By Craig Cramer
New farmers — or farmers looking for more profitable enterprises — can start turning their dreams into reality with the help of a new online course offered by the New York Beginning Farmer Project http://beginningfarmers.cce.cornell.edu, part of the Cornell Small Farms program www.smallfarms.cornell.edu.
“Our audience for 'BF 101' is Internet savvy and can easily 'Google' their way through mountains of information,” says Erica Frenay, the project's manager. “But the main goal of this course is to help them make sense of all that information - to guide their decision-making and help them develop a sound business plan.”
The course builds on the success of other online courses, including plant propagation, organic gardening, and botanical illustration courses offered by the Department of Horticulture http://hosts.cce.cornell.edu/hortdl, and in particular the How, When, and Why of Forest Farming course http://hwwff.cce.cornell.edu, a collaboration between Horticulture and the Department of Natural Resources.
Beginning Farmer Project manager Erica Frenay (left) conducts a planning session with students in Hort 240, Exploring the Small Farm Dream.
Like the forest farming course, BF 101 features publicly available materials on a stand-alone website coupled with a virtual classroom for registered students only. In the virtual classroom, students blog, participate in small group discussions, interact with instructors, collect resources relevant to each lesson, and complete activities, such as helping a fictional new farmer make business decisions.
The syllabus starts with assessing goals and resources, moves through marketing, enterprise selection, and environmental stewardship, and winds up with a hard look at profit potential and business planning.
“The best thing about the course was that it got me going through the process of creating a business plan and thinking about things intensively,” says Amy Sommers, who is starting a fruit and vegetable operation in Madison County. “Otherwise I might have spent the winter skimming through seed catalogs and fantasizing about what I want to grow rather than actually planning.”
Sommers was one of 22 participants who pilot-tested the nine-week course last fall. For information about the next course, contact Erica Frenay at 607-255-9911 or ejf5@cornell.edu or visit the course website: http://beginningfarmers.cce.cornell.edu. The project is funded by the New York Farm Viability Institute www.nyfarmviability.org and Cornell Cooperative Extension www.cce.cornell.edu.
More Beginning Farmer resources
New York Beginning Farmer Project also publishes Guide to Farming in NYS: What Every Ag Entrepreneur Needs to Know, a reference for new and existing farmers alike with information about taxes, business planning, labor law, zoning, regulations, marketing, and more. It's available online at: www.smallfarms.cornell.edu/pages/resources/businessmanage/guide.cfm.
Students who are thinking about starting their own operation after graduation are flocking to Hort 240, Exploring the Small Farm Dream. This semester, registration had to be cut off when enrollment quickly reached the maximum of 32 students, and the class had to be moved to a larger room.