You may have heard that the theme for this year's Annual Gathering is    Resiliency in a Changing Food System Landscape. Whether you already were aware, or learning the theme for the first time, you may be wondering: why resilience? Over the years at the Gathering our themes have covered racial equity, soil health, shifting consumer preferences and market dynamics, and business succession and the dilemmas of workforce development in the food system. Combined, these themes encompass issues spanning social, economic, and environmental systems, and the changes taking place within and between them. Resilience brings our attention to change itself, a characteristic that underlies all of our past themes (and future ones!), and provides us with a framework for how we manage for and effectively adapt to change while maintaining our food systems core purpose, function, and integrity. Resilience encompasses skills that build our capacity to adapt and thrive in changing circumstances, but it's also a state of mind, one we'll need to embrace in an era of climate change, rapid technological disruption in food and agriculture, and broad political and economic instability.

To help us learn resilient skills and understand the resilient state of mind, we'll have Laura Lengnick as our Gathering keynote and resilient guide. Laura isthe author of   Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate , and has more than 25 years of leadership innovating management practices and performance metrics designed to move sustainability values into action in businesses, community organizations, and government policy and programs across a diversity of scales from local to national. Since 2008, Laura has applied social-ecological resilience science to the development of practical and effective climate change mitigation and adaptation planning strategies. Learn more about Laura here.