Final report for SPDP24-026
Project Information
In Travis County, Texas, <0.5% of all food consumed is locally grown. Farmshare Austin (FSA) is changing that by educating, training and mentoring aspiring and working farmers in sustainable, organic and regenerative practices.
Farmshare Austin, in partnership with four other farms, created the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative (CTFIC) to provide affordable access to land, infrastructure and training for the purpose of honing skills and launching farm businesses. Incubator programs are vital to the survival of new farms in Central Texas. Travis County loses 16.8 acres of farmland every day, contributing to prohibitively expensive costs for purchasing or leasing viable farmland.
This project provided training in mentorship and best practices for farm incubator management for the organizations involved. At the 2024 National FIELD Schools, a yearly conference that brings together beginning farmer training organizations from around the country, members of the Incubator Collaborative learned from established incubator programs, supporting the development of an effective program. Lessons learned at the National FIELD School directly informed CTFIC operational procedures and approach to mentorship.
Outreach following the FIELD School shared information about the Central Texas Farm Incubator with the goal of building a stronger and more effective community of local mentor farmers. Ultimately, the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative will create and support more local farmers producing more sustainably grown food for consumers.
The goals of this project are to increase the number of successful new sustainable farmers in Central Texas by developing a farm incubator program modeled after the best practices of established farm incubator programs around the country and to improve the mentorship skills of experienced farmers in our community.
The objectives of this grant project are:
Objective 1: Expand knowledge and understanding of successful farm incubators for Incubator Collaborative mentor farmers based on the knowledge and information gained from attending the 2024 National FIELD School.
Objective 2: Increase the farm mentorship skills of Incubator Collaborative mentor farmers, farm service providers and other farmers interested in mentoring new farmers.
Objective 3: Provide a clear pathway for the Central Texas Sustainable Farm Incubator project via development of a strategic plan in cooperation with the Incubator Collaborative.
The training has been essential to the development of the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative, reducing the barriers faced by new and beginning farmers as they start their farm businesses. It has increased the amount of sustainable, organic farming taking place in the region and has laid the foundation for a dynamic, effective, long-term program to support the sustainability and viability of new farms in the region.
Cooperators
- - Producer
- - Producer
- - Producer
Education
Using collaborative, reflective and experiential educational approaches, this project leveraged the best practices for incubator programs from the FIELD Network, a national network of land based beginning farmer training programs. We do not need to reinvent the wheel when we can learn from what has worked and not worked for other farm incubator programs. We brought these lessons back to the Central Texas sustainable farming community and collaboratively shaped these best practices into a program suited to the particular conditions and needs in Central Texas. We cast our net wide for ideas, then filtered them through the knowledge, preferences and resources of our local sustainable farming community to create a farmer training resource unique to Central Texas.
Education & Outreach Initiatives
Expand knowledge and understanding of successful farm incubators for Incubator Collaborative mentor farmers based on the knowledge and information gained from attending the National FIELD School and BUGS conferences.
The FIELD Network (Farm Incubation and Education through Land-Based skills Development) is a nationwide network of agricultural training programs that share a common purpose of using land-based experiential learning to create new pathways to careers in agriculture and farm ownership. Each year the FIELD School brings beginning farmer trainers together to engage in peer to peer learning, collective problem solving and community building. Members of the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative attended the 2024 and 2025 FIELD school to learn from established Incubator program managers from around the country.
In 2025, Farmshare’s Farm Manager attended the BUGS (Black Urban Growers) Conference in Detroit with the goal of exploring strategies for how CTFIC can better support a diverse cohort of farmers.
By attending the 2024 FIELD school, CTFIC gained access to resources and information to directly inform the creation of operational procedures and the educational approach for the launch of our new incubator program. Learnings included:
- The importance of discussing failure with new farmers. Farming requires a continual grappling with forces outside of your control and new farmers need to be able to roll with unexpected outcomes. Mentorship can support their resilience in difficult times.
- The importance of setting clear expectations early in a program.
- Strategies for maintaining soil health and weed control in a space that is managed by many new farmers.
- Collaborative marketing strategies for incubator program participants.
At the 2025 FIELD school, we were able to share back the lessons learned in the pilot season of the Incubator Collaborative, including highlighting the unique collaborative approach we have developed to enable increased land access and mentorship support for beginning farmers in Central Texas. We were also able to continue to explore ways to refine our program operations and deepen approaches to equity and inclusion.
The key learnings from attending the BUGS conference were centered on the empowerment of communities working together to create collective food sovereignty and the impact of new farmer support provided by the city of Detroit in land ownership and start-up costs that has enabled many Black Owned farms to flourish. We are starting to look at ways we can raise funds to support the start-up costs for Farmers of Color in our incubator program and focus more intentionally on community building amongst our farmers as a tool for resilience and inclusion.
Provide a clear pathway for the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative project via development of a strategic plan for the launch and pilot year of a new farm incubator model.
A series of five, two hour meetings to plan and launch the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative (CTFIC). Sessions included values alignment, the creation of the Incubator Application and Handbook and mentorship training.
CTFIC Strategic Planning Meeting 1: 8/30/2024
Purpose: For the collaborative to be resilient and long lasting, we will build our partnership on a base of core values and common goals to serve as the root of our decision making as a group.
Outcomes:
- Identified and defined group values
- Developed a shared language and understanding of the project
CTFIC Strategic Planning Meeting 2: 9/17/2024
Purpose: To understand the qualities of the ideal candidates for the Incubator and what processes and metrics will best identify those candidates.
Outcomes:
- Reviewed the application
- Determined the application process
- Created the application scoring metric
- Clarified the process for matching applicants to host sites
- Created an outreach and recruitment plan
CTFIC Strategic Planning Meeting 3: 10/22/2024
Purpose: To create an operational structure for this collaborative that is rooted in our shared values and vision, that is flexible enough to grow and change with the developing needs of the farmers and partners, but structured enough to ensure efficient management.
Outcomes:
- Created the Incubator Handbook
- Refined the process for organic certification compliance
CTFIC Strategic Planning Meeting 4: 11/5/2024
Purpose: Identify skills, resources and knowledge gathered at the 2024 FIELD School that should inform the structure and mentorship approach for the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative.
Outcomes:
- Shared & reflected on takeaways from Field School
- Created a plan for further mentorship training
CTFIC Strategic Planning Meeting 5: 12/3/2024
Purpose: Prepare operations for the beginning of the first cohort in January 2025
Outcomes:
- Reviewed the timeline and TO DO’s for the incubator program launch
- Reviewed first quarter curriculum including orientation agenda
Increase the farm mentorship skills of Incubator Collaborative mentor farmers, farm service providers and other farmers interested in mentoring new farmers, with particular focus on skills in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Farmshare facilitates a community of practice to enhance, practice and reflect on farm mentorship skills to best support beginning farmers. We utilize Supporting Mentors to Teach Next Generation Agrarians - A Farm/Ranch Mentor Training Toolkit and mentor training tools from the Transition to Organic Partnership Project as well as lessons learned from the FIELD network to guide our collaborative learning. Ongoing mentorship co-learning has become a regular topic of our quarterly Incubator Collaborative meetings in order to continue to develop our collective mentorship skills.
Originally envisioned as a one day workshop, we decided that an ongoing community of practice around farm mentorship would both be easier for people to attend and allow the opportunity to apply and reflect on the learnings between each session. We dedicated a portion of our regular planning meeting to collective learning and reflection on mentorship skills.
Gathering together on a regular basis to reflect on the process and skill of mentorship in real time created a responsive feedback loop allowing us to quickly adapt to our deepening understanding on how best to support new farmers. Through this we learned some key take aways:
- Mentorship is not a one size fits all approach.
- Each farmer needs something unique to support their success. For some it is very practical production knowledge like the best planting times for different crops in our region. For many it is something less tangible - having someone they can trust to bounce ideas off of and to give encouragement during challenging times.
- When considering building trust and mentor/mentee matching, we must also consider the social determinants that may impact building trusting relationships between people with diverse cultural backgrounds as well as different communication and learning styles.
- In this, it is important to distinguish between mentorship and technical assistance. Technical Assistance is a sharing of skills and knowledge. Mentorship is more about coaching - listening deeply and asking open ended questions to guide the farmer to make decisions rather than telling them what to do. This is a particular skill that can be difficult to learn and requires practice. Layer on top different communications styles and building successful mentor/mentee relationships becomes much more nuanced than just skill matching.
- As we deepened our mentorship practice, we identified the need to both offer the coaching of mentorship and the technical assistance of practical skill building and have begun to separate how we approach identifying and fulfilling these complementary but disparate needs for incubator farmers.
Over the course of this project we have onboarded two new partners into the collaborative, incorperated them into the mentorship community of practice and created tools for self evaluation and reflection we can use to monitor growth and identify needs for further training.
The outreach audience gained knowledge about how farm incubators work, why they are beneficial for the support of new farmers, and what can help a farm incubator succeed.
Farmshare Staff attended three conferences to share information about the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative.
- The 2025 Texas Organic Farmers and Gardeners Conference in Pflugerville, TX.
- Farmshare staff engaged with farmers and farm service providers by exhibiting at this annual conference nearly 300 attendees.
- Farmshare’s Education Director presented on the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative in two separate sessions:
- Pathways to Agriculture: Training the Next Generation of Producers
- Innovative Organization Models for Small Farmers
- The 2025 Small Family Farm and Food System Conference at Texas State University.
- Farmshare staff engaged with farmers and farm service providers by exhibiting at this annual conference over 500 attendees.
- Farmshare’s Education Director presented on the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative in a session about land access for farmers.
- The 2025 National FIELD School in Austin, TX.
- Farmshare co-hosted the conference with the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project for 80 attendees.
- Farmshare hosted a farm tour for 80 farmer training professionals to highlight our land based farmer training programs, including the incubator.
- Farmshare facilitated a panel discussion featuring Incubator Farmers describing the impact CTFIC has had on their businesses, including the value of mentorship for new farmers.
- Farmshare presented the collaborative model we have developed that makes the CTFIC a unique approach to farm incubators.
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation summary:
Learning Outcomes
Project Outcomes
This project provided essential skills and resources for the development of the Central Texas Farm Incubator Collaborative (CTFIC) with the goal of increasing the number of successful sustainable farm businesses in Central Texas. Through an ongoing community of practice, experienced farmers refined their mentorship skills to better support the nuanced needs of new farmers. Utilizing best practices of incubator programs nationwide, operational procedures were created for CTFIC to enable sharing of land and resources to reduce some of the primary barriers new farmers encounter when launching new farm businesses. Lessons learned on mentorship and incubator management were shared back with a wide community of farmers and farm service providers within Texas and nationwide. Overall, this project has supported the launch of 15 new farm businesses in Central Texas, the mentorship skills of 16 experienced farmers and farm service providers and has laid a strong foundation for an innovative collaborative approach to farm business incubation that will have a long term impact on the local, sustainable food system in Central Texas.