Growing Your Local Food System and Its Brands

This project uses a three-phase process to implement all educational programming to Extension agents.

1. Virtual education. We are creating an educational curriculum for Extension agents in the form of online (Zoom) webinars (http://extension.msstate.edu/content/growing-mississippi%E2%80%99s-local-foods-industry-webinar-series).
2. Face-to-face workshops. We will deliver all the training face-to-face with Extension agents, mentor farmers, and farm service agency employees.
3. Community implementation. Extension agents and mentor farmers will work together to implement local food promotion projects/initiatives. We will provide technical assistance to these teams as needed.
4. *On April 26, PI and Co-PIs (the MSU team) met via Zoom with David Redhage and others at SARE to discuss a slight modification to the educational approach. The following was agreed to by all parties as a modification to both the approach and some changes to the overall budget for promoting educational content. 
   1. The MSU team has produced a two-day in-service training for Extension agents. This content will be presented in the additional form of an online course. During the summer of 2019, the team will have each expert record his/her content (PowerPoint) and each session will be recorded by a videographer on staff at MSU Extension. The production goal will be to create an online course called "How To Grow Your Food Business." The marketing goal for creating brand awareness with Extension agents in Mississippi and beyond is to use some funds to create a social media account to promote the new course. This will be a budget reallocation but not a change in line items or other.
   2. The MSU team reported that the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce had declined their funding to promote the project's work. Instead, they informed the MSU team they would do their part of promoting the work without the need for direct funding.
   3. The MSU team will partner with several entities affiliated with the Mississippi-Tennessee-Alabama Rural Tourism Conference in October 2019. The purpose is to provide training to Extension agents and other stakeholders.
   4. The MSU team will partner with the Up in Farms Food Hub, Alliance of Sustainable Farms, and participants at the Mississippi-Tennessee-Alabama Rural Tourism Conference. These new partners will facilitate all face-to-face training for the project in 2019/2020.
   5. The MSU team will submit a budget modification to use the funds that were declined by the Mississippi Department of Agriculture and Commerce toward promoting the educational content of this project, especially the newly-to-be online course, “How To Grow Your Food Business. 
   6. *The original plan was to create face-to-face training for agents, but lack of Extension Agent participation in our scheduled workshop led us to reach out to our partners to deliver content to mentors from additional organizations, industry partners, and agricultural associations to participate in the training. This led to such successful educational efforts as the Soil to Shelf Workshop, the statewide Women for Agriculture Training, The Mississippi Alabama Rural Tourism Conference, and the Mississippi Farmers Market Workshop.
   7. *Additionally, it was also decided to shift the focus to creating online content to make the training more accessible, not only to in-state participants, but also Extension Agents, and mentors in neighboring states. This shift ultimately proved timely and effective because COVID-19 required a shift in how to deliver content.