Final report for LNE22-436
Project Information
Collaborative aggregation and marketing models, defined in recent scholarship as Mediated Market Models (MMMs) are an emerging adaptation of direct-to-consumer (DTC) markets that blend the benefits of direct relationships to customers with coordinated aggregation across multiple farms. Typically organized by a single intermediary—such as a cooperative, nonprofit, or private enterprise—MMMs vary in structure, scale, and governance but share a commitment to values such as fair pricing, transparency, and sustainable farming. They offer scale-appropriate solutions to the limitations of DTC markets by reducing the labor burden on farmers, improving convenience and choice for consumers, and sustaining product quality and traceability. MMMs have demonstrated particular value during periods of disruption, where their flexibility and collaborative design supported greater resilience. However, these models face operational and financial challenges that must be addressed to ensure their long-term sustainability.
This research and education project was designed to identify common operational and financial challenges and facilitate the sharing of emerging knowledge and strategies to advance their development. We hosted a series of in‑person and virtual workshops designed to foster peer learning and farmer-practitioner knowledge exchange. We co-organized a bilingual session with Fresh Start Farms to meet the needs of New American farmers, ensuring equitable access to knowledge-sharing opportunities across linguistic and cultural communities. Workshops featured MMM practitioners who shared experiences with both successes and persistent barriers, while facilitated breakout sessions supported participants with identifying shared challenges, exchanging strategies for improving market coordination, and articulating needs for further research, technical assistance, and policy support. These small group discussions were recorded (with permission and IRB approval) by the research team to generate a robust dataset of practitioner insights that were later synthesized into a workshop summary report produced in partnership with the UNH Carsey School.
The research included a literature review that integrated research articles with gray literature—such as nonprofit-generated resources, grant reports and extension publications to deepen understanding of the organizational and economic dynamics underlying MMMs. Gray literature was assessed as contextual evidence, offering real-world examples of emerging models and regionally specific challenges and opportunities. Building on this research, the project conducted a comparative case study of four New England models—Local Harvest, Three River Farmers Alliance, Vernon Family Farm Store, and Fresh Start Farms—representing a diversity of governance structures and operational strategies. Through 49 interviews with farmers, core personnel, and customers, the research examined how organizational structures shape the distribution of risks and benefits, what motivates participants to engage in MMMs, and how external pressures influence overall economic and operational viability. Qualitative analysis assessed performance across farmer and customer satisfaction, labor demands, and approaches to addressing operational challenges, producing a richly detailed understanding of the internal dynamics that contribute to MMM success or strain. A complementary financial assessment conducted by the Food Works Group evaluated financial performance across key metrics, including gross and net revenue trends, scaling impacts, and changes associated with expanding sales channels. This analysis clarified the economic pressures MMMs face and identified areas where targeted investments or operational adjustments could improve financial sustainability.
Findings to date indicate that MMMs are most effective when supported by strong governance, equitable distribution of labor and benefits, and clear communication among farmers, staff, and customers. Farmers are motivated not only by expanded market access but also by the ability to focus on core production strengths rather than navigating all aspects of marketing alone, or producing everything their customers want.
The educational program contributed to observable farmer learning outcomes, including strengthened peer networks, shared strategies for addressing common challenges, clearer understanding of governance and communication best practices, and improved capacity to evaluate financial performance and operational decisions. Together, the project’s research and educational initiatives have produced actionable insights that support farmers, service providers, and food system leaders in developing and sustaining collaborative marketing models that are viable, resilient, and aligned with core values.
130 farmers who participated in the workshops will increase their participation in MMMs or join an existing or newly created MMM by selling at least five percent of their products through a New England MMM. Farmers’ participation in MMMs will result in an average of $200 net income per week and 5 hours per week of reduced marketing labor per farmer.
Problem and Justification:
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) market models such as farmers’ markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) appeal to a limited population of consumers. Growth beyond this population has been stagnant for a decade, limiting market access for small and mid-sized farms in New England reliant on these markets. For farmers, DTC markets require substantial time and labor, yet are unreliable and often inadequate, thus limiting farmers’ ability to increase production. For consumers, DTC markets are inconvenient, have higher prices, and limited choice, restricting participation to privileged consumers with higher income and capacity to overcome these barriers. To ensure their long-term viability, small and mid-sized farms in New England need new marketing strategies that reduce their labor but still deliver a fair price and expand market access.
This project benefitted the nearly 8,000 small New England farms that sell directly to consumers, specifically those that are seeking to expand their production, reduce their reliance on DTC markets, or decrease their marketing labor. The project also has implications for the more than 2,700 small and mid-sized New England farms selling to restaurants and institutional buyers who may also be seeking additional market outlets.
Solution and Approach:
Collaborative, or mediated market models (MMMs) are a rapidly growing adaptation of DTC markets that introduce a single intermediary between producer and consumer that serves to aggregate products from multiple farms and communicates information about farm practices and values to consumers. Examples of MMMs are online farmers’ markets, multi-farm CSAs, online subscription programs, and multi-farm-aggregating farm stores. MMMs are proposed as a solution to farmers’ intensive DTC marketing labor and limited market access by creating short supply chains that deliver fair prices for farmers. By collaboratively aggregating products from multiple farms, MMMs increase convenience, choice, and flexibility for consumers, and thus potentially increase consumers’ participation in markets appropriate for small and mid-sized farms.
As New England MMMs develop, farmers and stakeholders need opportunities to learn from each other as they experiment with these new market models. Our educational workshops brought together farmers and stakeholders engaged with or interested in experimenting with MMMs, for peer-to-peer learning. The workshops generated actionable insights as stakeholders and farmers shared their best practices and strategies for successful marketing through MMMs. Farmers and stakeholders benefited from educational products generated from the workshop synthesis and interviews with New England consumers about their experiences and preferences with purchasing food from MMMs. A comparative case study of four different types of MMMs provided insights on strategies to manage common challenges, to inform decision-making and investment in these marketing models.
Cooperators
- (Researcher)
Research
Mediated market models (MMMs) are said to reduce logistical barriers for farmers and consumers, but this expectation needed testing. Generating data from farmers and consumers, we assessed the impact of MMM participation for New England small and mid-sized farms and consumers. Our questions from the beginning of the project were:
- Does selling products through MMMs increase income or reduce marketing labor for farmers?
- What challenges and opportunities do MMM-participating farmers identify as important?
- What does consumers’ experience with MMMs reveal about opportunities for further development and expansion?
- Do MMMs offer greater variety, convenience, and/or appeal to consumers who don’t participate in traditional DTC markets?
We conducted a review of peer-reviewed and gray literature—including nonprofit reports, case studies, extension publications, graduate theses, project reports, and publications about MMM development, common challenges, opportunities, and needs going forward. Gray literature was assessed as contextual evidence rather than formal research and used to strengthen the regional relevance of insights shared in our workshop reports. This literature review generated an insightful and informative body of knowledge we used to supplement our educational products and guided the design of our workshops and case study.
Population
Our target population was the operators of small and mid-sized farms in New England that are either currently participating, interested in or considering involvement in collaborative aggregation and marketing models, practitioners involved in leading the development or management of MMMs, and technical service providers who support farmers and practitioners involved with MMMs.
Methodology
We conducted a comparative case study of four different types of collaborative marketing models or MMMs —multi-farm CSAs, a farmer-led food hub that sells direct to consumers, an online farmers' market/subscription based program, and a farm store that aggregates collaboratively from multiple farms. Our core objective was to examine how MMMs perform and sustain their guiding values while navigating economic and operational challenges, and to identify how challenges and opportunities varied by their organizational structure. By comparing four different types of MMMs, we could examine how diverse governance structures influence the distribution of risks and benefits among farmers, food businesses, staff, and customers. We assessed how different organizational structures impact their performance across multiple dimensions such as farmer and customer satisfaction and operational sustainability. Because the effectiveness of different markets – and farmers’ capacity to try new market channels– depends so much on farmers’ particular context, this approach enabled us to compile MMM snapshots that offer other farmers examples with real financial and labor information of how MMMs work for farms like their own.
Data Collection and Analysis
We recruited farmers, managers and staff from four MMMs in NH:
- Local Harvest, a cooperative for-profit, certified organic CSA,
- Three River Farmers Alliance, an online food hub and regional distributor,
- Vernon Family Farm Store, an on-farm, year-round store that aggregates from local farms, and
- Fresh Start Farms, a food hub and CSA.
We hired an interpreter to support the participation of farmers and customers of Fresh Start Farms, ensuring that our case study sample included a diversity of perspectives and experiences. We conducted a total of 49 interviews in the winter of 2024 and 2025 with participants from across the supply chain, to ensure perspectives from all roles in the four MMMs. This included: 32 interviews with farmers (averaging 90 minutes each, six per MMM), 8 interviews with core personnel, owners and staff (averaging two hours and 20 minutes each, two or three per MMM), and 20 customers (averaging 74 minutes each). The customer interviews enabled us to examine consumers’ experiences with participation in MMM. The interviews focused on patterns of participation, and barriers and opportunities for expanding consumer participation.
We analyzed this robust dataset to assess the performance of the MMMs across multiple dimensions, including farmer and customer satisfaction, labor demands for farmers and core personnel managing the MMM, returns for contributing farmers, and staff perspectives. Key questions guiding the analysis included: What makes these models work? What motivates farmers to participate? How do MMMs balance efficiency with their core values, and how do external constraints shape their capacity to build sustainable, economically viable models? Our team completed an extensive qualitative coding of all our case study data.
The final analysis phase of the comparative case study involved an extensive, time-consuming process of distilling our findings from the coded data. Because our interview data is so substantial and rich, we had 529 references coded under challenges alone, requiring us to undertake a secondary phase to create a synthesis of coded data for each of our 153 codes, which represent the themes we identified in our findings through the descriptive and thematic coding phase (Saldaña, 2014). Our final step (not started yet) is a theoretical model of how external constraints shape the capacity of MMMs to create economically viable supply chains that we can build on and test with an externally funded, multi-state project.
Additionally, we hired the national consulting firm Food Works Group (FWG), to conduct a financial assessment of the four MMMs to examine their financial performance, including gross and net revenue, fluctuations in sales over time, the impact of expanding their product line and number of contributing farmers, and the impact of increasing their sales channels. This assessment helped to identify MMM’s greatest financial challenges, how their governance structure impacts their economic viability, and identified which adjustments or investments might offer the best return on investment.
We shared early insights from our study with a broad audience of farmers, food system practitioners and agricultural service providers at the NH Food Alliance Statewide Gathering in May of 2024. Our workshop synthesis report shares insights on how these models navigate common operational challenges to offer actionable insights to help stakeholders build more resilient and sustainable collaborative marketing models. We also developed two Research Briefs that summarize key findings and actionable recommendations for collaborative aggregation and marketing models.
We have a very extensive dataset based on our 49 interviews with farmers, core personnel/staff, and customers of the four MMMs in our case study. Our team conducted a rigorous analysis of this dataset, resulting in 153 qualitative data codes, which represent themes in our dataset. We are currently doing the final phase of analysis of our coded data, so readers can check our UNH Food Systems Lab website to find publications and reports about our findings as they become available: https://www.unhfoodsystemslab.net/research
Summary of key findings so far:
Farmer and customer reported benefits of MMMs
More stable and predictable markets; Reduces some barriers for beginning farmers
Collaborative aggregation reduces uncertainty for farmers by allowing farmers to sell product before harvest, or the reassurance that marketing and distribution will be handled by the MMM. These benefits are particularly valuable for helping beginning farmers get established.
Allows farmers to focus on what they do best
MMMs take on marketing, coordination and logistics, customer service, invoicing, and distribution—freeing farmers to focus on production. This also helps avoid late payments and administrative burdens.
Opportunities for specialization
Working collaboratively enables farmers to grow fewer crops more efficiently while still offering customers a wide range of products through the MMM’s combined product offerings.
Strengthens farmer networks
Collaboration builds relationships, mutual aid, and solidarity among farmers, creating a sense of community and shared support.
Broadens market access
Aggregated distribution enables small farms to reach more distant or larger markets that would not be feasible individually, increasing sales potential for both wholesale and retail customers.
Shared infrastructure efficiencies
Collaborative aggregation enables shared cold storage, distribution services, and other equipment, reducing individual capital burdens and improving overall efficiency.
Strengthens scale-appropriate markets
Retail and wholesale buyers prioritizing local food tend to be more accommodating of production variability, delayed payments, or unexpected challenges than large distributors. Collaborative aggregation can improve stability of product supply to strengthen these market channels.
Challenges facing MMMs
High land and infrastructure costs
Land, cold storage, and transportation infrastructure costs all pose significant barriers to establishing and scaling collaborative aggregation and marketing models.
Labor shortages
Finding and paying skilled farm labor at sustainable wages remains a major challenge, especially in regions with high cost of living. These challenges complicate the labor and time demands of managing MMMs.
Organizational capacity limits
MMM core personnel and staff are often stretched thin coordinating the aggregation of products from multiple farms and managing communication and individualized support for farmers. Administrative load can grow quickly as participation expands.
Governance and decision-making
Cooperative decision-making require time-consuming involvement. Farmers vary in how much transparency and participation they want or can realistically provide.
Balancing autonomy with transparency and collective needs
Farmers value independence, yet collective marketing requires shared standards for growing practices, crop planning, pricing, and quality, which can create tensions and unintentional competition among farmers.
Supply and demand coordination
Farmers and managers describe persistent challenges in coordinating supply and demand—including oversupply of certain products, insufficient production of others, and the need for improved planning and communication across farms. Some farmers may lose sales if too many growers produce the same product. Factors range from varying farm scales, inconsistent yields, and limited storage and labor.
Crop specialization vs. product diversity
While specialization can improve efficiency, it can also heighten vulnerability to crop failure. Farmers must also meet customer expectations for variety, which can strain labor and management capacity.
Challenges with scale and fairness
Larger farms may be favored because they can supply more consistently, potentially sidelining smaller farms. Managing equitable participation is an ongoing challenge.
Pricing pressures
Local farms struggle to raise prices even when costs increase because they compete with lower-cost farms outside the region. Pricing uncertainty also makes planning difficult.
Seasonal variability
Seasonality is a structural challenge across all models. Farmers confront both winter scarcity and summer gluts, complicated by unpredictable weather, which all make it hard to meet customer expectations for consistency.
Customer barriers
Customers must learn to cook seasonally, adapt to higher prices, and accept reduced choice at certain times of year—an ongoing educational challenge.
Risk of bypassing the aggregator
Once relationships are established, farmers or buyers may work directly with one another, undermining the aggregator’s financial model.
Strategies farmers and managers can use to strengthen MMMs
Intentional planning before launch
Careful design of governance, pricing systems, legal structures, and crop planning reduces conflict and builds long-term sustainability.
Right-sized governance models
Blending efficient managerial decision-making with opportunities for farmer input can reduce meeting burden while maintaining transparency and trust.
Regional collaboration
MMMs can partner across states or regions to improve product diversity, manage supply disruptions, and share best practices.
Clear contracts and expectations
Written agreements outlining non-compete expectations, crop commitments, and pricing guidelines help prevent conflict and protect the viability of the aggregator.
Flexible and fair pricing strategies
Negotiation, margin differentiation between wholesale and retail, delivery fees for very small orders, and predictable price lists help stabilize farm planning.
Training and technical assistance
Support with food safety, quality standards, government programs, and crop planning helps farmers maintain consistent supply and meet customer expectations.
Supply and demand coordination
Strategies for coordinating supply and demand include coordinated crop planning, increased product diversification, stronger collaboration across farms and customer relationships, developing new markets, and more intentional season extension.
Effective coordination in crop planning
Facilitated communication among farmers helps to avoid unintentional competition, stabilize pricing, and ensure reliable product availability. Structured planning conversations—such as winter crop‑planning meetings—help producers collectively design systems that match their goals while maintaining market balance.
Proactive management of product consistency
Using shared planning tools and actively coordinating production can reduce competition among farmers while ensuring consistent supply for customers.
Balancing crop specialization with product diversity
Effective approaches to balance specialization with sufficient diversity include partial specialization, gradual expansion into new crops., and intentionally differentiated products that complement rather than compete with other producers in the network.
Strategies for managing seasonal variability
Farms can manage seasonal variability through season extension, diversifying winter product offerings (e.g., jams, candles), adjusting staffing levels, value added processing, and supplementing local products with out of region sourcing. These help MMMs retain customers during the off season by staying operational year-round, smoothing farmer revenue.
Opportunities and needs to strengthen MMMs
Stronger marketing efforts
Social media engagement, improved websites (including search engine optimization), and customer surveys help MMMs reach new customers and understand market demand trends.
Programs supporting food access and equity
Models such as community gift cards, support for SNAP/EBT participation, and state food access initiatives help broaden the customer base while supporting local farms.
Policy & funding opportunities
Expanded grant programs, supportive local food purchasing incentives and broader social safety nets (such as healthcare and income supports) could substantially strengthen small farm viability.
Continued market research
Ongoing research into consumer preferences, challenges and needs, and effective marketing strategies will help refine and strengthen these models.
Education
We hosted a series of seven educational workshops to foster peer learning and networking among farmers and stakeholders who are using or intending to develop collaborative marketing models. The workshops were designed to support farmers experimenting with new marketing approaches through access to emerging knowledge, active problem solving and learning to develop and test best practices, identify common challenges, and innovate as a network of practitioners.
Three in‑person workshops were held at winter farmer conferences across New England between November 2022 and January 2023, including sessions at the Maine Organic Farmers & Gardeners Association (MOFGA), the New England Vegetable & Fruit (NEVF), and the New England Organic Farmers Association (NOFA) Massachusetts. Each workshop began with an interactive activity using Mentimeter, followed by brief presentations from farmers and stakeholders in leadership roles in an MMM. Breakout groups facilitated by the research team enabled participants to discuss challenges, strategies, and organizational tools. Project team members organized recruiting, advertising, planning, coordinated workshop flow, and documented lessons learned.
Based on feedback from advisory committee farmers, we also hosted three virtual workshops via Zoom the following spring (January to March 2024), to serve farmers and practitioners who were unable to attend the in-person sessions. Virtual workshops also reduced participation barriers for people with limited time, financial resources, or without childcare options. To better serve New American farmers, we offered a multilingual workshop developed in collaboration with Fresh Start Farms and the Southern New England Farmers of Color Collaborative. Based on partner input, we adapted presentation materials for translation into multiple languages and provided live interpretation of the presentation, a team of interpreters to facilitate multilingual small group discussion session, and snacks. This workshop supported deeper engagement with specific farming communities and addressed the need for multilingual educational programming in Spanish, Khmer, Hmong, Arabic, Maay Maay, or Kirundi.
Each virtual workshop was focused on a specific MMM, such as a multi‑farm CSAs, online farmers’ markets, and farmer‑owned food hubs, and featured practitioner presentations and peer‑to‑peer breakout discussions. Across all sessions, each workshop featured at least one representative from a New England MMM who described how their model operates, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use to address them. Structured breakout discussions asked participants to identify key challenges, opportunities, successful strategies, and their needs for technical assistance, research, and policy support. Research team members documented these discussions through notes and worksheets (with IRB approval), generating a rich qualitative dataset that informed subsequent analysis and educational materials.
Milestones
1. Recruit participants for peer learning exchanges (Engagement)
Target: 200 farmers and stakeholders would attend one of seven workshops.
Action: Outreach was conducted through the UNH Food Systems Lab database, UNH Extension networks, and partner organizations to raise awareness of in‑person and virtual MMM peer learning exchanges.
Evaluation: Attendance was tracked at each event.
Complete: More than 140 farmers and stakeholders registered for the virtual series, and attendance from in‑person and virtual events combined brought participation to an estimated 160-175. Recruitment for virtual sessions occurred after winter conferences concluded, and participation increased steadily through additional outreach and the scheduling of an extra in‑person workshop with Fresh Start Farms.
2. Facilitate information sharing through conference and multilingual online peer learning exchanges (Learning)
Target: 200 farmers and stakeholders would attend one of seven workshops.
Action: Peer learning exchanges in our workshop series enabled farmers and stakeholders to share experiences, best practices, organizational tools, and strategies for strengthening MMMs.
Evaluation: Quantitative data were collected using Mentimeter and Qualtrics; qualitative data were gathered through notes and worksheets summarizing breakout group discussions.
Complete: Three in‑person workshops were held at winter conferences from November 2022–March of 2023. Attendance ranged from small groups of 5–10 to a large session with 50–60 participants. The virtual series (January–March 2024) expanded access, with over 140 registrants and around 100 participants, nearly 30 participants per session. An additional in‑person workshop with Fresh Start Farms brought overall participation to 160-175 participants total. Multilingual workshops were also offered to support New American farmers.
3. Establish a Community of Practice (Learning)
Target: 150 of the 200 workshop participants would join.
Action: Farmers and stakeholders were invited to join a Google Group for continued peer learning and access to project materials.
Evaluation: NA
Not Completed: Contact information was collected through workshop surveys, and the Community of Practice Google Group was created with farmer suggestions for its design. However, the invitation email mostly went to spam folders so it was never received, and the project team did not have the capacity to maintain sustained engagement in the platform given several periods of staffing gaps in the project team, and the long gaps between study engagement (workshops, interviews, etc.) and final outreach product completion. Establishing a community of practice addresses a need but we could not figure out how to make it work in reality because it's hard to facilitate and maintain engagement solely through an online forum.
4. Distribute year-one educational products (Learning)
Target: 600 farmers and stakeholders would access project products.
Action: Materials included two formal presentations, a workshop report synthesizing best practices, and two research briefs.
Evaluation: Workshop report and research brief downloads and presentation attendance will serve as metrics.
In progress: Dissemination is in progress with distribution planned for Late February-March 2026 through UNH Extension, UNH Agricultural Experiment Station, UNH Today, NH Food Alliance, direct emails to study participants who signed up for communication, and partner networks.
5. Recruit a core group of farmers for the case study (Engagement)
Target: 20 compensated farmers would participate.
Action: Recruitment focused on farmers selling their products through the four selected MMMs included in the case study.
Evaluation: Number of participating farmers.
Complete: 32 farmers selling products through the Three River Farmers Alliance, Local Harvest CSA, Vernon family farm store, and Fresh Start Farms all agreed to participate.
6. Facilitate core group case study data gathering and reflection (Learning)
Target: 20 farmers would provide detailed data.
Action: Farmers shared their experiences and information regarding their experiences selling products through the MMM.
Evaluation: Quantitative data collected in Qualtrics; qualitative data collected through interviews.
Final Status: Rather than requiring ongoing self‑tracking, the comparative case study approach gathered in‑depth data through interviews and financial analysis, reducing farmer burden.
7. Distribute “farmer snapshots” of case study results (Learning)
Target: 300 farmers and stakeholders would read the snapshots.
Action: Case-based examples of MMM benefits and challenges will be shared through the Community of Practice and UNH Extension channels.
Evaluation: Website download counts.
In progress: Two of three planned case study briefs were completed (one in progress), highlighting core strategies by farmers, grounded in context of four specific models described in the reports. A report sharing synthesis of workshop insights was completed, with another designed for technical service providers in progress.
8. Collect year-three evaluation survey results (Evaluation)
Target: 100 year-one workshop participants would complete a follow-up survey.
Action: Participants would complete a brief survey assessing MMM-related actions taken.
Evaluation: Results analyzed using STATA.
Not complete: We ran out of time to do this as we had very limited staffing for much of the project so we choose to focus on core objectives.
9. Analyze quantitative and qualitative evaluation results (Evaluation)
Target: Combine data from 200 year-one surveys, 100 year-three surveys, and qualitative workshop records.
Action: Quantitative analysis using STATA; qualitative analysis using NVIVO.
Evaluation: Findings compared to performance targets.
Not complete: NA given we didn't manage the follow up survey.
Milestone activities and participation summary
Educational activities:
Participation summary:
Learning Outcomes
Performance Target Outcomes
Target #1
130
farmers who participated in the workshops will increase their participation in MMMs or join an existing or newly created MMM by selling at least five percent of their products through a New England MMM.
NA
Farmers’ participation in MMMs will result in an average of $200 net income per week and 5 hours per week of reduced marketing labor per farmer.
Unable to verify because final evaluation survey was not feasible
Unable to verify
Unable to verify because final evaluation survey was not feasible
We have no way to determine for sure whether a farmer who had been considering collaborative marketing decided to move forward because of our project, as we were not able to conduct a final follow-up survey of all project participants. We did conduct a baseline survey but response rates were insufficient for ensuring accurate conclusions. Moreover, the decisions to establish an MMM or participate as a farmer are fluid, complex and iterative decisions and pathways. Given the magnitude of such a decision and the unique combination of individual circumstances, social networks, and capabilities involved, we would not expect or recommend that a farmer make such a decision because of one workshop or research study that they participated in. Given that MMMs are in a relatively early stage of development, this project was important for facilitating knowledge sharing and dissemination of actionable insights that can inform their further development and improve technical support from agricultural service providers.
I was never really comfortable with this performance target but it was designed to meet the restrictive parameters given, which seemed to be based on a plant science model (such as a farmer adopting a specific production product, practice, or technology). This was my high priority for offering feedback on the SARE program when the ad-hoc committee on making the grant proposals more inclusive of the social sciences.
Additional Project Outcomes
Doing this project has informed the Project Director of all the potential and needs of these emerging models and I have submitted two grant proposals to support continuation of this work. One proposal (Competitive AFRI NIFA sabbatical proposal) is currently under review and a NH Agricultural Experiment Station grant was already funded. So despite this grant ending, the work is ongoing and this grant created a strong foundation for an ongoing long-term research program focused on collaborative aggregation and marketing. I anticipate our impact to grow as we continue our outreach efforts, now that we have two attractive and accessible outreach materials to share and will be presenting our findings at regional farming and food system conferences, workshops and events.
As a result of this grant, Sarah Cox of Tuckaway farm (mentioned below) who is developing an MMM called Tuckaway Food Commons was featured on a tour of local agricultural sites for the staff of our Congressional representatives. The tour stop included discussion of this research project, the farmer's unique collaborative aggregation and marketing model, and discussion of how this grant funding impacted the development of the project.
Sarah Cox, a NH farmer who is in the process of developing a unique MMM has been in conversation with us through the project and said participating in the workshops and case study was useful as she was making decisions and developing her unique model. Through this connection I paid for her costs (with my own startup funding, not the SARE grant) to attend the Farm Stop conference in Michigan, which I would not have known about otherwise, helping me learn about the farm stop model (which is integrated into my new grant proposal) and have in-depth conversations with Sarah about her evolving MMM model, Tuckaway Food Commons.
We are just at the point of having our educational materials to share, so we would have more to say about the project's impact in the next few months, because we haven't yet shared any of the outreach materials (case study draft just being finalized now).
A brief email response to our draft of the case study report from a participating MMM (we shared the draft before finalizing):
The peer learning exchange workshop design was key to the project's success and overall went well. Our idea to feature representatives of successful/established models to talk about how their model works and share their strategies for common challenges worked well, and was a valuable educational opportunity for farmers and practitioners working with or in the process of forming MMMs. The small group breakout sessions were effective in facilitating knowledge and strategy sharing, and the approach of having our research team document these conversations and then synthesize and share them back out with a broad audience was a strength of the project. The comparative case study design was another strength, allowing us to provide valuable insights to inform the development and strengthen these models as we complete our analyses and outreach materials.
As mentioned above, the Community of Practice is something I would approach differently because in order for it to be useful there needs to be a level of sustained engagement that may not be feasible for researchers or farmers, so I don't have a good sense of what alternative could work better.
The overall impact of our project was constrained by not having one dedicated postdoc focused on the project, because that position was vacant for a substantial portion of the project period and we had to make it work with a part-time, remote person for a brief period, then part-time remote postdoc who then joined us fully but only for 8 months, leaving us in limbo and lacking our core personnel much of the time. If we had a postdoc focused on the project as envisioned it would have made a huge difference with building relationships, sustaining engagement, building momentum, and completing milestones as planned in order to reach the full potential of the project. I don't think it was a bad idea to rely on a postdoc in this way, it was just really bad luck and bad timing, so I'm not sure what I would approach differently in the future.
Future research and educational efforts that continue the approaches developed through this project are needed and have potential. For instance, expanding a comparative case study of additional MMMs such as the farm stop model have great potential, and the workshop designed could be repeated effectively and would be more attractive to farmers now that we have outreach materials to share at the outset.