AdAgrA 2015: Restoring the Waste Places

Short Course: Beginning Market Farming

John Dysinger

Pamela Dysinger

Kirsten Knecht

Nick Knecht

Fred Perlee

Lilia Perlee

AdAgrA: Adventist Agriculture Association

Beginning Market Farming- Part 1

So when we were off, we were really off, and that was great, and where are all my pictures?

Anyway, that experience was eye-opening for us in this way.

We saw the results of parents giving themselves for the gospel and the broader field of the world and neglecting what Mrs.

White calls the garden right outside your door.

And so beyond all of those things that John that I shared, John in his heart was so committed to young people that he was in the dorm 2 nights a week counseling.

That was in addition by the desire of his heart.

The stories, the things that he heard in those private sessions with young people would make you heart sick, as it did ours.

And we started saying, phew, you know, what are we gonna do?

This isn't, you know, God doesn't want us to judge, but he wants us to look at the fruit.

You know, in the garden, if we want to have good fruit to take to the market, there are certain things that we have to do.

And if we see that we've got bad fruit coming out of our garden and we just say, oh well, it'll go better next time, It'll go, no, that's not wisdom in farming and that's not wisdom in parenting.

And so the Lord really laid on our hearts that we couldn't continue what everyone else was doing and think we were going to get a different result.

Yes, there was good fruit here and there and we mind those young people, what did your parents do?

And So yes, we said to ourselves, well, we could stay in this line of work, we can give ourselves to these young people, and we might be able to make it with our own family, but statistically, No, we couldn't.

And the Lord started really laying on our hearts.

And So at the end of those 6 years, we determined to go back and well before that, and this is what I was going to show you and I can't believe that my pictures are gone.

Those are the pictures that were there to begin with.

They were both born while we were in Kenya.

We came as a family of 2 to Africa and we went home as a family of 4.

And I've lost all the pictures from those years.

But we left there and we went to Andrews University so my husband could get a master's degree in education.

We had no clue of what was coming down the pipeline.

But I can tell you that that year, that 10 months, was like an amazing oasis for our family.

We were so burned out and we didn't even realize it.

You know, you're just going, going and when you get out of it, you remove yourself.

All of a sudden you start seeing, wow, you know, Here's the foundation of our marriage.

I'm telling you, we were headed right towards the result of other fractured family groups.

It was, our marriage had suffered, our family was suffering.

Kirsten was 2 and Jonathan was 10 months.

And even though they're little, children at that young age reap the results of parents not investing all that they should.

And so that was a wonderful year where we just enjoyed being a family.

We didn't have to look to see if there was any, if every young person was there.

No responsibilities for anybody but us and our kids.

And I can remember saying, I feel like a bird that has been let out of the cage.

God knew what we needed and that was a wonderful oasis.

And the Lord opened up for us to teach at 1 room Adventist school.

I have a degree in elementary education and my husband in secondary and so they hired us as the teaching team knowing that I had the experience with elementary and so John taught 4 days a week and I came in 1 day a week to just sort of help him and give him a break and it gave him a day with the kids.

But during that time I was pregnant with that big tall guy.

We were building a house and my husband was in a career that was totally out of his comfort zone.

My husband's a very focused man and he was now teaching 3 grades.

The second year he was teaching 6 grades with 13 students and we were not meeting our goals.

So did I say that when we were called to Tennessee, this is where my in-laws were?

So this is our farm, and that's my tall Joshua with Grandpa.

We moved to the farm with grandma and grandpa and tried every way to buy a house far from the farm and close to school, which was about a half hour.

And so we built a small cabin on the farm and that's where we started.

But as I said, 2 years into it, John was not, I mean we weren't meeting our goals.

He would leave before the kids got up in the morning and he would come home just as they were going to bed and we're saying, wait a minute, we were trying by going to elementary to regain for ourselves some time with our family and it just wasn't happening.

And so the Lord slowly started calling to our hearts and we made that leap of faith and we left employment.

And I want to tell you the difference between faith and presumption is whose idea is the step.

It was, and I can't even go into how, but it was undeniable.

We knew that we had to make a change, And so we did.

So we moved to the farm and when John left teaching, mind you, the Lord did not tell us what we were gonna do.

We had some ideas and I think that God gave us those ideas to comfort us and to help us to know it was going to be okay.

But no, those ideas, the door started closing, closing.

We have a mortgage and my husband has left his employment and we have Nothing.

We didn't have like this huge thing to fall back on.

The Lord just took us down to being totally dependent on him.

And it's a very scary but very gratifying place to be.

And you just have to learn to trust the Lord.

So it took 18 months, and in those 18 months, we were led to farm.

And that's a long story, but the Lord, again, made it clear.

And I'll say this, I didn't want to farm.

I did not want to farm and I knew the Lord was calling my husband to it, and I was dragging my feet and saying, no way, Lord, I don't.

I knew what it was gonna cost me personally.

I knew that it was going to be over the top, and I would be in the garden and not in the home, right?

And I hadn't really embraced the calling then.

I can talk to moms today with so much more confidence because of what God has done in our family and for our family.

So, but at that time I had a lot of fear.

Plenary

Whitmar McConnell

Some Seeds Fell

This is actually based on Proverbs 4, 7, where it says wisdom is the principal thing.

Wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom, and in all your getting, get understanding.

And from Education, Page 225, true education imparts this wisdom.

It teaches the best use not only of 1, but of all our powers and requirements.

Character building is the most important work ever entrusted to human beings.

Never before was its diligent study so important as now.

Never was any previous generation called to meet issues so momentous.

Never before were young men and young women confronted by peril so great as confront them today.

I commented on what wisdom is, but I want to comment on what the other 2 are, because I taught 13 hours on the ideal or model soil during this session, and it's the foundation of what I taught.

And you can see the title of the message here is Some Seeds Fell, which may give you the idea we may look at the parable of the sower.

Understanding the character of the soil, restoring the image of God.

Understanding is the right action of the will.

And the result of those things, now you could call out when I say the right action of the will, it's the emotive force.

It's how we feel about that truth that we've learned.

And these 2 things, there are 2 aspects of life that is important that you understand in order to rightly understand the character of God.

Or the character of the soil, or our own character.

The character of God, what does God say about himself?

And It doesn't matter whether we accept that or we don't accept it.

It doesn't matter whether we agree with it or disagree with it.

It doesn't matter if we choose to obey it or not choose to obey it.

It is determined and we're not gonna change that.

The real thing that we have control over is the random part and I know Steve if you're in here you don't like that word but fluid maybe fluid the fluid part of life and that is the will is the right action of the will that we're told that we need to understand.

And so it's the coming together of those 2 things that brings wisdom, that brings action.

And if there's no action in life, there's no testimony.

So, we need to understand all 3 of those things.

And hopefully as we go through this, you'll understand that a knowledge of the Holy is the beginning of wisdom.

But in getting that, get the understanding of it, which is the right action of your will.

This is an admonition that I try to follow all the time.

It's a quote from Thomas Akempis, who was a monk, who didn't quite see things the way he was supposed to.

"'If you can see things the way they really are, "'and not merely the way men report them to be, "'then you are wise, and God is your teacher, and not man.'" The theme of this conference is restoring the waste places.

So my question to you is where are the waste places?

It's 1 thing to say we want to restore the waste places, but where are they?

We now live in a world where food destroys health, law destroys justice, Education destroys knowledge, government destroys freedom, commerce destroys economy, and religion destroys morals.

Is that the waste place we need to restore?

Let me share this quote from the second chapter of Christ Object Lessons which addresses the parable of the sower.

That which the parable of the sower chiefly deals with, my apologies for the mistake, that it deals with is the effect, the effect.

Hear that word, the effect produced on the seed by the soil into which it is cast.

In other words, It's the effect of the soil on the seed.

Those are the conditions that we live under.

And my question is, when I asked if that's where the waste places are, is that where we solve the problem?

Now, she says that these are effects, These are conditions.

But the causes for those effects were put into motion a long time ago, possibly.

Now, if you put your hand on a stove and you burn it, well, the cause was you put your hand on the stove and you burn it, and the cause and effect happened immediately.

But in most cases, causes could have been put in motion days ago, weeks ago, months ago, years ago, decades ago, generations ago.

You know, when The disciples brought the blind man to Jesus and they asked him, who sinned, this man or his parents?

The causes were put into motion and he was innocent of them.

He's just suffering the consequences of them.

How many things happen in life that you were innocent of, that you had nothing to do with?

1 of the things we don't understand is not only are there effects produced by our choices, But there are effects that are produced in the aggregate.

There are effects produced by the aggregate of humanity.

And these things are set into motion, and the effects come into being.

And look around the world today and its condition.

We didn't, as individuals, have everything to do with the causes for that.

But as a collective of humanity, we had those choices.

Those are the waste places that have been affected.

I don't think we're where the waste places are yet.

Is it...are the conditions that are in the world today, are those the conditions that you wanted?

And yet those are the conditions that we have.

Something went wrong in the process of knowledge and understanding and action.

Even with your own lives, ask yourself the question personally.

Talk to God about it, but in your own life, are the outcomes, are the conditions that are in your own life, are they the conditions that you want?

If you're being, you can be honest with yourself.

I mean, maybe they are, but I can tell you that the conditions that I have in my Life right now are not everything that I want them to be So Somewhere along the line.

There are waste places that are causing the effects and producing waste places.

Throughout the parable again from Christ's object lessons, I apologize I didn't put the reference on here, it's just a couple pages over.

Throughout the parable of the sower, Christ represents the different results of the sowing as depending on the soil.

In every case the seed and the sower are the same.

Thus he teaches that if the word of God fails of accomplishing its work in our hearts and our lives, the reason is to be found in ourselves.

Now I have up there understanding the character of the soil, and if any of you were in my class, you'll have discovered that there's a direct relation.

The Bible says the body and the mind are 1.

Short Course: Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques

David Sharpe

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 5

Okay, some of these definitions you are going to know just because we've already gone over them but we're now into the optimizing section.

This is the part where you tweak and change and add things that most people will never ever see, but they are very important.

So some definitions that you need to know.

We've talked about rank, ranking, and positions.

Refers to where a site shows up in search engine results.

I go to Google and I type in Hillside Farms and the very first 3 results that I see are for Hillside Farms sausage.

Hillside Farms organic fruits and vegetables is number 4 in the search results on page 1, so we say that it ranks number 4 on page 1 or it has a position of number 4 on page 1.

Yeah, except you don't see numbers but we count, We go 12345.

So if I say, I got a web page that's number 3 on page 1, that just is the rank or the position.

So typically, these words we use like, it ranks well or it ranks poorly, good positioning, bad positioning.

So, we tend to not talk about, you know, number 3 on page 1 all that much because what my results, what I see may not be what you see when you do the same search.

So we're looking a little more in general terms when these words are used.

Ranking factors, ranking elements, ranking signals, these are the things and things is about as good as I can do right now, we will talk about the specifics here shortly.

The things that Google looks at to decide where to position your web pages.

There have been over 100 ranking signals identified.

1 of the things, 1 of the great frustrations that we face is that Google doesn't tell us a whole lot about what it does, how it does.

Because if they did, then every time they tell us what they're doing, a bunch of people get out there and try to figure out how to game the system.

And Google doesn't want their system to be game.

They don't want somebody to try to figure out how to trick the system.

So every once in a while they'll come up with an update to their process and knock out all the people who have been gaming the system and everybody screams and hollers.

It's not here in my list, but we talked a little bit about algorithms.

Did everybody understand what I'm talking about when I say algorithms?

An algorithm, I'm not going to try to give you the mathematical definition, but it is like a complex formula.

And Google takes the information that it finds on your website and it runs it through this algorithm and it says as a result of what we see here we think that this site gets this position or this page gets this positioning or we think this page is no good so we're just going to drop it out altogether.

The algorithm is the formula that they use to evaluate and analyze the site.

Optimization, it's what we do to a page or to an image or a piece of content or the entire site, the things that we do to try to encourage Google because tricking Google is bad news, It doesn't work very well.

We want to encourage Google to give your site better positioning in search results, relevant search results.

There's the technical or on-site search engine optimization.

And this is the stuff that goes on behind the scenes.

And we'll be taking a look at behind the website walls in just a moment so you can see what we're talking about with the technical or on-site optimization.

There's off-site stuff and these are things that you might do on social media.

When I say offsite, I don't mean out here in meatspace, out here in the real world.

I'm talking about away from your website, out there on the internet, so it'd be social media.

It's not on your webpage, it may be, maybe it's a directory.

But there are things that you can do to optimize that listing.

There are probably 12 or so, depending on what kind of business you're in, there's about 12 directories out there that you should be paying attention to because the listings, your business listings in those directories will affect your positioning.

For example, if Google looks at your website and then It goes and looks at the Google Places listing and it looks at Manta and it looks at Super Yellow Pages or Super Pages and then it looks at Yellow Pages and it looks at Yelp and Foursquare and these other directories of local businesses.

It sees that your phone number is either completely different or slightly different on each 1 of them, it says, something's wrong here.

We'd go through and make sure that all your directory listings are precisely correct.

That's an example of the offsite, off of your website, on other websites that have an effect.

I don't know why I stuck that in there, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

Content and SEO, it used to be that the, that this technical or off-site stuff that we do, on-site, sorry, the technical SEO that we do, used to be the primary thing.

In recent, last year or so, Google has made content so much more important that now you have to consider the 2 of them together.

You cannot work in isolation from each other.

How do we use content in the context of optimization?

I can tell you how we used to do it back in the old days when we discovered that there were such a thing as keywords.

This was back in the days of the HTML pages where you had to code the page.

Back to Menu

All Teachings

Beginning Market Farming- Part 1

44m

Some Seeds Fell

1h

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 5

1h

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 4

1h

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 3

50m

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 2

51m

Online Marketing: Strategies and Techniques- Part 1

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10. Jeremiah: The Destruction of Jerusalem

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AdAgrA Panel

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Tools of the Trade: Tools and Techniques for Increased Productivity and Efficiency

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Fresh Produce in January

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The Very Best School

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Sound Doctrine