dionne Toombs, Acting Director, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and Monica Rainge, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights.
Chester Fort, Vice President of U.S. Lumber Operations at West Fraser Timber, and Dr. Thomas W. Mitchell, Endowed Professor of Law at Boston College and Co-author of the Uniform Partition Act legislation, were also among the 40 guest speakers during the two-day event.
“Our goal this year was to integrate various points of views for participants to consider,” said Dr. Clarence Bunch, Program Leader of the Cooperative Extension Program’s Agriculture and Natural Resources unit in PVAMU’s College of Agriculture and Human Sciences. According to Bunch, the purpose of providing different points of views was for participants to “inference a different way of reasoning, integrate advancing concepts and implicate new assumptions. This year’s goal was achieved,” he said.
The SFLR Joint Regional Conference is a signature event of the SFLR Program at PVAMU, which also includes 21 SFLR workshops on sustainable forestry and land retention with a concentration on educational information to address legal matters related to owning heirs’ property.
The SFLR Program was established through a grant from the American Forest Foundation. PVAMU and the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff are two of eight institutions and the only 1890s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities designated as land-grant institutions) that comprises the SFLR Network, a collaborative of organizations located primarily in the Southeast Region of the United States who network together to “improve forest management by connecting African American landowners to established networks of forestry support including federal and state government programs, businesses, and nonprofit conservation, legal, and community development organizations,” according to the American Forest Foundation.
Under the leadership of Bunch, with support from Dr. Elliott Washington, AgNR Extension Program Specialist/Forester, PVAMU’s SFLR Program, under the umbrella of the Small Farm Institute, is planned, implemented and managed by Angela Moore, Program Coordinator, CEP-AgNR.
For more information or to register for upcoming SFLR workshops, visit www.pvamu.edu/sflrevents or www.pvamu.edu/sflr.
By Angela Moore, Program Coordinator, CEP-AgNR
SFLR Joint Regional Conference Planning Committee Co-Chair and Conference Organizer
-PVAMU-