The International Analog Forestry Network is an organization that is helping to heal the life support systems of the planet and we’ve been busy expanding our reach and our organization to meet the ever-increasing demands for regenerative approaches to forest restoration and food production.

The last year’s work has focused on strengthening our network by carrying on a series of three “training of trainers” workshops: one in Sri Lanka at the Belipola Centre, another in Costa Rica at Finca Fila Marucha, our Central American training centre, and a third in Ecuador with our South American partners. These trainings produced 37 newly certified trainers who will now carry on the work of AF worldwide. Welcome to all of our newly certified trainers!

It will be exciting to see how many new practitioners they can bring into the fold and how many new ecosystems and watersheds these new AF trainers and their students can begin to restore!

Our FGP standards were finally approved by IFOAM in 2014 and we are currently working on improving the standards, creating a farmer to farmer certification standard, and inviting international certification agencies to inspect for the Forest Garden Products.

We have continued to grow our alliance with the Rich Forest program in order to create collaborative efforts with the business community that will help support our training and other outreach strategies.

We would also like to announce the addition of two new members of our Board of Directors. Trudy Jurianz is co-director of the Belipola Training Centre in Sri Lanka, where, as a certified analog forestry trainer, she organizes trainings and grows food for the local market in a forest garden setting at our oldest analog forestry demonstration site.

Anthony Dufty is the sustainable management coordinator for Port Philip and Westernport CMA Victoria, Australia, where he works to restore degraded landscapes using the AF method. We are very lucky to have Trudy and Anthony on the Board team and look forward to many productive collaborations with them!

Thanks to all of you who are restoring mangroves or making corridors for the monkeys and birds or increasing the economic productivity of the land. Thanks to all of you who are spreading the positive, solution-based principles of analog forestry to an ever-growing audience.

May your plantings thrive and your harvests be abundant, may the places that you are beckoned to touch reflect the beauty of the forest organism that serves as our model in analog forestry design!

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