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.