The Best of ‘Farmer to Farmer’ Podcast: Revisiting and Expanding Solutions for Market Farm Start-up, Scale-up, CSA Modeling, and Employee Management

Progress report for ONC17-024

ONC17-024 (project overview)
Project Type: Partnership
Funds awarded in 2017: $28,973.00
Projected End Date: 05/31/2019
Grant Recipient: Purple Pitchfork
Region: North Central
State: Wisconsin
Project Coordinator:
Chris Blanchard
Purple Pitchfork
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Project Information

Summary:

This project uses the Farmer-to-Farmer (F2F) podcast to create decision-making resources for North-Central beginning farmers (in production less than 10 years). Each F2F episode is an interview exchange between host Chris Blanchard and a professional producer of organic vegetables, fruits, herbs and/or flowers, highlighting tools and technique.

As online/on-demand radio, the podcast is effective because farmers can listen while they do farmwork. However, the big limitation of this format is that it’s extremely difficult for farmers to go back and find specific information they might want to implement.

This project will create transcripts of F2F’s 90+ episodes, making them more easily searchable. Highlights from transcripts, plus new interview material, will become in-depth episodes on four farmer-requested topics: farm start-up considerations, scale-up considerations, CSA model comparisons, and employee-management strategies.

All content will be free through SARE, Farmer-to-Farmer, Extension and farm sustainability organizations.

Outreach capitalizes on the podcast’s established audience of 8,000+ listeners.

Project Objectives:

Per farmer request, this project will make the valued content of all Farmer-to-Farmer podcast episodes to date (90+) more searchable by creating transcripts.

This project will generate well-rounded consideration of market-farm start-up issues, scale-up issues, CSA modelcomparison, and employee management strategies through ag professional Chris Blanchard’s review of thetranscripts and input from partner producers.

This project will produce and promote lasting resources for farm decision-making by making new contentavailable free to Farmer-to-Farmer’s 8,000+ weekly listeners and beyond.

This project will document how producers apply content to their operations through multidimensional feedback.

Cooperators

  • Steve Pincus
  • Katie Bishop
  • Kristen Kordet
  • David Bachhuber
  • Mike Bollinger
  • Katie Prochaska

Research

Materials and methods:

To date, we have transcribed approximately 150 episodes of the Farmer to Farmer Podcast. We will proceed to summarize and provide outlines to our farmer cooperators this spring.

Research results and discussion:

We do not have any results to share at this time.

Participation Summary

Educational & Outreach Activities

Participation Summary:

Education/outreach description:

We have not conducted outreach activities at this time.

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Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture or SARE.