Building Grassroots Infrastructure for Peer-to-Peer Learning and Support for Sustainable Farmers in Alabama

Objectives 1 & 2 (Central Alabama CRAFT Network):

The grant period began right as the COVID pandemic shut down much of the world.  Our planned April 2020 CRAFT workshop was cancelled, but we transitioned quickly to doing virtual CRAFT workshops, as follows:

• May 2020 - McDowell Farm School, Homestead Poultry Keeping (virtual).  This workshop featured a virtual farm tour of the McDowell Farm School as well as a video workshop on selection, nutrition, care, and infrastructure for homestead-scale poultry.  Host Aubrey Gallegos alternated between sharing pre-recorded videos of different parts of the farm, with live commentary and Q&A.  Full video available here.
• June 2020 - Blue Rooster Farm, Perennial Cut Flowers and Basic Cut Flower Design (virtual).  This workshop featured a virtual farm tour of Blue Rooster Farm which raises cut flowers both in a high tunnel and in the field.  It also featured a short workshop of cut flower design basics led by Allison Creel.  Kirk and Allison shared information about farm funding, including about the NRCS grant that helped Kirk and Allison acquire their high tunnel.  Full video available here.
• July 2020 - Marble Creek Farmstead, Advanced Poultry Production and Processing (virtual).  This workshop featured a virtual farm tour of Marble Creek Farmstead and Marble City Meats USDA Certified meat processing facility.  Led by Matthew Lawrence, the prerecorded video clips were interspersed with slides detailing everything about the farm's production, from feed costs and vendors to shelter specs to potential animal health issues.  Participants were able to hear from Matthew about his process creating and certifying his USDA Certified meat processing facility for poultry, beef, and goat.  Matthew was also transparent about funding and farm business management, investments and debts.  Full video available here.
• August 2020 - Farm Business Management Panel featuring Laurie Moore of Moore Farms and Friends, Sheila Dicks of Joy Haven Farm, and Travis Kress of Wallace State Community College Agriculture/Horticulture (virtual).  At this virtual panel discussion, each farmer shared about the evolution of their farm business over the life of their farm, and what informed their decision-making at each step along the way.  They shared strategies for recordkeeping and accounting, budgeting and profitability, insurance, and hiring help. Travis Kress provided information about beginner farmer business program through WSCC, information on where to sign up, duration of class and learning objectives.  Full video available here.
• September 2020 - Dynamite Hill Smithfield Community Land Trust and Fountain Heights Farm - Ancestralization, Healing and Reclamation: Earth Narratives in Urban Farming (virtual). Majadi Baruti & Susan Diane Mitchell from Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust and Dominique Villanueva & Christopher Gooden from Fountain Heights Farm spoke about their process in starting their farming projects and their commitments to Black urban farming and reclaiming, restoring, and reconnecting with city land to benefit their communities. Each presenter spoke to their particular rituals, values and belief systems that they use to connect with their ancestry and the earth throughout their cultivating and caretaking of the land they farm. Participants were invited to share their particular earth traditions with each other in this session. Included in the presentation was technical information about the formation of the Dynamite Hill-Smithfield Community Land Trust. Full video available here.
• October 2020- Luddite Farm, Biodynamic Farming (virtual).  This workshop featured a virtual farm tour of Luddite Farm, which primarily raises goats and garlic.  Host Joan Robertson shared information about Draft animals and biodynamic farming, as well as information about collaborating with local extensions and universities to do research projects (Joan is currently working on a research project on Husk Cherry production).  Full video available here.
• May 2021 - Farmer Physical Health, with Joanna Mann, Licensed Massage Therapist and Herbalist of Walden Farmacy, Bessemer, AL and Carmen E. Capó-Lugo, PT, PhD from UAB (virtual). This workshop provided farmer-specific ergonomic exercises, tips, and resources to ease pain and support body health, as well as a wealth of nutritional and movement-focused information for promoting overall physical health, for farmers whose body is their most important tool.  Full video available here.
• June 2021 - River Queen Greens, Building Strong Farm Teams (virtual).  Cheryl Nunes and Annie Moore of River Queen Greens shared about their management strategy and guiding principles, apprenticeship program, the nuts-and-bolts logistics of coordinating multiple crews on two farm sites, and so much more. Co-moderators Sarah Bell from Jones Valley Teaching Farm and Charlie Griffin from Hepzibah Farms, posed questions of Cheryl and Annie, and also shared some from their own experience as farm managers and employees. This workshop was not exclusively geared towards farm owners, crew leaders, and supervisors, but was intended to be particularly useful for members of the ASAN network in those positions, as well as farm employees. Full video available here.
• July 2021 - EAT South, Tool School (in person).  This workshop hosted by Caylor Roling of EAT South focused on tool repair and maintenance with information on ergonomic use of tools and finding quality tools that are easier on the body. Participants shared their favorite tools, tool care tips, and homemade tools that they brought along. There was a social gathering following in person where farmers connected with each other.

Outreach for the above activities included:

• Promoting each event in ASAN’s monthly e-blast (sent to over 2000 contacts by email) and online events calendar (http://asanonline.org/events)
• Promoting each event on ASAN’s social media accounts on Facebook and Instagram.  This includes creating Facebook event pages for each event, direct-inviting individuals to those events and sharing them in groups and on partner pages
• Calling, texting, and sending targeted emails to past CRAFT participants and other engaged CRAFT members 
• 1:1 leadership development meetings with CRAFT SC members
• Grassroots outreach through CRAFT SC members and other engaged CRAFT attendees, ie sharing on their social media pages and to their networks through other channels.

Other project activities related to the Central Alabama CRAFT Network included a virtual Steering Committee (SC) meeting in February 2021, where the SC evaluated the 2020 CRAFT season and made programming decisions for the 2021 season.

Some unanticipated challenges and key takeaways include:

• The COVID-19 pandemic required new ways of reaching and working with farmers. For some of our farmers, 2020 CRAFT workshops were the first time they were attending or leading a workshop on Zoom.  We provided ample tech support, and did individual coaching with farmer-presenters to build skills on online presenting and tools.  We streamed all workshops simultaneously on Facebook as well.
• ASAN staff learned from other programming and from post-workshop feedback, how to make CRAFT programming more effective and engaging in 2021. Changes included shifting the time for networking/socializing to the beginning of the session and creating a facilitator role for SC member hosts.
• In January 2020 the CRAFT SC decided that the year's workshops would cover a mix of in-depth/advanced and introductory level topics.  Attendees, accordingly, were a mix of farmers as well as gardeners, homesteaders, and interested members of the general public.  In 2021, the CRAFT SC decided to focus on more intermediate and advanced level topics only, in order to appeal more exclusively to those who were actively farming.  
• In 2021 the SC was able to use the (preliminary) results of the FNA to guide programming decisions.
• In 2021 the SC also decided to break from the established format of CRAFT being hosted only by farmers themselves, in order to bring in vetted non-farmer experts on certain topics (e.g. mental health, physical health).  These speakers were selected for their ability to make their expertise relatable and accountable to farmers' experience, and farmer-experts "co-hosted" the workshops as interviewers and moderators of the Q&A with their peers.

Farmer Needs Assessment (Objectives 3&4)

In October 2020 ASAN hired three Farmer Needs Assessment (FNA) Fellows: Nonhlanhla Jones, Darren Beachem, and Olivia Cleveland. Fellows were selected for their familiarity with farming and the Alabama sustainable farming community (all three are farmers themselves), their geographic distribution, their ability to connect with a diverse target audience of interviewees (all three Fellows are Black, two are women, and represent a range of ages and cultural backgrounds).

The Farmer Support Coordinator provided training for the Fellows in October-November 2020 (as well as throughout the interview process), which included:

• Education on interview skills for research projects
• Education on ASAN history/structure/programming
• Technical competencies - Zoom, Google Docs, Survey Monkey, Chromebooks, Google Docs phone app, recording audio on Chromebook, and effective interview notetaking
• Working knowledge of a wide variety of topics like farm equipment, healthcare navigation, and government programs and grants, for purposes of education/resource-sharing during interviews

Between November 2020 and February 2021, the Farmer Support Coordinator and the FNA Fellows collectively conducted 50 interviews with sustainable producers across Alabama.  These interviews were not primarily educational events, but did provide some indirect education including:

• Education on ASAN mission, values, structure
• Government grant and loan funding and other resources, including resources specifically for women farmers and farmers of color
• SAAFON
• Gender Identity and pronouns, what LGBTQ stands for
• Importance of written business plans and growth plans, in order to apply for funding
• There were questions that were geared towards assessing the level of familiarity farmers had with certain technologies of sustainable farming including familiarity of succession planning, seed saving, and how often farmers soil test. Included in this section were opportunities for farmers to reflect on the way that their land has changed over time and their impact on this land. This part of the assessment provided a structural framework  to encourage farmers to reflect on themselves as land stewards, through the questions asked and with the support of the interviewer.
• Because we hired three fellows who are themselves all Black farmers, two of whom are young farmers, and two who fall in the beginning farmer category, the assessment process connected Black farmers to each other and provided opportunity for mentorship.

In March 2021 we conducted a Farm Employee Focus Group virtually over Zoom. The slides, which include notes, from this event can be found here.  As all 50 FNA participants were farm owners and/or primary operators, we realized we unwittingly excluded the voices of sustainable farm employees. The farm employee focus group was intended to begin to fill this unintentional gap in the FNA data. Participants in the focus group shared that while there are a multitude of wonderful aspects of being a farm employee, they also have witnessed and/or experienced firsthand a number of labor concerns (outlined in the Farming in the Margins final report accessible in full here).

In late March 2021 we held a Network Wide Focus Group, also virtually over Zoom. The slides from this event can be found here. This focus group was a “first look” at the initial findings of the FNA, and an opportunity to receive feedback from FNA participants (and others in the ASAN network) about what they felt was pertinent to include in the final FNA report.

Like the FNA interviews themselves, the primary goal of these focus groups was not educational, but they nonetheless had indirect educational impact, including: 

• The initial findings of the assessment itself. One attendee, a white man, reported that it was his first time hearing about the racialized discrimination of farmers of color in loan offices. Another educational moment was the stratification of income.
• For the farm-employee group, participants were concerned, though not surprised, based on their own experiences to hear that farmers by and large recruit through word of mouth and family connections and often are not hiring full time employees.

In June 2021 ASAN released Farming in the Margins: A 2020-2021 Needs Assessment of Alabama Sustainable Producers Report. Beside connectivity through the interviews and focus groups themselves, and influence of the findings on programming, the Farming in the Margins report is a resource for small, sustainable farmers and supporting organizations for the years to come. The report was distributed through traditional media (press release), social media, ASAN’s email distribution list, on ASAN’s website, and through ASAN partner organizations and agencies. Follow-up promotion on ASAN’s social media included educational posts highlighting the findings. All 50 farmer participants received printed copies of the report in the mail. Initial feedback from partners (including ACES Extension agent and Alabama Arise advocates) endorsed the report and spoke highly of it as an educational resource for direct service providers and non-profit organizations who support farmers. 

Some unanticipated challenges and key takeaways include:

• Interviews were conducted in person but socially distanced due to COVID, which meant that recordings were sometimes difficult to make out; since this process was an important oral history collection opportunity, if we were to do it again we would have invested in more sophisticated recording equipment for interviews.
• As is consistent with the nature of research projects, as time progressed some interview questions proved to be especially generative and important, while others turned out to be less so. We learned what questions, especially open ended questions to ask farmers, and the insights gleaned from these observations are already being incorporated into program evaluations and conversations with farmers.
• The findings from the FNA were incorporated into CRAFT 2021 programming and the program selection for the 2021 Food and Farm Forum, including CRAFT sessions on access to capital, building strong farm teams (labor), and collective/cooperative farm business structures, and Forum sessions on farm/business management software, shipping frozen meat, climate change mitigation strategies, and more.
• ASAN staff and Board of Directors utilized the data from the FNA to inform significant organizational development work in 2021, including an organization-wide shift towards a deepened focus on community organizing, collective action, and policy work in the next several years.