Nicole Cook, environmental and agricultural faculty legal specialist at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and Berran Rogers, UMES Extension Small Farm Program coordinator, were recently awarded an 18-month grant for $98,000 from the Northeast Extension Risk Management Education Center to provide free risk management education to farmers who are underserved by crop insurance. The MyFaRM (Mastering Farm Risk Management) project is supported by USDA/NIFA under award number 2018-70027-28588 and focuses on reaching underserved farmers, including farmers growing or who would like to grow underserved commodities or “specialty crops.”
MyFaRM is a series of classes about how to develop personal risk management plans in the areas of (1) production, (2) marketing, (3) finances, (4) human resources and (5) legal risk, with an emphasis on using Federal Crop Insurance and private insurance options to sustain and support the growth of their farming operations.
The MyFaRM team of instructors include experienced educators from ALEI, UMES Extension, University of Maryland Extension, Virginia State University, MARBIDCO, MidAtlantic Farm Credit and other industry experts, including farmers with experience in diversifying their farms and developing niche markets for their products. The project provides three different learning opportunities. First, a core group of farmers will commit to attend all of the classes and will “graduate” with a five-year risk management plan that they developed for their farms. Second, farmers who can commit to attending all of the classes within any given risk topic will also be invited to attend classes most important to their farming operation to learn about a particular area (or areas) of risk. Third, the grant team is working with an internationally renowned video production company, The Carlin Company, to ultimately offer a 10-part series of online, self-guided educational webinars to be made available for free on UMES Extension’s Small Farm Program website and the ALEI website.
The classes will kick off with an introductory class at UMES Extension’s 2020 Small Farm Conference this November. Participating core farmers will be granted a scholarship to attend the entire conference. All farmers who enroll to attend the marketing risk classes at the end of the series next summer will also be able to attend the last class in the series, which will coincide with the 2021 Small Farm Marketing Bus Tour.
In addition, core farmers who complete the series of courses will be provided scholarships to attend demonstration courses and field days offered by the UMES Extension Small Farm Program throughout the summer and fall of 2021, including learning about harvesting and processing specialty crops for markets. Core-farmer graduates of the program will also receive scholarships to attend the 2021 Small Farm Conference in November 2021.
Participants in the core-farmer group must commit to attend a minimum of eight of the classes, and all must commit to attend the introductory class and all of the classes on financial risk.
More information will be coming soon. Applications for core farmers will be taken in September. In addition, registration for the topic classes will be open. To help spread word about the program, please contact Cook at 410-651-6182 or Sharon Ward at smward@umes.edu for more information.
