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

Outputs
Target Audience:This project served primarily farmers who implement or plan to implement regenerative practices including pasture-based livestock production, diversified vegetable production, or a combination of the two in the upper midwest. Between September 1, 2023 - September 1, 2024, Farmers Rising worked with two cohorts of Farm Beginnings participants. In 2023, we had nine participants in the fall Farm Business session. Of those nine participants: seven identified as feminine, one of whom further identified as LGBTQ; one identified as LGBTQ, gender neutral, and Black / African American; and one identified as masculine. No participants were military veterans. Six participants had no farming experience, two participants had one year of farming experience, and one participant had four years of farming experience. In 2024, we had ten participants in the spring Farm Dreams session, seven of whom progressed into the Farm Business session, with one joining exclusively for the fall. Of those eleven total participants: seven identified as feminine, one of whom also identified as Spanish speaking + gender neutral; five identified as White, and one as Multi-Racial. Two identified as masculine, one further identified as Black / African American and one as White. One preferred not to disclose their gender identity, and further identified as White. No participants were military veterans. Ten of the participants had no farm experience. All Farm Beginning participants are developing small-scale farms focusing on specialty crops or pastured livestock production. Almost all participants were interested in providing social services and engaging their communities as a source of natural space connection, equitable food/nutrition access, education, and well-being. Farm Beginning participants are consistently from limited resource backgrounds. In 2023, six participants were either farming or planning to farm in rural settings, and three were either farming or planning to farm in urban settings. In 2024, six participants were either farming or planning to farm in urban settings, and five were either farming or planning to farm in rural settings. Farmers Rising doesn't have reportable demographic information from field days / events and Farm Dreams Workshop, for the September 1, 2023 - September 1, 2024 time period. During the first year of this project, This Old Farm did not add demographics to our evaluations. Qualitatively we can report that we primarily served small scale niche meat producers during this first year, many of whom are getting into livestock production due to lack of commodity crop infrastructure. Others are environmentally conscious and see the need to build soil health by bringing livestock back to the farm. This Old Farm's average producer manages between 25 and 50 head of beef or beef equivalent.During year 1 of this project, we reached mostly existing producers but we also had a few that were still in the planning stages and had yet to start raising livestock.The majority of farmers in our cohort are a husband and wife team, but there are a few women-led operations.The women tend to focus on marketing while their partner focuses on raising the livestock but this is not always the case.The majority of our farmers fall below the United States Average Age of the American Farmer which is 57; many are between 30 and 40 years old. Changes/Problems:Two challenges came to light this year at Farmers Rising when working with and creating events for farmers, both centered around engagement. First, field day attendance was low unless held in collaboration with other non-profit organizations in the area; therefore, we focused on holding collaborative field days that pulled from multiple audiences. This change led to and increase in our ability to provide our farmers with expertise in areas that we normally would not be able to provide. Second, we struggled to keep our CRAFT Steering Committee adequately engaged. Our Steering Committee had enthusiasm at the beginning of the year when farmers have extra time for outside projects, but once spring and summer hits our farmers are busy on their farms, difficult to reach and provide little support. We have come to the difficult decision to change the CRAFT network structure and rename it the Farmers Rising farmer network. There will no longer be a steering committee but we will maintain an open, farmer-advisory structure in which everyone in our farming community is invited to a planning event at the beginning of each year and can help us choose topics for field days, workshops and social events for farmers. Both Farmers Rising and This Old Farm had challenges navigating community concerns regarding gathering demographic data during registration for field days, events and programs. We receive frequent pushback from, in particular, older community members regarding data collection for liability waivers and demographic information despite demographic surveys including opt-out answers of "prefer not to disclose". In response, we often have one-on-one conversations about our data management policies and practices, as well as transparency regarding what the information is for and how it is both stored and used.? What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Farmers Rising has ensured program staff were able to attend multiple conferences during Year 1 of the program. Project Director Jackie de Batista attended the BFRDP Project Director meeting in Denver, CO in October 2023; Kate Larson attended the New Entry Field School in Kansas City, MO in October 2023 and the Emerging Farmers Conference in February 2024; Jackie de Batista and Ritchie Wai attended the Farmland Summit conference in Minneapolis in November 2023;and Jackie de Batista, Kate Larson, Ritchie Wai and Rashad X attended the Everything Local Conference in Springfield, IL in January 2024. Jessica Roosa and Matthew Sims of This Old Farm attended the Know to Grow Conference in Indianapolois in January 2024; the Heart of America Grazing Conference in Cinnicinati, OH in February 2023; and the Soil Health and Sustainability Conference in West Lafayette, IN in June 2024. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Preliminary project results have been shared by social media and within organizational newsletters. As we make progress into Year 2and have more solid evaluation results available, we will share more broadly as well as format and load into Farm Answers. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Both Farmers Rising and This Old Farm made good progress during year one, with the exception of collecting evaluations. The timing of our programming made end of year surveying incongruent with the reporting period to the USDA. In year two, we willhave much more solid data after surveying participants in December 2024, and Farmers Rising is also shifting timelines for the holistic business planning trainingto better fit both the BFRDP grant period as well as our ability to serve our ncubator farmers.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Farmers Rising has had a transformative year as an organization from undergoing a rebrand initiative, changing our name from Angelic Organics Learning Center to Farmers Rising, updating organizational goals, and making personnel adjustments. Since receiving our BFRDP award we have benefited from working with This Old Farm to move our work toward our 3 main objectives forward. We immediately set ourselves on a positive path by working closely with our evaluators, Sift Consulting, to help us refine our project outcomes and outputs, and to design our evaluation tools. All Project staff at Farmers Rising and This Old Farm underwent an evaluation training with Sift in April, and began utilizing our evaluation tools as appropriate. Farmers Rising started our yearlong Farm Beginnings Course in early March, and will be finishing up at the end of November with 9 students completing the full course. They will graduate having created mission and vision statements, enterprise budgets, marketing plans and business plans. While we won't have evaluation results to report in this first year due to the timing of the course's end, much progress has been made which will be measured in December 2024 and reported in Year 2. The farmer-to-farmer Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training (CRAFT) Network held 4 field days in collaboration with other organizations to broaden our reach. To reach our climate change educational goals, we organized these events to ensure our host farmers discussed how they have adapted to changing weather conditions that have affected their farms in the last few years. Much background work has been done toward creating a climate change curriculum, and a six-class educational series entitled New Realities - Farming in the Climate Change Era will begin in November 2024 and feature experts in agriculture and climatology. Much progress has been made in pursuit of opening Farmers Rising's new livestock incubator program. We have raised an additional $240,000 to support infrastructure development, in addition to the staff funding support provided by BFRDP. Since September 2023, we have: Formed a BIPOC Incubator Advisory Council, and brought them together with staff and board for ongoing collaboration, advice and farmer support; Purchased a Pick-up Truck; Installed a well and 4 hydrants along the north side of the main grazing field; Developed an interactive map to enable infrastructure placement as well as guide grazing management; Promoted Ritchie Wai to be our Incubator Coordinator; and Developed an Incubator Handbook, Agreements, and Application. We decided to push back our timeline for accepting farmers applications and onboarding the new incubator farmers to Spring 2025, allowing time to finalize infrastructure development which took longer than anticipated and to also enable farmers to come aboard at a more natural time to begin a livestock operation. And while it took a couple of months of deliberation and exploration with NRCS to design a fencing plan and identify a suitable contractor, as a result of this process we have created a fencing mapping and design template which farmers can use to determine material needs and find regional suppliers. This tool can be duplicated to help farmers visualize production spaces, infrastructure placement, soil classes, future herd rotation and more. We have attached both of these as-yet-unformatted but useful tools to this report. Finally, basic background and procedural documents have been drafted including the Farmers Rising incubator handbook, farmer agreements, and application and scoring rubric. We are also thinking through how to best offer marketing support and cooperative/community-based approaches to integrate our rural-based farmers with other local disadvantaged farmers, local urban farmers, and the LFPA program. We are intentionally designing our program to better serve disadvantaged communities and community members, and hope to have more solid resources for sharing by the end of year 2. Currently, the Incubator Coordinator is exploring various pathways for recruitment within designated communities. At This Old Farm, we established a foundation of programming on which to grow from in supporting all 3 Project objectives during this first year. A new Pasture and Livestock Specialist, Matthew Sims, was onboarded early in the granting period and he has since built one-on-one mentor relationships with 40 separate farms offering on-farm visits and individualized guidance throughout the year. In addition, work was done to leverage programming that aligned with our objectives by concentrating on networking with other Agricultural Stakeholders to ensure duplication of programming was avoided. Utilizing this strategy allowed us to begin programming in Year 1 rather than having to concentrate on creation of curriculum. For example, a partnership was made with Farm Credit Services of Mid America to present financial programming, and NRCS to offer a soil health field day. These field days were offered in Ohio and in Indiana, expanding our reach to farmers. One of the most unique and rewarding pieces of This Old Farm's work within this Project is our opportunity to bridge the gap between farm practices and meat quality. To do so, we launched a free grade and yield program for beginning farmers, and are proud to end the year having offered 683 grade and yield reports to our participating farmers. We also held 2 separate meat processing plant tours to help our producers visualize carcass quality. One of these tours included a presentation by Purdue University's Meat Science Professor, Stacy Zuelly, who was able to walk through the information that can be gained from both a quality grade as well as a yield grade. Finally, the partnerships created with Agricultural professionals and organizations allowed us to concentrate on establishing networking opportunities between farmers for farmer-led support and education instead of worrying about creating new curriculum. We saw some excellent examples of beginning supportive relationships developing amongst our cohort of farmers, which was an unexpected result but may prove to be one of the largest impacts for our beginning farmers.

Publications