This Farm Financial Calendar Tool from The Carrot Project is designed to help you stay on track during the growing season with daily, weekly, monthly, and annual tasks. Adapt the Calendar to your farm's needs and realities and create a personalized financial management calendar for your farm.

To view a webinar on how to use the tool, click here.

The CSA FoodBook for a Sustainable Harvest by Elizabeth Henderson (1994) is a compilation of recipes for CSA shareholders to enhance the concept of the CSA through education on how to best use ingredients by season. 

This workbook, in its first edition, is currently being used in a pilot program by the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project as a tool for participatory goal setting and skills assessment/development.

Updates and revisions will be made based on participant feedback at the conclusion of the pilot program.

For more information on using this tool, please contact Jennifer Hashley. 

The Unlocking MA Money for Your Farm: Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources (MDAR) Grants and Financial Assistance Programs webinar, is part of the Investing in Your Farm: Accessing Grants and Loans for Growing Your Business workshop series, hosted by the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project.

In this webinar, instructors share knowledge/understanding of MDAR grants and funding programs for agricultural projects. Topics covered in the workshop include:

• MDAR Farm Viability Programs (FVEP, IVP, MEGA), grant process, classes and other grants.
• Urban agriculture, Food Venture, Mass Food Trust. 
• Grant reciepients experiences.

For additional information please reach us out at: nesfp@tufts.edu

This tool is designed for beginning farmers who want to learn vegetables names in English. This lesson includes activities for farmers to identify vegetables by reading, writing, listening, and seeing photos.

The University of Wisconsin developed this spreadsheet as an intuitive system for data organization for diversified vegetable farms. It is an excel based spreadsheet with three input pages and three output pages. Expenses are entered on the first spreadsheet page, and sales information on another. A third sheet requires growers to allocate detailed expenses to each crop including production labor hours. The spreadsheet uses the data from the input pages to calculate each crop’s cost per pound ($/lb), breakeven price, and gross margin by market channel.

This guide provides farmer resources specific to veterans who wish to find a job in farming, or begin their own market-based agricultural business.  The guide also includes farmer veteran profiles, a section on how to use your GI bill, and links to organizations which provide farmer training.

The What to Wash and What Not to Wash signs are visual aides to assist farmers at the wash station in order to recognize which vegetables should be washed in water and those that should not be washed with water. This resource can be used by staff as a guide to teach farmers during a workshop on post-harvest handling, but then will stand alone as a large sign in a farm wash station area. Staff will use hands-on demonstration to show farmers how to utilize the wash station and follow food safety procedure; this is one piece of that education.

Paperwork can be the bane of the certified-organic, GAPs-audited, and financially-aware farmer. Learn how to capture information, get on top of your paperwork, and wow your inspector, auditor, and banker. Chris Blanchard provides an overview of the basic techniques he and his crew used to gather information and keep it organized for easy access with a minimum of effort.

To help us continue to provide high quality programs and events, please fill out this brief evaluation after watching the webinar: http://www.tfaforms.com/377522

Marketing can help you decide what to grow or produce, choose where and how you want to sell it, differentiate yourself from other farmers, and make effective use of social media and other marketing tools. Learn the basics of doing your own marketing or supervising someone else. This series of 4 webinars is designed as a complete marketing class, but you can view each one as a stand alone course. 

Webinar 1: Use Market Research to Guide Farm Business Decisions

If you want to grow your business, you need to sell more to your existing customers, sell to new customers, and/or expand the number of products or services you offer. Market research can help you generate new ideas and choose the best options. This session will show you how to use basic market research to assess market trends, understand your current or potential customers, and decide what products, prices and channels make sense for your farm. 

About the Instructor:

Myrna Greenfield, founder and “Top Egg” at Good Egg Marketing, provides expert marketing for good food and good causes. Good Egg helps businesses increase sales and build customer loyalty through brand development, sales and marketing strategies, websites, and social media. Greenfield is a frequent speaker, trainer and workshop presenter. She holds and MBA from the Simmons School of Management and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. 

Webinar recorded on May 30, 2018.