Auerbach to address international events
Prof Raymond Auerbach, an internationally renowned authority in the field of organic farming, will be heading off to Europe in
June to address a number of international symposiums.
Auerbach, an associate professor of Soil Science and Plant Production at Nelson Mandela University (NMU) George Campus, will attend a meeting of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Organic Plus Project in Padua in northern Italy.
From there he will travel south to Messina, where he will chair a session on food security and agriculture at the 24th International Sustainable Development Research Society Conference. Here he will deliver a summary of his research work on organic farming systems, which pertains to the conference theme "Actions for a sustainable world: from theory to practice".
After Italy, he will spend a week with the Commonwealth
Agricultural Bureau International (Cabi) in the United Kingdom to finalise his book, Organic Food Systems: meeting the needs of Southern Africa.
The 24 chapters cover the research of his agroecology group at the NMU George Campus over the past ten years, including the long-term organic comparative farming systems research trials, research done by his students in Uganda, Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa, and ideas about farmer training, the value chain, urban food production and organic food systems around the world. Auerbach is due to retire at the end of September, but he will continue to be involved with organic farming systems research, a field he has worked in for 45 years.