VOA标准英语2010年-Website of the Week – Eco-Farm.org（在线收听）

The Ecological Farming Association is a non-profit group whose focus is on small-scale sustainable agriculture. Its website — Eco-Farm.org — helps promote agricultural education and networking.

Spokeswoman Marcy Coburn says there are three blogs on the website. "We have a genetic engineering blog, which is the Genetic Engineering News Service that then goes out in e-mail, but also gets converted into a blog.  That's posting information that people put out about that subject.  And then we have a farmer blog where we have some guest farmers, who actually write for the farmer blog what they are growing this season or issues that they are having with water or climate change or anything like that."

Before a session called "Planting the Future: New Leaders in Activism for Food and Farm Justice" at the Ecological Farming Association annual meeting in January, the speaker encouraged everyone to take a stretch break. Lectures and powerpoints from the conference are posted at Ecofarm.org.

The third and newest blog is called Eco-Farm NextGen. It features 'mentor farmers' who dispense advice to, and answer questions from, those new in the field. Coburn says there was a real need for that. "We get a lot of e-mail communication from people all over the world who are asking questions that we don't necessarily have researchers or staff on hand who can answer those questions. But we definitely have that kind of expertise in our extended cyber-network. So creating a forum for that kind of interaction is really exciting."

In addition to the blogs, news and resource links on the site, Coburn says visitors have access to the full array of speakers and workshops from Eco-Farm's recent annual meeting in California, which included talks and workshops on advances in agricultural techniques, marketing strategies and research.

"That's some amazing content, really high profile people, and it's really inspiring stuff," Coburn says. "We encourage any kind of dialogue to happen as a result of listening to those. If people have questions or are inspired again, they can write into blogs and ask questions.  We also link to PowerPoint presentations of some of the hot topic discussions that happen at the conference as well."

Eco-Farm.org is also taking advantage of new social media, and is linking to Facebook and Twitter.