 My name is Amelia LaMaire and I'm coming to you from Sycamore, Missouri in Ozark County in South Central Missouri. We're here at my small farm called Flotsam Farm and we are mainly interested in producing food for ourselves in our local community. We raise dairy goats and chickens and ducks and we grow a wide variety of fruits and vegetables. Sweet potatoes and garlic are our biggest vegetable crops. And I am working on a project through North Central SAIR called Building the Local Food Economy in Ozark County, Missouri. So for my project it has several different parts but a big one is interviewing the farmers and homesteaders around the area. So I'm planning to complete about 25 interviews mainly in this county but also slightly outside the county if it makes sense. But conduct interviews, visit farms and document what people are producing, what works really well for them, what challenges they've had, what their ideas are for the future of sustainable agriculture in our area and how they feel that maybe we could work together, what information they're maybe lacking, what resources would be helpful to them. So conducting those interviews and then compiling all that information into a local food database or directory to share among producers and possibly consumers eventually. Another part of it is actually gathering people, physically gathering them together once a season for farm summits to just meet each other and network informally but also just share what we're all doing and identify common successes and challenges, exchange ideas, exchange goods and talk about our plans for the future, talk about possible collaboration on shared facilities, shared equipment, shared marketing, just kind of live in an informal way, see what comes out of that and see what makes sense for us. I've also been putting together with help from several other people, putting together a monthly newsletter that is all submission based and it's just broadly anything having to do with growing food, building things, living well, living sustainably in the rural Ozarks. So lots of different submissions from articles to photos to poetry to classifieds of people having things to sell or trade or give away. So that has been a great way to bring people together and exchange information. For me personally it makes sense to live in a way that's somewhat self-sufficient and sustainable and I'm really interested in just figuring out how that can work at a practical level because it's very difficult to grow your own food. It takes a tremendous amount of work and money and especially living in a rural area like this, it's hard to get money and it's hard to find time so my and I also see that a lot of other people think that way too and so I see an opportunity of bringing us all together to try to solve that problem so that we can all just live better.