Money

The Texas Center for Local Food is launching a series of community meetings this fall about Making Money for Your Farm! 

The series will explore marketing and sales topics by and for Texas farmers and ranchers. Meetings are an opportunity to learn from, connect, and ask questions of other Texas producers while building community connections and learning how to grow your farm business. Registration is FREE and required in advance via Zoom.

Register today and please share with other farmers – experienced, new, and aspiring alike!

🍴 How to Break into Restaurant Sales — Wednesday, September 6th — 6:00 – 7:30pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErcO2vrjMoG9a-26BE0DIUQw8WiHCydJIO 

For the first event on September 6, Texas farmers and chefs discuss what you need to do as a farmer to sell to restaurants and what to keep in mind when you’re building your relationship with chefs. Featuring Finegan Ferreboeuf of Steelbow Farm, Chelsea Fadda of Pecan Square Cafe, Marcella Juarez of Palo Blanco Farm & Ranch and Nadia Casaperalta of South Texas College’s Culinary Department. Bring your questions, share with your network, and register today!

🥕 Best Practices for Selling at Farmers Markets — Wednesday, October 4th — 6:00 – 7:30pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0rceyopjIsGNGU7yEdobREz-fKgupYtpb5 

Are you interested in selling at farmers markets, or making improvements to your current setup? Join the Texas Center for Local Food for the second event of their Making Money for Your Farm series on October 4th from 6:00pm – 7:30pm!

Hear from two experienced farmers market vendors – Kay Bell with Passion Garden Farm and Chisa Brigham at HAD Land Farms – about what they’ve learned and how they maximize their profitability at market. They’ll discuss best practices for display, sales, and logistics, and leave plenty of time for discussion and questions. Register today & please share!


📈 Harvest & Sales Tracking Tools — Wednesday, November 1st — 6:00 – 7:30pm

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEsduGuqTkiHtXbdwHR11PdcvpswrWXxGQ8

So you’re selling your products but you don’t have a great system in place to keep track of it all… come learn from two Texas producers and educators – Shakera Raygoza of Sentli Regenerative Center and Terra Preta Farm, and Michelle Akindiya of Farmshare Austin – what it looks like to track harvests and sales across different market channels. They’ll share and explain their farm harvest and sales tracking systems, and how they utilize services like Square and Quickbooks. We’ll leave plenty of time for discussion, and we’ll send you home with customizable tracking spreadsheet templates.

This is our list of our bests for 2020.. we begin this blog post on Dec 7 and will add to it as we approach year end..

Best Report: The Food system: Concentration & Its Impacts by a respected group of authors including our own Douglas Constance from Sam Houston State University. Report presentation video.

Best Books we read: Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas. Gratitude to the National Good Food Leadership Network book club for including this book. Grain by Grain, another winner by Elizabeth Carlisle with Bob Quinn takes the reader through the long process to establish sound, durable businesses based on values of nutrition and retention of footways that are good for people and planet.

Best Virtual Conference: Mission Capital Data Institute Conference. The combination of pre-recorded 15m sessions coupled with 45m live sessions was a lively experience. This is one of the few conferences where I went back and viewed recordings of sessions I’d missed. The main benefit was the relevant topics including How to Make An Infographic and How to Use Pivot Tables in Excel. The agenda was laid out clearly and it was pretty easy find sessions. I found myself rushing a bit from session to session – not that different from in person life. -SB

Best New Way to Think About Food System VisionFood System Vision Prize Themes from OpenIDEO When we look at our work from different perspectives, we see more open doors to creating the new food system we want. (1) Traditional Wisdom & Practices (2) Community-informed Policy (3) Hyper-localization (4) Human-first Technology.

Best Indicators of a Shift in Academic Thinking About Food Systems – National Academy of Sciences workshop “Healthy People, Healthy Planet: Building a More Sustainable, Resilient, Equitable, and Nourishing Food System – A Workshop“, July 2020. The introduction by Dr. Patrick Stover, Dean Texas A&M AgriLife describes changed expectations of our food systems shifting to a more systemic analysis focused on long term health and environmental impact. Dr. Stover draws on the 2015 report, “A Framework For Assessing Impacts of the Food System” as the basis for this shift in expectations. Dr. Ricardo Salvador of the Union of Concerned Scientists walks through one example (among many) of COVID-19 among meat packing plant workers to demonstrate that scientists cannot legitimately address food as system without considering work welfare. Watch the videos here. Stover Salvador

Best New Government Resource – The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service Transportation and Marketing Program webinars and resource listings during COVID-19 have been excellent resources, highlighting outstanding COVID responses for us all to leverage across the nation. The website design highlights sharing of the multitude of local food resources offered and gathered by this critical front line agency.

Local Food As Economic DevelopmentWorking Landscapes video. Food processing for schools and rural communities in Warren County, North Carolina. Worth a watch for economic development professionals! they used in depth participatory process called “Community Voice“.

by Carolina Mueller

The Texas Center for Local Food invited Carolina Mueller to share her impressions of the training in support of our collective work to create anti-racist food systems in Texas. We are grateful for her willingness to share. Carolina is a food systems practitioner, part-time farmer and full-time graduate student at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Carolina is the volunteer President of the Central Texas Young Farmers Coalition. Over the past decade, Carolina has worked in a number of positions all along the food chain. Her work in food spans from the big-picture national policies down to the personal experiences of individuals and communities.

In August 2020, I had the pleasure of attending the Uprooting Racism in the Food System training organized by Soul Fire Farm. I would like to share some of my experiences and takeaways from this training in the hopes that it contributes to the formation of a collective learning community that explores the effects of race, class and power in food. Food Justice and equity are phrases that many of us have been thinking and talking about recently as we consider how to fix our very violent food system. Two questions that I keep asking myself are: 1) what is equity really and truly in food systems and 2) how are we embodying it in our work? Sprinkled throughout, you will see more questions that I ask myself and ask you. The Soul Fire Farm training helped me get closer to answering these questions through historical education, poetry, personal reflection in addition to sharing tools and action items.

The training began by setting expectations that we would not expect to solve anything in these three hours. I appreciated the acknowledgment that centuries of harm won’t be solved in just one training. This was followed by calling in our ancestors, someone who came before us who we carry in our lives and work. For me it was my paternal grandmother, Ingeborg Keller, who passed when I was just a baby but is my closest familial connection to food production. The summoning of over 130 other names was such a powerful place to start and to acknowledge that the past is present. It also awakened in me the desire to dig more deeply into how those who lived before me have gotten me to where I am now. Who came before you that you want to learn more about? How does their life, personality or values connect to you?

Next, we moved on to a brief but important history lesson to contextualize how our (not broken, functioning just as it was built to) food system came to be. I learned about the Discovery Doctrine and The Tuskegee Institute Movable School established by Booker T. Washington. The Discovery Doctrine is the idea that European monarchies have a right to colonize and claim land in the name of spreading christianity. This notion, upheld by Justice John Marshall in the Supreme Court in 1823 (spoiler alert: Marshall owned land that he would have lost claims to without this decision) is the toxic sludge from which our current food system emerged. This is just one example of our messed up history, but we didn’t only focus on what was wrong with our history. Another big focus of what we learned was the notion of Indigenous and Black joy, resistance and resilience against the system of White Supremacy, like the Tuskegee Institute Movable School. I was in awe that those kidnapped and enslaved had the foresight, imagination and hope to braid seeds into hair, bringing with them the potential to plant a new future. If we let ourselves dream and imagine, what kind of food system could we create?

One of the tools that we were provided was a rubric to evaluate to what extent our organizations are complicit with the culture of White supremacy. Having worked in food nonprofits my whole career, this rubric really illuminated just how far the Central Texas food and farming community has to go. We could all benefit from this kind of critical introspection, and I urge our predominantly White nonprofit community to consider this training and apply the rubric to their work. Then, after finding opportunities for growth, making those shifts in leadership, power and vision. Who is allowed to be seen as a leader? How does current leadership make power or take power in our community?  Equity is more than a buzzword that organizations can drop into a mission statement or a job title; in order to have any meaning at all, it must be anchored in the desire to radically upend how we structure our work. That work will need to happen inside of us, inside of our organizations and inside of our larger communities.

Whether you are acting as an individual, a farm or an organization, here are some action items from Soul Fire Farm that you can explore, reflect on and manifest. Below are the action items that stood out most to me.

  • Reparations: person-to-person reparations
  • Policy: Fairness for Farmworkers (HR 40) and Breathe Act
  • Rematriation: Returning land
  • Solidarity shares: CSA sliding scale option
  • Divest/invest: supporting farms, businesses, organizations, institutions advancing food justice
  • Create good jobs and hire equitably

Before contacting Soul Fire Farm, learn about their work. Register for their Uprooting Racism training. Support the work of Soul Fire Farm.

Farmer Market Managers Highlights (full report is here)

In 2019, Farmers Market Managers operated 8,140 farmers markets.

The largest number of markets operated during June through September. The month of July was the highest month of operation, followed closely by August, with 71.9 percent and 71.8 percent, respectively. Twenty-one percent of the markets operated year round.

At 52.4 percent, Saturday was the most common day of operation.

Fruits and vegetables composed the most common food category sold at 99.6 percent of markets, followed by Condiments and sauce at 94.1 percent.

The percent of markets that had locally grown labeling totaled nearly 84.7 percent. Gluten free and Grass-fed had 46.1 percent and 46.0 percent, respectively.

Of the 4,076 markets that accepted Federal Nutrition Programs, 78.7 percent accepted Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Of the 4,352 vendors/producers who accepted Federal Nutrition Programs, 66.7 percent accepted Women, Infants and Children’s (WIC) Farmers Market Nutrition Program (FMNP), followed closely by Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP) at 66.3 percent.

On an average market day, 916 households shopped across markets in the U.S. and spent $14,547 per farmers market.

Farmers Market Managers served as paid employees in 4,321 markets, while in 3,162 they served as volunteers. On average, the paid Farmers Market Mangers earned $18.40 per hour. Managers worked an average of 19.4 hours per week.

There were 31,609 volunteers contributing their time across 5,078 markets.

Do you see an important gap in the sustainable agriculture information available today? Do you know of information from SARE-funded research or education projects that could help fill this gap if it were widely available in an easy-to-use information product? If so, SARE wants to hear from you! [SARE is Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education].

Please help SARE Outreach meet the needs of today’s farmers, ranchers and agricultural educators by submitting your ideas for new or enhanced information products using the link below by March 1.

  Submit your product idea here!

Submissions will be prioritized by the SARE Outreach Steering Committee for development based on alignment with SARE Outreach’s selection criteria and capacities. Please note:This survey is intended to assess information needs and opportunities only. Submission or acceptance of product concepts does not constitute a request for or guarantee of funding to develop the product.

Please contact SARE Outreach at sare@sare.org if you have questions or comments about this survey. Visit www.sare.org for more information about resources available from SARE Outreach.