Beginning Farmer Update
Kansas Rural Center has long focused on beginning farmer education. We were founding partners of the Growing Growers program in the early 2000s, which focuses on training new and beginning farmers in the Kansas City metro region. That program is especially focused on fruit and vegetable production, and I feel lucky to count myself as a graduate of Growing Growers. When my family and I moved back to Kansas in 2006 to start a farm, the Growing Growers program provided me with fundamental education and the opportunity to work on a couple of organic farms that were formative in teaching me how to farm in Kansas.
KRC still participates in the Growing Growers planning efforts, but over the past four years Kansas Rural Center has worked to develop our own beginning farmer programming. We developed our curriculum as part of a partnership with the Farm Beginnings Collaborative, a group of 15 organizations from across the country who focus on beginning farmer and rancher training over the past three years we have offered various iterations of this class of this program to Kansas producers. Our goal is to reach new and beginning farmers and ranchers across the state, focused on the skills that are needed by all different types of farmers and ranchers. This starts from the basics of developing a solid vision for what you want your farm to be. One of the delightful and challenging aspects of farming is there are so many different things to grow and ways to grow and sell them. That provides a near infinite amount of variability in how farms operate but can also be a challenge for those who do not have a clear vision of what they want. So, we start with helping participants envision what they want to do and then build on some basic business planning and management skills. We don’t dive too far into specific production techniques aiming to keep our programs widely useful. We have two different types of courses we offer, a short course which we call Farm Dreams, and a more in-depth course which we call Farm Beginnings. Farm Dreams focuses on
the very basic skills of considering a farm as a business operation and developing a basic business plan. We have offered Farm Dreams twice this year, once in the spring and again in July. The students that we engage with Farm Dreams are a mix of those who have recently started a small farm with the past couple of years and are searching for a little bit more direction as well as people who are really dreaming about farming. Farm Dreams is fully virtual and we have actually had several participants from out of state join us when the series was promoted in some national newsletters. While our work really is aimed at helping to educate the next generation of Kansas producers, all are welcome.
Our full Farm Beginnings course is an 8 to10 week course that we have offered as a mix of virtual and in person meetings. Its goal is to support farmers in developing a sharp focus in what they want to do, while providing more detailed information on critical topics like business structure and management and some of the legalities of farm operation. We are planning to offer the full, in-depth Farm Beginnings training later this winter. Stay tuned for our sign up for our Farm Beginnings course later this fall.
Article by Tom Buller