Creating an Ag Professional Support System for Refugee and Immigrant Farmers

Commodities

Practices

Creating An Ag Professional Support System for Refugee Farmers is a collaborative project led by the University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service to train agriculture professionals from different organizations across Kentucky who work directly with or have programs that can benefit refugee and immigrant farmers who are currently farming or interested in establishing farming operations. The primary goal of this 2-year project is to increase the knowledge and skills of agricultural professionals through a series of farm tours, webinars, and culturally appropriate educational resources that will support knowledge transfer and implementation of sustainable practices in refugee and immigrant communities of Kentucky. Farm tours will include direct interaction with farmer mentors using translation services and taste testing culturally appropriate recipes using produce grown on local community farms. Webinar topics include but are not limited to cultural competency topics, access to land, production education, food safety, business planning, and market opportunities. Combined programming and a central repository of resources will help ag professionals support refugee and immigrant farmers while supporting food sovereignty and addressing community food insecurity and the barriers these populations commonly face in reaching their goals of feeding their families fresh produce and generating farm income. Project success will be evaluated by the number of ag professionals participating in activities and reporting improved cultural and production literacy, number of downloads of resources developed, and the number of ag professionals reporting implementation of learned practices in direct technical assistance and locally hosted programs.

The primary goal of this 2-year project is to train agricultural professionals working with refugee farmers interested in establishing farming operations. The two main objectives of the project include:

Cultivate a Community of Practice (CoP) that engages at least 30 practitioners, growers, and other ag professionals with a passion for and recognized need of strengthening the knowledge base of refugee farmers. The CoP creates a space to share organizational information and best practices and transfer knowledge, with an end result of improving information and educational resources available to growers.

Create a farmer tool kit, translated into key languages (Spanish, French, Swahili, Nepali, for example) that can be shared with new growers. The toolkit will be simple, graphic heavy, and culturally appropriate for the refugee populations.

The objectives will be met through a series of project activities, webinars, in-person events, farm tours, and educational resource described below:

At least 8 webinars will be hosted for ag professionals on a range of topics to increase their ability to interact with and support refugee and immigrant farmers. These highly interactive meetings will allow for content delivery and topical discussion, expanding the participants’ knowledge of resources, improving cultural competency skills, and learning from peers’ experiences. During each session, subject matter experts, including translators, farmer mentors, and others, will lead discussions on selected topics. Targeted content will be influenced by ag professional, subject matter expert, and farmer input, with anticipated topics including general crop production, certification programs, food safety, and other topics.

At least 8 in-person meetings to network and inform current and prospective ag professionals about existing resources and those in development and to coach them on working with refugee farmers. During each session, subject matter experts, including translators, farmer mentors, and others, will lead discussion on selected topics. Each session will result in a checklist, factsheet or other companion resource for agents and other ag professionals to use to integrate knowledge and skills into local farmer education and outreach programs. The in-person events will focus on soft-skills and topics like working with an interpreter/translator.

At least 8 farm tours will be hosted on farms operated by the farmer mentors and university research farms. This format is an effective way to engage ag professionals in in situ learning, where they can network and meet refugee farmers currently or interested in growing produce crops. Direct connection through translators and observation of practices will reinforce ability to support this population of growers and enable participants to transfer this knowledge in other situations.

As part of the farm tours, the project team will work with local chefs for taste testing activities using produce grown by local refugee and immigrant farmers selling through commercial channels. This will introduce ag professionals to crops they may not have worked with and will encourage relationships and build trust over shared food with ag professionals, farmers, and translators.

A farmer toolkit will be developed, populated with existing resources and those created as part of the project. Several existing education resources will be translated into languages that are important to the local immigrant and refugee farmers. At least 10 simple, graphic-heavy factsheets will be created, translated into languages like Spanish, French, Swahili, and Nepali. These resources will be reviewed by farmers for accuracy and readability before public distribution. The toolkit will be housed in the curated online resource repository hosted by the University of Kentucky Center for Crop Diversification (https://www.uky.edu/ccd/).

This combination of activities will empower ag professionals to support refugee and immigrant farmers in Kentucky and combat the barriers of low English fluency, minimal production and marketing literacy.  Refugee and immigrant farmers can flourish with the help of ag professionals. Providing support to ag professionals through educational resources, information sharing, and coaching, will increase their confidence and success in transferring knowledge to refugee farmers aid them in reaching their farming goals.