We had a wonderful and very productive time at the TOFGA conference this year. Here are links to PDFs of our presentations.
Value-Added Production with Jonathan Hogan of Wicked Good – Here’s the link to Jonathan’s PDF presentation slides about Wicked Good and here’s the link to a PDF of our presentation “Finding your Opportunity.” For our project “Beyond Fresh,” funded by Southern SARE and led by NCAT, we will be releasing a guide to help Texas family farmers decide whether processing your crops is a good business decision. The guide will be published later in 2018. The workbook will include calculators to guide your financial decisions. To get an early look at our calculators, please visit our Value-Added Processing section.
Food Hub Feasibility Study – We hosted a lunchtime outreach session to listen to farmers talk about food hubs. We brainstormed questions, concerns and benefits and enjoyed a lively discussion. Here’s the agenda as a PDF plus we added a discussion of benefits. We showed just a few slides and here they are as a PDF. For more info on the project and to complete our farmer survey, please visit the project page. Later in 2018, we’ll share the results of the outreach and brainstorming session.
Food Systems from the Farmer View – Looking at the food supply chain as a value chain, rather than a simple movement of food and money, enables us to think about equity in our food system. Are all participants in the food system getting value from their participation?
Local Food Value Chain
Are you as a farmer getting the price you require? Is the mom assured her daughter will be fed healthy, local food at school? We shared our work as a member of the USDA FoodLINC cohort to develop strong local food value chains in Texas. Dr. Rebekka Dudensing shared early results of our Local Food Price study that will be released in 2018 and we hope this study will help you begin a conversation about prices where farmers and buyers could meet for specific vegetables grown. Here are our slides as a PDF.
Where do you find resources to develop your farm business? Your value-added business? Ava Cameron presented our new Resource Directory. If you are a Business member of the Texas Center for Local Food, you’ll be automatically added to the directory. If you have ideas for businesses we should add, please let us know. We are developing this directory with NCAT and we want it to be useful for you! Resource Directory Contact: Ava Cameron AskMe@TexasLocalFood.org