North American Women Meet
Region Ecological Farming
(This document was translated into English by Synodical Pastor Martim Reusch, whose native languages are Portuguese and German and shared with the Northwest Synod of Wisconsin to further our companion synod relationship.)
Meet experiences in ecological farming and community health. This was one of the principal motives of the visit to the region, during this week, of two North American women coming from the state of Wisconsin. Diane Kaufmann, 50, and Sharon Magelssen, 52, visited ecological farms and a farm's industries, besides to meet initiatives for health using medicinal plants - all of these experiences have been developed in the township area of Vale do Sol. The exchange happened through the Evangelical Church of Lutheran Confession In Brazil (IECLB) and the Center for Advice the Small Farmer (CAPA).
At the three days visit of Santa Cruz do Sul, the American women were escort by the Pastor Sinodal of the Sínodo Centro-Campanha Sul, from IECLB, Martin Reusch. Members of the Lutheran Church in United States - already a few years now in a narrow relation with the Sínodo Centro-Campanha Sul - Sharon is a licensed nurse and Diane a farmer. Diane's activity in her farm is something that the farmers here certainly haven't heard much about - the organic sheep's dairy farm.
In the condition of small farmers representative, Diane also integrates a Wisconsin governmental commission that should concludes in the next months a report about the agriculture's future in that North American state. According to her, like in Brazil, there are many promises of benefits to the family agriculture from the government, with no concrete changes in the area's reality. Diane found herself impressed with the existence of a movement in favor to the ecology in Rio Grande do Sul state, that she considered more developed than the initiatives in the United States around the organic farming. She remembered that in the United States there is a big "strength" in favor to the use of genetics, technology that is rejected by the ecological farmer