New Entry's farmer library has hundreds of resources on sustainable farming, marketing, and operating a successful small business. Our physical library at our office in Beverly, MA contains books, CD's, DVD's periodicals, pamphlets, and videos in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Khmer. You can also search the directory below for downloadable digital resources, helpful web sites, and online farming videos.
Please visit or email us at nesfp@tufts.edu if you can't find what you're looking for here. Sometimes we are out in the field, so it's best to let us know if you're planning on stopping by.
New Entry's farmer library has hundreds of resources on sustainable farming, marketing, and operating a successful small business.
The Bookkeeping for Farmers webinar is part of the larning material produced with the Overcoming Risk During Climate Variability: The Importance of Recordkeeping in Small Scale Farming grant.
The slide deck include visuals, charts, and graphs to enhance understanding of the topic.
Handout that provides an overview of how to build your own pack-shed and walk-in cooler for a diversified vegetable/fruit farm. Based on a workshop held at the Farley Center's farm incubator.
The Building from the Ground Up: USDANRCS Conservation and FSA Loan 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 NRCS and FSA funding programs for beginning farmers. Topics covered in the workshop include:
Mission and benefits of working with FSA.
Getting started as beninning farmers.
Non-insured crop disaster assistance program.
Supervised credit and unique requirements.
Farm ownership loans.
Farm operating loans.
Down payment loan program.
Microloans.
General eleigibility and application process.
For additional information please reach us out at: nesfp@tufts.edu
Word document checklist for farmers to assess the completeness of a developed business plan. All regions. English Level: Advanced. Farming Level: Beginner. Literacy Level: High. Keywords: Business plan, market, marketing, product, competition, sales, operations, personnel, management, financial
How can small farmers attract and retain good workers, minimize their administrative burdens, and create new opportunities while doing so? What if a company could help small farmers across an entire region of the country meet their staffing needs, while at the same time covering administrative tasks from payroll to handling workers' compensation claims? What if this company could also guarantee farm workers year-round stability, either by connecting them with off-season jobs or providing them access to unemployment insurance? Further, what if this company gave both farm workers and farm owners the opportunity to take on leadership roles, or even invest and earn dividends? What if it helped farm owners capture social values that made them more enticing to workers and consumers alike?
As a group of partners in agriculture and academia, we have been gathering feedback on these solutions from both farm owners and farm workers through focus groups through a project supported by a Northeast SARE Novel Approaches grant. This report outlines the feasibility of collaborative solutions to labor challenges and proposes a path forward.
This report broadly refers to the proposed solutions as “collaborative labor solutions.” In some surveys and focus groups, the solutions were more specifically referred to as “Entity X” as part of a specific narrative used to solicit feedback. Broadly, in any collaborative labor solution, farms across a given region (possibly reaching across multiple states) would pool their resources into a new entity that would recruit and hire workers, distribute them across participating farms, and take care of the legal, financial, administrative, and Human Resources (HR) work involved in employing people. Farm owners would pay this entity an hourly rate per worker, and this would cover wages plus the entity's overhead. We used the shorthand “Entity X” to refer to this framework in our focus groups.
From there, the details of Entity X were meant to evolve to specific needs and desires. A collaborative labor solution could take the form of a farmer-owned cooperative, worker-owned cooperative, farmer-owned LLC, or a wholly separate temporary labor company. Depending on the structure and the specifics of the business model, farmers (and/or workers) could have the opportunity to invest—as well as the obligation of taking part in leadership and finding creative ways to generate a profit. Within any structure, participants would have to solve complex problems: balancing the scheduling needs of different farms, accounting for often unpredictable changes in those needs, ensuring the right balance of skills for different farms, maintaining fair wages, and providing housing and/or transportation for workers.
This guide discusses the understanding of producer and worker perceptions of labor problems and the potential for collaborative solutions and proposes a path forward.
Included in the guide is a discusion Toolkit for Farmers and fact sheets by Northeast state on the Basics of Farm Employment Law.
Working with towns and their agricultural commissions, New Entry Sustainable Farming Project’s Community Farmland Connections project uses spatial analysis to identify unused viable farmland and encourage landowners to lease their land to a farmer. Through spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and subsequent community education and outreach, this process can be a valuable way to increase the amount of viable farmland that is utilized in a given community. By reaching out to landowners in different areas, community groups can facilitate matches of prime farmland with beginning and existing farmers, in order to increase both new agricultural opportunities and local food for the town, county, and state.
This guide is intended to help municipal groups and/or agricultural non-profits think creatively about how to support new and beginning farmers finding land. It draws on the experience of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, a farmer-training program in northeastern Massachusetts, as we sought to find small parcels of farmland for the farmers graduating off of our incubator farm. It outlines step by step the spatial analysis and community process we went through with communities around Massachusetts.
Organized into a series of independent Fact Sheets, this guide allows you to explore topics as needed or follow along as a complete resource, content Includes:
Getting Started: Learn about farming education, finding a suitable farm, and essential infrastructure.
Financing and Risk Management: Explore options for financing farm operations, managing risks, and understanding insurance needs.
Use this soil amendment application template developed by Cornell's GAP program (https://gaps.cornell.edu/educational-materials/decision-trees/log-sheets...) to help record what, how much and where you apply fertilizers on your farm. This template will help you with both the Nutrient Management Plan required by the Massachusetts Department of Agricultual Resources (starting in 2016) and to help with your farm's food safety plan.
