By Sara Servin | NGFN Intern
Small and medium-scale farmers face a variety of market challenges, from consistent buyers to dependable crop insurance to food safety certifications. In our work, we acknowledge these diverse challenges facing farmers and strive to connect them with the tools and resources that are appropriate for their unique circumstances. Ultimately, we ask the question, how can we get good, healthy food into local and regional economies so that both the farmer and the community can thrive?
Our NGFN webinars are one way that we begin to address this question. We ensure high quality webinars with expert panelists on a wide range of topics on sustainable food systems. We welcome all those interested in food systems – from the consumer to the farmer – to participate in our webinars, ask questions, and learn something new from the experts and each other. If you’ve attended one of our webinars in the past, or are interested in the one of the future topics, please consider continuing your support or pledging today!
Our recently aired webinars:
April 16, 2015: Discerning Pallets: Grower’s Experiences Selling to Food Hubs
For recording, slides, presenter bios and more, visit this webinar’s full page here.
For this webinar, we have assembled farmers representing a wide variety of experiences – different geographies (CA, MT, MI, and MA), different sizes (from 8 to 400 ac.), different products (vegetables, animals, and mixed) … who sell into different kinds of food hubs (non-profit, for profit, growers co-op) asking different services from them (simple transport, sell-through, and selling to the hub).
Each of these farms has different reasons to work with their local food hub. What works for them? What doesn’t work so well? How do they choose what to sell through the hub? We’ve asked these farmers to share their unedited experiences and advice with their fellow farmers across the country who might now be considering a relationship with a food hub.
Learn how they chose to start selling to the hub, why, what the hub demands of them, what they get in return, how they are managing risks, and how their business' bottom line has been affected.
May 14, 2015: Crop Insurance for Small Farms: A Crash Course
For recording, slides, presenter bios and more, visit this webinar’s full page here.
Crop insurance is a critical part of a comprehensive risk management strategy. Matching operations with crop insurance options is important. In addition, identifying and matching a farm's overall business goals to other insurance tools is an important step in the growth and sustainability of the operation.
Learn about crop insurance options, what it means to be in an insurance contract, how to think about the best options for your farm, or the farms that you advise and work with.
Our upcoming webinars:
June 18, 2015: Creative Financing for Food
Is access to capital holding your food business back from thriving?
Whether you run a farm, food hub, processing facility, retail store, co-op or shared kitchen this webinar will introduce you to new and creative sources of capital.
August 20, 2015: One Page Cost Benefit Analysis Tool
Making decisions that make good financial sense is difficult. But difficult decisions become a whole lot easier when you have the right tool to walk you through the financial implications of your decision.
Meet the One Page Cost Benefit Analysis Tool. Recently created by Farm Credit, this tool is designed to make your difficult purchasing (or other financial) decisions a little easier.
Join us to learn how this powerfully simple tool can help your business today, or how you can use this tool to assist the farms and other business owners you work with.
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