Progress 09/01/24 to 08/31/25

Outputs
Target Audience:Farmer operators, agricultural scientists and extension faculty, private sector consultants, policy makers and commodity groups. Changes/Problems:We continue to recognize the need for sustainable and extensive funding to compensate network staff who can support emerging on-farm research projects and extend the impact of our growing OOFRN network. We did not budget for any significant staff time in this proposal and appreciate the value of using most funds to support farmers. However, the organizational overhead required to sustain the network will require new long-term investments in both farmer stipends and network staff. This could include proposals to foundations, USDA NC-SARE, and OREI programs.The temporary freeze on USDA NIFA-OREI and NC-SARE funding levels and opportunities discouraged some groups who had planned to submit grants last summer, and staff turnover at OEFFA have been challenges. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Our network provided multiple opportunities for in-person and virtual professional development for students, educators, and farmers. One graduate student and 2 undergraduate students were trained as facilitators for our DIY training meeting. Several university faculty participants served as small group facilitators for the first time this year. And many additional students, educators, and researchers participated in our workshops to see the benefits of a farmer-led collaborative research approach. During this grant period, more than 40 farmers received training and assistance in the scientific process, research approaches, and grant writing through our programming. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We distribute a monthly electronic newsletter to directly share information about upcoming presentations, links to recordings of past presentation notes, upcoming grant deadlines, research opportunities, and educational opportunities. The newsletter is also shared on OEFFA's large listserv. We expanded our network mailing list from 87 initial names to more than 265 as of the end of this reporting period. We used our website and YouTube channel to continue posting monthly presentations on YouTube and had 418 new views in this grant period. We post notes and slidedecks from discussion meetings, but not recordings. Our three institutions continue to display our network flier at events and speak to other groups about our work. In January 2025 co-facilitator Cassandra Brown, presented a session on our network at the Ohio State Organic Grains Conference. Co-facilitator Denise Natoli Brooks has continued discussions with regional and national SARE leadership about our network and how our workshop resources might be used with new audiences. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We are using a second no-cost extension to continue our winter webinars and planning meetings with farmers and researchers. We also plan to lead or co-sponsor additional on-farm field days where organic farmers can present innovative research and discuss research questions/project ideas with other network members. We will continue supporting working groups and allocate participant stipends to support farmers who take leading roles in these efforts. We have discussed leveraging similar efforts at our institutions including OEFFA's conference, farm tour series, and Help Shop for organic farmers; and related grants at Ohio State and Central State on agroforestry and farmer-led research. We also continue to build relationships with other organizations in Ohio and with similar state, regional, or national groups interested in replicating the program that we have developed and pioneered in Ohio using these OREI funds.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Organized 3 Additional In-Person Farmer Workshops. Our team hosted 3 additional DIY Research workshops at the Southern Ohio Forest Farming Conference in September 2024 (16 participants), the Ohio State Beekeepers Association Meeting in October 2024 (26 participants), and the OEFFA Conference in February 2025 (8 participants). For each event we engaged facilitators and notetakers who were new to our workshop process, including students, researchers, farmers, and educators. We gathered feedback through participant evaluations and facilitator comments. Planned and Hosted 8 Virtual Monthly (OOFRN) Meetings. Our team continued to host monthly Ohio Organic Farmer and Researcher Network virtual meetings through May 2025. We have noticed that monthly meeting attendance waned during the summer months and decided to stop meeting June-November. In all, we hosted 8 meetings during this grant period, including 5 research project presentations, 2 network leadership meetings, and one successful meeting of working groups. Built Trust, Common Vision, and Plans for the Future We hosted 2 Network Leadership Meetings in December 2024 and May 2025 designed to gather feedback and new ideas from others interested in building this network. We continued to offer a small $100 stipend to farmers who participate in these meetings to demonstrate that we valued their time. Part of the meeting agendas was to discuss advanced farmer roles in the network, responsibilities, and reasonable stipends for these roles. We continue to recruit farmers, researchers, and educators to our diverse and growing network. We now have an email list of 271 network members based on past event and meeting participants and others who have expressed interest in our network. A monthly newsletter was established, with advice from network members, to share network events and resources, grant proposal opportunities, and research projects looking for collaborators. We planned a series of farm tours to highlight current on-farm research and discuss research questions in person. This was a farmer idea from our network planning meetings. We have held two of these events during the reporting period and had 2 others planned. The first focused on equipment and tactics for weed and nutrient management for organic grain growers and drew 40 attendees. The second on a project to assess economic and soil health impacts of leguminous forages when plowed under vs. harvested for organic forage growers. We had16 attendees for this one. Future events will focus on other research questions or current trials. We are becoming a trusted resource for those working in organic and participatory research. Network members are inviting and referring us to other farmers and researchers. Both farmers and researchers are reaching out to us as well for advice and connections. We have been able to assist farmers with research design, and to foster connections between farmers with mutual research interests, and between academic researchers and farmers with mutual interests. We have provided advice to other teams forming farmer-focused networks for research and education, including an FFAR grant, and an NSF-funded project on alternatives to rubber. Connections with organic farmers from our project were also leveraged to create two farmer nodes for the USDA AFRI SAS project led by Ohio State and Central State. Plans for a sustainable, collaborative network are a final piece of our grant objectives. We have discussed this topic in our network meetings this year, asking what the greatest value activities were and how to sustain this over time with or without funding. Co-facilitators have spoken with representatives of North Central SARE and the Organic Farming Research Foundation about using our workshop model and materials to boost proposals for their farmer-led grant. We have also discussed a podcast series, creating a regular feature or event at the OEFFA Conference. Develop and Submit Grant Proposals. Logistical support for working groups and farmer leadership was identified at our network planning meetings as a helpful role OOFRN could provide. We have shifted energy and grant dollars to support emerging clusters of farmers and researchers ready to develop specific on-farm research ideas or projects. To gauge working group support and cohesion, we offered 5 facilitated discussion groups during our monthly online meeting times on these topics: organic fly control for livestock (9 participants), on-farm mushroom spawn production (7), effectiveness of companion planting (8), participatory onion breeding and marketing (5), and agronomic flaming for weed control (5) with 34 participants in all. We offered higher stipends to individual farmers willing to play a leadership role in a working group to compensate them for their time and energy. We organized follow-up in-person meetings for the onion breeding and mushroom groups. We helped with additional follow-up meetings for the mushroom research group and were able to connect them with an Ohio State researcher to lead a grant proposal with them. Grant Proposals. OOFRN efforts led to 5 grant proposals and 1 letter of intent in the past reporting period. A $249,932 SARE Research and Education proposal on corn seeding rates and row widths for weed control was awarded to Ohio State researcher Osler Ortez. The topic came from our first DIY Research and Education workshop in February 2023 at the OEFFA Conference. A $5,000 Ohio State Warner grant (go.osu.edu/WarnerGrant) was awarded to study the economic trade-offs of on-farm spawn production. The idea came from our Southern Ohio Forest Farming Conference workshop in September 2024. The group's work was featured as one of our fall farmer exchanges which has led to a solid working group focused on forest farm issues and led by a talented Ohio State extension educator with a background in mycology. Additional grant ideas are under development from this group. A Letter of Intent was submitted to Organic Valley's FAVO grant program to study organic fly and tick control in organic dairies, based on working group discussion. Three major USDA Organic Research and Extension Initiative grant proposals were developed based on our workshop discussions and network working group meetings. Unfortunately, we were unable to submit these due to USDA restructuring and review. Our network supported discussion and preparation of a grant to compare organic fly control options for beef and dairy operations, and a resubmission of the corn seeding rate trial. A researcher from Indiana developing a new variety of corn attended our 2023 OEFFA Conference workshop. He developed relationships with farmers, educators, and staff there who assisted him to prepare an OREI Research and Education proposal. Network facilitators provided advice for a farmer considering an Organic Farming Research Foundation grant on her plant breeding project. Multiple topics discussed in our organic grain grower workshop groups have led to additional research projects featured in Ohio State Extension's eFields trials, including a trial on alfalfa N contributions discussed at the Ohio State Organic Grains Conference Workshop and at the 2024 OEFFA Conference workshop.

Publications

• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2024 Citation: Flame Weeding: An Alternative for Minimizing Cultivation Passes in Organic Corn Production Systems. Mercy Odemba*, Eugene Law, Elijah Dean, Cassandra Brown. Poster presented at the North Central Weed Science Society 2024 Annual Meeting. December 19-12, 2024. Kansas, City, Mo. https://ncwss.org/wp-content/uploads/NCWSS-2024-Program-Final-Post.pdf
• Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2024 Citation: Onion Variety Trial. Fernanda Krupek. 2024 ePLUS (Produce, Landscape, Urban, Specialty Crops) Report, January 2024. Ohio State South Centers, College of Food Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, Pages 62-63
• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2025 Citation: Organic Study Circles: Lessons learned from peer-to-peer extension programming in Pennsylvania & Ohio. Anna Hodgson, Penn State and Cassy Brown, Ohio State. Thursday, January 9, 2025. Ohio State Organic Grains Conference, Sandusky, Ohio.

Progress 09/01/23 to 08/31/24

Outputs
Target Audience:Farmer operators, agricultural scientists and extension faculty, private sector consultants, policy makers and commodity groups. Changes/Problems:Distributing participation stipends to our farmer workshop attendees has proven difficult. Both universities require vendor paperwork which includes personally identifiable information, and many farmers have not bothered to fill out these 2-5-page forms for the relatively small payout amount. We have collected them onsite, but this is not best practice due to the PII requested on the forms. Attempts to use gift cards have met with obstacles at both universities. Lack of financial support for network staff time has also been a challenge. The grant did not provide much salary support for the organizing team, and most of the OOFRN project has been supported through in-kind allocation of time from faculty and staff at the three partner organizations. While this has worked well for the first year or two, and our organizations are supportive of the project, we have realized that it will be difficult to expand the OOFRN further without a more sustained and official investment in staff time from all three of our partner organizations. The good news is, our efforts have pulled in numerous other staff and faculty as workshops and meeting presenters, workshop facilitators, and technical assistance. We are hopeful that this second year of funding may deliver enough grant projects and partnerships to justify a request for stronger and more sustained staff support commitments from one or more of our organizations. We are also planning to include more staff support compensation in future proposals to grow and extend the OOFRN. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Our network provided multiple opportunities for in-person and virtual professional development for students, educators, and farmers. Two graduate students were trained as small group facilitators and were provided an opportunity to meet and learn from farm participants. Our network has also helped many newly hired extension educators and researchers meet farmers, engage in farmer-led and participatory on-farm research discussions, and brainstorm collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects. More significantly, more than 100 farmers received training in the scientific process, research approaches, and grant writing through our programming. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We developed an electronic newsletter based on feedback from our network members, which shares information about upcoming presentations and links to recordings of past presentations, upcoming grant deadlines, research opportunities, and workshops or other events of interest. We expanded our network mailing list from 87 initial names and email addresses to 195 by the end of September 2024. Articles about the network have appeared online at our three institutions and Johnnie Speicher, our co-facilitator at OEFFA, developed a flier about our network for distribution at OEFFA and other events. Co-facilitator Denise Natoli Brooks made a presentation about our network at a Central State - Ohio State Universities research networking/exchange event. She also developed a presentation about our approach for the 2024 National BUGs (Black Farmers & Urban Gardeners) Conference in Columbus, Ohio, and has had one-on-one discussions with regional and national SARE leadership about our network. Our network has also been mentioned by at least two Ohio State researchers as a place to build farmer relationships for collaborative research and several have been inspired or used our network as a model for their own collaborative efforts or proposal. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?We requested a one-year no-cost extension to continue our work and implement emerging ideas about how best to distribute incentive payments to participating farmers. We hosted two more workshops this fall and have plans to do another in February 2025. While these initial on-farm research brainstorming workshops have been successful, our farmers have told us in planning meetings that it is difficult for them to put forth the time and effort needed to follow-up with farmers and other network partners to formalize ideas into concrete research proposals. As a result, our main focus during this second year will be to help launch and support a handful of active on-farm research working groups on focused topics. These working groups will make use of the best ideas from our workshops, planning meetings, and monthly network discussions. We are reallocating some of our participant stipends to support farmers who are willing to take a leading role in these emergent focused working groups. We also learned that we need to find more sustainable and extensive funding to compensate network staff to support the emerging on-farm research projects and extend the impact of our growing OOFRN network. This could include proposals to foundations, USDA NC-SARE and OREI or ORG programs.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Workshops. Our team hosted 3 successful DIY Research workshops between September 2023 through August 2024 and had scheduled 2 additional workshops for the fall of 2025. For each event we were able to draw in facilitators from our organizations who were new to the workshop process. Attendance varied from 14 to 61 with a good mix of farmers, educators, and professional researchers. After each event, we reviewed evaluations and facilitator experiences to learn what should be retained or improved. Materials and presentations were modified to meet time and facility constraints, audience, and to respond to feedback. We learned that 2 hours was the bare minimum of time required to make this work, and that most of that time should be devoted to small group work. We also felt the events were better if the conference attendees already had something in common, as opposed to the pilot workshop we had done at the OEFFA Conference in February 2023. Before the grant period ended in September, our team had confirmed plans to hold additional workshops at the Ohio Southern Forest Farming Conference (9/29/2024), the Ohio State Beekeepers Association Meeting (10/25/2024), and had began conversations about an OEFFA Conference event in 2025. Workshops completed during first year: Black Farming Conference 9/30/2023 34 pre-registered, 26 attendees Small group topics: Pest Issues, Marketing, Farm Diversification, Soil Health, Land Access Ohio State Organic Grains Conference 1/3/2024 61 pre-registered, 55 attendees Small group topics: Weeds, Marketing and Sales, Cover Crop N Contributions, Soil Health, and Diversified Rotations OEFFA Conference 2/15/2024 14 pre-registered for this event 18 attended Small group topics: companion planting, cover crops, Cover Crop N contributions, variety trial, variety breeding Virtual Ohio Organic Farmer-Researcher Network (OOFRN) Meetings. Our team hosted monthly virtual meetings during the first-year grant period with attendance varying between 5 and 26 people. Four farmer presenters were compensated for sharing their research experience. Farmer-led topics included powdery mildew trials, pasture management tools for rotational grazing, organic no-till corn trials, and strategies for addressing in-row weeds in organic field corn. Four meetings focused on guided conversations with network participants to review and discuss the network's goals, strategies, and specific projects. Additional meetings discussed strategies for using and assessing biostimulant products; the mechanics and logistics of variety trials; and basic information and Q&A with a major grant program leader. Recordings of these meetings are posted to our website and have had 377 views. Quarterly Network Leadership Meetings. These were scheduled to be part of our monthly meeting routine so that we didn't have to set a separate date. Over the course of the year we built a good group of regular attendees, despite the difficulty of weather and time constraints that plagues farm industry meetings. Direct feedback led us to offer a small $100 stipend to farmers who participated in the quarterly leadership meetings to allow them to prioritize attending and in making them feel like their time was valued. Build network. We were able to gain regular participation from a diverse and growing group of farmers, as well as researchers and educators in our partner organizations. By the end of the year, we had numerous examples of new partnerships and relationships forming between the farmers, researchers, and educators who had been participating. We have decided to shift energy from introductory/early planning workshops to provide more support for specific emerging clusters of farmers and researchers who are developing and implementing their on-farm research ideas. Proposals. We did meet our grant objective of developing multiple grant proposals or proposal teams to generate resources to support intensive farmer-led, on-farm organic research. Four of our DIY workshop ideas were submitted as grant proposals to the Ohio State on-farm collaborative Warner Grant program (https://amp.osu.edu/research/funding-opportunities-warner-grants-sustainable-agriculture).These focused on participatory produce breeding and trials, flame cultivation, perennial cover crops systems for organic transition, and the use of manually vs. remotely-vented high tunnels for spinach production. Three of the proposals received funding. In addition, ideas generated at one of our workshops led to the development and submission of a major proposal to the USDA OREI program (which was not funded, but will be resubmitted this year). The farmer who originally proposed the idea was a substantial partner in the OREI planning and writing process.

Publications

• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2024 Citation: Can I Get A Little Help??? Writing SARE Grants. Presentation at Black Farmers and Urban Growers Conference, Columbus Ohio, June 29, 2024. Lead: Denise Natoli Brooks; Co-presenters: Liz Brownlee, NC SARE and Michelle Wallace, CSU Extension/SARE State Coordinator.
• Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2024 Citation: Curious Mind? The Ohio Organic Farmer Researcher Network. Invited presentation to Central State University-Ohio State University Showcase Research Partnership Meeting presentation, Columbus, OH, May 2, 2024. Denise Natoli Brooks lead, Douglas Jackson-Smith, co-presenter.