Empowering sustainable farmers with proactive, community-centered farm law education, resources, and networks.

View the project final report

Commodities

Practices

• Education and Training: decision support system, technical assistance
• Farm Business Management: agricultural finance, agritourism, apprentice/intern training, financial management, labor/employment, land access, marketing management, new enterprise development, risk management, Legal
• Sustainable Communities: quality of life

This project, “Empowering sustainable farmers with proactive, community-centered farm law education, resources, and networks,” delivered the following outcomes:

1. Reduce Risk: 208 farmers learned 12 core principles of farm law and took at least one of 10 specific legal risk-reducing practices across 5 farm law subjects, in both English and Spanish.
2. Empower Farmers: 167 farmers felt empowered: they recognized their inherent abilities to address legal risk in their operations.
3. Train Farmer-Leaders: 8 farmers receive specialized training as a workshop co-presenter and take a leadership role in assisting peers with farm law risk reduction.
4. Train Attorneys: We had to eliminate this part of the project due to the burdens of additional time, cost, and delay of managing the pandemic circumstances. 

Issues surrounding business formation, sales contracts, farmland leases, loans, employment law regulations, food safety liability, crop insurance, liability for slips or falls, partnership negotiations, succession and more plague farmers during the life cycle of the farm. Distracting them from their core work and draining the farm of resources, these issues destabilize our innovative direct to consumer and organic farms the most. This project changed that by fostering an ecosystem of support where farmers are empowered with to reduce legal risk and leverage legal opportunity.

This project achieved these results through workshops titled “Cultivating Your Legally Resilient Farm,” for the in-person version and "Discovering Resilience" for the online version, as well as farmer leadership development. The key was our curriculum which has a track record of at least 70% of farmers reducing legal risk through at least one action step taken within 3 months. The curriculum has also seen at least 63% of farmers become more empowered to recognize their capabilities. Workshops were led by trained farmers and Farm Commons staff together, under a curriculum that emphasizes creativity, relationships, and social values as keys to proactively addressing legal complications.

We planned to host 12 workshops in person, one in each North Central Region state over 2 and half years, reaching 40 farmers each. The workshops were complemented by a workshop Toolkit. Farmers created an individual “My Farm Law Action Plan,” for reducing their farm’s vulnerabilities. Peer-cohort groups supported farmers as they move forward on their action plan. 

Because of the global pandemic, the project experienced significant changes. We were able to host 4 in-person workshops before canceling the remainder and converting to the online format. The conversion took 9 months and we lost valuable outreach time. But on the positive side, we were able to translate the workshop into Spanish (complemented by separate additional funding for translation) and make it available nationwide. We are also able to host these online workshops indefinitely. We are confident hundreds more farmers will benefit from expanded resilience as a result of this project. 

Core-principles-risk-reducing-practices-and-subjects

These were our original objectives:

1. 744 farmers learn 12 core principles of farm law.
2. 744 Farmers take at least one of 10 specific, legal risk reducing practices.
3. 703 farmers feel more empowered to recognize and address legal risk on their operations.
4. 24 farmers receive specialized training and serve as workshop leaders in assisting peers with farm law risk reduction practices.
5. 6 attorneys are trained in farm law and assist at least 25 farmers in meeting their risk reduction goals.

Please see Optional Attachment for a list of the 12 core principles, risk reducing practices, and farm law subjects.