National AgrAbility Project

Chuck Baldwin helped staff the AgrAbility booth at the World Dairy Expo in Madison,
WI, October 3-4. He shared the responsibilities with Ami Bliefernicht of Easterseals Wisconsin on Tuesday and with Alan Kaltenberg, farmer, and Julianne Renner, AgrAbility of WI communications, on Wednesday. The booth had an excellent location in the main entrance hall next to the FBI booth and Triple Crown products, being just a couple tables down from some of the cheese outlets and a very short walk from the Ellsworth Creamery's ice cream stand at the end of the hall. Besides the location, another thing that attracted people to the booth was a sign-up sheet that people could fill in for a drawing to win a truck step provided by AgrAbility of WI.

Staff were able to speak with a number of FFA members on Tuesday and, in addition to the variety of farmers and vendors from the United States that stopped by, they also had some good interaction with foreign visitors from several countries in Europe and Barbados on both days that Chuck worked. Other AgrAbility personnel that stopped by included Dick Straub from WI and Abi Jensen-Quinlan, formerly with AgrAbility of WI.

Ed Sheldon and Chuck Baldwin joined their 2501 LIFE Project partner John Jamerson in attending the National Black Farmers Association conference in Natchez, MS, located on bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River, October 27-28. There were roughly 200 in attendance. Much of the conference focused on the 22007 Discrimination Financial Assistance Program, but the LIFE Project and AgrAbility were also given time to present along with the opportunity to have a booth to share printed materials and some small assistive technology tools. Both Ed and Chuck thought that more people visited them to ask excellent questions and to express a lot of interest in what AgrAbility was doing than at any of the previous eight NBFA conferences AgrAbility had attended.

The schedule permitted Chuck and Ed a bit of time to take in some of the culture, food, and history of the Natchez area - learning of the struggles between the settlers, the Native Americans, the African Americans, and the North and South during the Civil War. The trip also afforded them the chance to travel part of the Natchez Trace on their way back to the Jackson, MS, airport. That trace, or trail (now a national parkway), was widely used by Native Americans and, eventually, by many barge pilots who would take unmotorized wooden barges down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then walk 35 days on the Natchez Trace to Nashville, TN, where they could find a better road system and transportation to take them home to various points across the United States. The barges themselves would then be dismantled and sold as lumber in New Orleans.

Submitted by Chuck Baldwin