2021 Conference

KEYNOTES

WILL HARRIS is recognized as a worldwide leader in humane animal husbandry and environmental sustainability. He is a fourth-generation cattleman, who tends the same Bluffton, Ga., land that his great-grandfather settled in 1866. Born and raised at White Oak Pastures, Will left home to attend the University of Georgia’s School of Agriculture, where he was trained in the industrial farming methods that took hold after World War II. After graduating, Will returned to Bluffton where he and his father continued to raise cattle using pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics, and feeding the herd a high-carbohydrate diet of corn and soy.

In the mid-1990s, Will became disenchanted with industrialized methods that had created a monoculture for their cattle. He made the audacious decision to return to the farming methods his great-grandfather had used 130 years before.

Will is the immediate past President of the Board of Directors of Georgia Organics. He is the Beef Director of the American Grassfed Association and was selected 2011 Business Person of the year for Georgia by the Small Business Administration.

LYLA JUNE JOHNSTON is an Indigenous public speaker, artist, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages from Taos, N.M. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship and food gathering practices, and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma.

She blends undergraduate studies in human ecology at Stanford University, graduate work in Native American Pedagogy at the University of New Mexico, and the indigenous worldview she grew up with to inform her perspectives and solutions. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in Indigenous Studies with a focus on Indigenous Food Systems Revitalization.

Lyla June spends her free time learning her endangered mother tongue, planting corn, beans and squash and spending time with elders who retain traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge.

is an Indigenous public speaker, artist, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages from Taos, N.M. Her messages focus on Indigenous rights, supporting youth, traditional land stewardship and food gathering practices, and healing inter-generational and inter-cultural trauma.

She blends undergraduate studies in human ecology at Stanford University, graduate work in Native American Pedagogy at the University of New Mexico, and the indigenous worldview she grew up with to inform her perspectives and solutions. She is currently pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks in Indigenous Studies with a focus on Indigenous Food Systems Revitalization.

Lyla June spends her free time learning her endangered mother tongue, planting corn, beans and squash and spending time with elders who retain traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge.