Act

Student farmers across programs and universities gather to present about their own programs and learn about others to collectively grow and improve campus food systems.

Learn the three essential components of marketing your farm, with a focus on agritourism. Myrna Greenfield is the “Top Egg” at Good Egg Marketing and the author of Marketing Your Farm: A practical guide to attracting loyal customers and increasing sales. Ellen Parlee is the co-owner of Parlee Farms in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, which offers pick-your-own fruit and flowers, along with a farmstand, bakery, ice cream stand, animal petting area, and a food trailer. Ryan Wilson is the co-owner of DeMeritt Hill Farm in Lee, New Hampshire, which offers pick-your-own apples/peaches/blueberries/Xmas trees, hayrides, school tours, special events, Cross Country running, and hiking trails and has a full commercial kitchen. The farm plays host to Torey Roderick Performance Horses and every October, the world-famous Haunted Overload.

Are you applying for a local or regional food systems grant and looking to incorporate up-to-date local food systems data in your application? In this webinar, the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service will explore and demo a new tool called the Food and Agriculture Mapper and Explorer (FAME), which brings together data from dozens of publicly available datasets to make it easy for food systems practitioners to search and visualize information about U.S. local and regional food systems.

FAME is an open-access resource with the goals of supporting the utilization of data in program development, evaluation, and decision making and improving access to data. Using an equity focused lens, this resource includes indicators covering topics including labor, community resources, nutrition security and food access, business development, and local food sales and works to improve access to more comprehensive data on local and regional food systems. Join this webinar to learn how to best make use of this resource and to learn more about the state of local food systems in a given area. There will be a live question and answer session at the end.