The Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy Farmers Program - the First Ten Years: A Graduate Follow-up Survey and Beginning Dairy Farmer Case Studies

The Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy Farmers Program - the First Ten Years: A Graduate Follow-up Survey and Beginning Dairy Farmer Case Studies

Summary

Data is being gathered about Wisconsin School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers graduates and their career pathways, opportunities and barriers, life and job satisfaction and other details of 10 years of past students. Respondents also evaluated their experience with the WSBDF, including 97% of participants rating the overall quality of the program as very good or excellent. Detailed results will be used to help improve the WSBDF, inform and shape other classes and programs, and increase awareness of the public and policy-makers about the needs and benefits of training and supporting farmers, stewards of our working lands.

Objectives/Performance Targets

Our project’s primary goal is to investigate in some depth, through survey and case study research, the professional activities, life-choices and opportunities of the approximately 200 graduates from the University of Wisconsin pasture-based School for Beginning Dairy and Livestock Farmers (WSBDF) in the first ten years since the Program’s inception in 1995.

—- From the mail survey and case study research we seek to determine: who is farming (and information about their farming operation), and who is not farming. What professional activities they are engaged in if not farming; do they still continue to want to farm; what impediments kept them from achieving their goal of farming, to date, and how do they plan to overcome these obstacles. For those farming: what was their pathway to start-up; what were the impediments to successful start-up; and how did the WSBDF assist/not assist in career pathway development; what other resources were available/helpful/not available upon graduation; what would they change about/add to the WSBDF to make the program more effective.

—- Our broader goals include increasing knowledge and awareness of: 1) what aspects of the WSBDF helped/didn’t help our graduates get started in dairy farming; 2) what were the barriers to start-up that our program helped/didn’t help our graduates to overcome; 3) the public that the WSBDF has been successful and effective at helping many individuals who have had a dream to farm to achieve their goals; and 4) change skills and attitudes through initiating, developing and implementing improvements in the program structure and content to ensure that the WSBDF can best serve its stakeholders (would-be start-up dairy and livestock farmers) and mission (‘to help aspiring dairy farmers get started’).

—- Ultimately, we would like this work to change behavior/practices through 1) greater demand for the WSBDF program offerings among NCR stakeholders; 2) additional financial support (GPR funding) for the WSBDF through UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, Wisconsin legislature and/or private endowments; 3) increased interest/demand among educational institutions/groups to develop their own beginning farmer program, possibly adapting the WSBDF; 4) improved accessibility to start-up farming; and 5) improved profitability, environmental practices, and quality of life for beginning farmers.

An important component of the project is to communicate our successes, and shortcomings, with a broad public and with policy-makers across the NCR. Both within the WSBDF and UW-Madison CALS, as well as across institutions and throughout the region, the time is ripe for discussion and improvements to programming and models of beginning farmer training.

Accomplishments/Milestones

To date, the project has accomplished the first goal of mailing the Graduates Survey (both several rounds of hard copy mailings, as well as email follow-ups where possible and phone follow ups to non-respondents). With persistence, we have obtained an approximate 70% response rate by attendees and graduates for whom we had current reliable contact information or could obtain through relatives or our network. (A hard copy of the WSBDF Graduates Survey is enclosed in the mailed copy of this report). From this data we will be able to answer each of the questions we asked about whether graduates are farming, details of their farming operation and/or career pathway, challenges, opportunities and resources, as well as their evaluation of the WSBDF program. Preliminary results are indicated in the following section.

Currently, we are drafting the interview instrument for use in case study follow-ups of 10-12 graduates of the program. We are drawing on previous experience with this kind of farm and career/entry interview work to inform our instrument development. We are also using the preliminary data from the mail survey to help categorize our respondents and decide which parameters, such as career pathway, type of farm, farming background, social support and others to inform our choice of case study candidates. These interviews will be conducted in August and September and the information analyzed and used to complement the mail survey results during the fall and early winter.

As we continue to look at the meaning and implications of the data and stories our graduates are sharing with us, we will be able to achieve our broader goals. We will identify which aspects of the WSBDF program are working well to help students achieve their ‘dream to farm’ goals and which need improvement. As we revise our programming to meet the current and future needs of our clientele (including energy and nutrient management issues that are on the forefront of the agriculture-public interface), we keep in mind the obstacles and barriers past students have faced and try to ameliorate them or advise ways to handle and work through common difficulties. This season’s class begins in November and will benefit immediately from our analysis of the data gathered in this project.

Also this fall we are expanding the WSBDF program to include four facilitated distance education sites as well as the Madison location. This allows us to increase the accessibility and reach of the program, enroll, train and mentor more students into farming and provide additional justification for requesting GPR (General Purpose Revenue) support from the Wisconsin legislature. Again, by applying what we learn from past students’ experience through this project and using it to improve our program across all the locations, we will be able to address the objectives of increasing demand for the program in the region, interesting other institutions in providing beginning farmer programming (ours or their own) and improving farmer participants’ profitability, environmental practices and qualities of life.

Impacts and Contributions/Outcomes

Early analysis of the survey results (not for distribution as late-coming surveys were not yet entered into the database) indicates that over 80% of respondents are currently involved in a farming operation, validating the mission of the School, as well as being consistent with an earlier survey of program graduates. Graduates not involved in farming are engaged in a number of professional activities and, interestingly, 70% of them indicated it was somewhat or highly likely that they would farm in the future.

The WSBDF program evaluation section asked about a number of specific parts of the program and found a high level of satisfaction with presentation by instructors (94% satisfied or very satisfied), in-class discussions (85% satisfied or very satisfied), access to speakers (90% satisfied or very satisfied), farm field trips (81% satisfied or very satisfied) and class handouts (88% satisfied or very satisfied). Farm financial training has been of increased emphasis in recent years of the program and while 68% of respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with this aspect, 22% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied and 10% were somewhat dissatisfied (none were very dissatisfied). We can check to see when these respondents took the course and whether we have improved with time, as well as follow up with questions in the case studies to clarify how to make our financial planning even better.

When asked about availability of financial support, 64% of graduates were satisfied or very satisfied, 31% were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied and 4 % were somewhat dissatisfied. Again, while the majority of respondents did not cite inadequate financial support, there may be an opportunity for making the class (and/or internships) attractive to more students by providing additional support. Note that we did not survey prospective clients, but those for whom attendance was presumably not a problem. With the recent addition of distance education sites at reduced cost compared with the Madison campus, we may have addressed this sufficiently, but will continue to monitor whether cost is a barrier for some and work with them to apply the scholarships we have available and/or to generate more, especially from within their local communities.

In addition to other detailed questions, a full report of which will be made available to the public, as well as included in the SARE final report, we asked past students simply to rate the overall quality of the WSBDF program: 97% of respondents gave it a very good (49%) or excellent (48%) rating. We are pleased and gratified with this response and will continue to work hard to maintain our high quality program as we reach out to a broader audience across the NCR. Through our attendance at conferences, fairs, agricultural meetings and other public and policy-making events we will share what we have learned with the WSBDF to make sure it is communicated to a wide audience. We are also working with the UW-Madison CALS administration to share our experiences with the WSBDF program and its growing distance education component as a model for shaping other classes to meet the evolving needs of students on campus and throughout the state.

Another opportunity we have to share what we do at the WSBDF and learn with and from others at a national level is as contributing members of a 2.5-year NRI (National Research Institute) project (“Farmland Access, Tenure and Succession: Impacts on Small and Medium-sized Farms, Land Use and the Environment”) starting in September that will, among other objectives, develop and pilot educational farmer training modules that fit in with the research goals and findings of this project.

Collaborators: