What is Indigenous agronomy? How can western agronomy be used in Indigenous food systems? How is Indigenous agronomy used in practice? Join the Rural Partnerships Institute Indigenous Food Systems Project for this interactive webinar series. All of the webinars will be interactive, so please come with your questions, expertise, and knowledge to share.

Please sign up for any webinars you are interested in, even if you cannot attend. The Zoom link will be emailed to participants before the webinar. All webinars will be recorded and recordings will be emailed to everyone who registered.

REGISTER HERE FOR ALL WEBINARS

🌽 Indigenous Agronomy in Practice

March 6, 2025 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom

What is Indigenous agronomy in practice? This webinar will highlight a research partnership between UW-Madison PhD student Daniel Hayden and the Ohe·láku corn growers cooperative in Oneida. Daniel Hayden and Lea Zeise will share their collaborative research on intercropping cover crops with Tuscarora white corn and discuss what Indigenous agronomy means to them in practice. Following their presentation will be a community discussion for Tribal producers. Bring your questions, expertise, and knowledge to share.This webinar will be recorded. The recording will be emailed to everyone who registers even if they cannot attend the live webinar.

Daniel Hayden (Comanche) is a doctoral student at UW–Madison in the Department of Plant Pathology doing research with Tribal partners on intercropping with Native corns. 

Lea Zeise (Oneida Nation) cares for ancestral Indigenous varieties of corn with a cooperative she co-founded called Ohe·láku (oh-hey-LAH-goo) since 2016. Since 2021, Lea has led Ohe·láku’s partnership with UW-Madison to conduct cover crop research in the cornfields to reduce tillage and improve soil and microbial community health.

🫘 Archaeology and History of Wisconsin’s Native Agriculture

March 19 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom

More info coming soon!

Dr. Bill Gartner is a Lecturer and Principal Investigator in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who works with the Menominee Nation to study the history of ancestral Menominee raised field agricultural systems and land use.

🚜 Scaling Indigenous Corn Production: From Mounds to Combines

March 27, 2025 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom

This session will follow Indigenous corn seed from planting through the season all the way to harvest and drying before it’s processed to hulled hominy corn for the Tribal Elder Food Box.  Each step will be detailed, including perspectives on scales of production from mounds and hand planting to mechanical corn planters and combine harvesters.  Expanding the processing scale to meet the nearly two thousand units required for the Tribal Elder Food Box will also be covered.

DanCornelius (Oneida) is an Outreach Program Manager at the University of Wisconsin – Madison Great Lakes Indigenous Law Center and College of Agricultural and Life Sciences and an Indigenous grower.

🌱 Basics of Indigenous Agronomy

April 1, 2025 from 6:00-7:30 PM on Zoom (registration required for Zoom link)

 This webinar will cover introductory agronomy for Tribal producers and Tribal staff members. Bring your questions for instructor Will Fulwider and your expertise and knowledge to share in a community discussion.

We are also offering an in-person Indigenous Agronomy Field Training in March.

Will Fulwider is the Regional Crops Educator with Dane and Dodge County Extension. He collaborates with farmers in the two counties on building an educational program using applied, on-farm research centering on increasing farmer profitability through reduced input approaches. Collaborative research themes include nitrogen cycling with cover crops, integrating winter annuals into crop rotations in Wisconsin, and finding approaches to agricultural production in solar farms.