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.
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.
Farmers benefit from building knowledge about often nuanced and complex farm labor legal obligations. Farmers need to know more about their employment law obligations before they can set priorities, decide on action steps and begin to take action. This fact sheet covers basic farm employment law in Vermont: minimum wage, overtime, meal and rest breaks, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance.
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.
A Conversation with Lowcountry Local First and the Responsive Evolution of an Incubator and Apprenticeship Program presented by Brian Wheat, Lowcountry Local First, Friday, May 11th, 2018.
Join us for a conversation with Brian Wheat from Lowcountry Local First (https://lowcountrylocalfirst.org/). Their Good Farming initiative supports sustainable agriculture and is designed to grow and connect the local food system by training new farmers, supporting existing farm businesses and educating consumers. Additionally, they provide consulting services for private companies, municipal government, and anchor institutions to cultivate local farms and fill gaps in economic development activities. Lowcountry Local First has transitioned their farmer training program from an incubator farm model to an apprenticeship model that incorporates apprenticeships with local food businesses as well as farms, providing pathways to careers in food throughout the value chain. Learn about this transformation and participate in the discussion to see how their transition and lessons learned might be applicable to your farmer training program.
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 to 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 4: Building Online Engagement to Market Your Farm
Websites, social media, email, and other types of digital marketing are great tools, but they can also be a huge waste of time. This session will cover basic dos and don’ts of websites, tips for getting found on the web through search engine optimization and online directories, and making the most of email and social media marketing.
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 an MBA from the Simmons School of Management and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
