By SHARON KILPATRICK

By SHARON KILPATRICK

Rappahannock News Staff Writer

Rappahannock hosted one of the meet- i ings of the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group (SAWG) this weekend.

At a meeting Sunday at the Child Care and Learning Center vegetable growers who are members of the Virginia Association for Biological Farming (VABF) met with Jim Worsted, an agronomist from Kentucky, to discuss how agricultural research such as the research done by Virginia Tech and*»ther land grant universities could be more useful in promoting sustainable agriculture.

The 1990 farm bill called for research promoting sustainable agriculture. To implement that the nation was divided into regions. Virginia is in the southern region which includes the states along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Virginia to Texas and the neighboring states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

VABF is one of 41 organizations affiliated with the Southern SAWG. Many similar meetings will be held this winter and spring and the results will be used to promote sustainable agriculture research and education.

John Bums, owner of Goat Hill Farm outside Washington and president of VABF, said that two recommendations to come out of Sunday’s meeting were that more research should concentrate on small and medium sized farms and farmer producers should be better represented on review boards that select pro-» jects for research funding.

Richard Abel, who grows asparagus, lettuce and respberries organically at his farm on Route 622, said, “The purpose is to try to develop ideas for research we feel ought to be carried out by VPI and Virginia State into desireable ways of doing the least harm to the environment, to encourage sustainable practices to gradually replace more destructive practices now going on.”

At a “brainstorming session” Sunday morning participants said that most farms in I the south are small farms, yet most research