Small Farms Conservancy is a broad-based non-profit public benefit corporation.

The mission of the Small Farms Conservancy is to protect, sustain and inspire

small farming worldwide.

Small Farmer’s Journal is a working partner with the Small Farms Conservancy

fully and wholly endorsing the mission statement.

(For more complete information visit www.smallfarmsconservancy.org)

For months, the Conservancy has been extremely active, working on several fronts to gather information and funding – plus offering specific assistance and connections to individuals faced with small farm challenges and needs. There is tremendous interest in the Conservancy’s stated goals and programs. As we’ve known all along, the timing is right.

We balance the fund-raising work with outreach and service, while we feverishly work to fill-in the program details. Clocking hundreds of hours and thousands of miles, meeting with people from New England to the Midwest, the South and Southwest to our own Northwest, we are seeing important patterns of need and interest. And we’ve been surprised to see and hear that access to specific information has been uppermost in people’s minds:

1. Where can I find a farm apprenticeship or farm job?

2. How do I find farmer’s markets in my area?

3. How to find foodstuffs; i.e. raw milk, fresh eggs, grass-fat meats, heritage fruits and vegetables?

4. How can I get a start farming?

5. Where’s a good place to learn farming?

6. How do we find help with specific farm legal issues?

7. How do we protect our farm after we are gone?

8. I need liability and health insurance.

9. We need to find farm apprentices/help.

10. And “How can I help this important cause?”

In that order, those are the ten questions we hear most often.

It’s been a perfect match of our stated goals to the expressed needs except that we’ve been surprised in an important way. Insurance we thought would top the list, it doesn’t. We thought that directory assistance for farm produce would be way down, but as you see, it’s above most of the other items. For us this translates to an exciting equation:

A. Lots of people want to farm (more perhaps than even we imagined). They, if given an opportunity, will farm.

B. The demand for the good food of local farmers is accelerating rapidly – and does not appear to be anywhere near satisfied. Meaning more farmers are needed.

C. “Where” and “How” are the most commonly used words pointing to the critical need for information service and education.

The Conservancy is working to connect these three elements together dynamically, resulting in more better-informed, established and new farmers providing more good local food.

The Conservancy’s partnership with the Small Farmer’s Journal is providing a mechanism to get apprenticeship, labor, farmers markets, education, and farm beginnings information out to those who need it. On these pages, on the websites, and through outreach to regional organizations we will be building dynamic and static directory listings. At this moment information is being gathered for a master continental listing for farmers markets. And, as for apprenticeships, farms to buy, farm caretakers, grass-fed Yak etc., watch for a new enterprise.

On the legal front, there is a great deal of work to do but we are heartened by the professionals who have reached out to the Conservancy offering their expertise in these areas. We are identifying outstanding organizations such as the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund and the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance and anxious to tie them and others together into a working coalition or alliance.

And on insurance, we have the makings of an exciting program, so much so that we are not at liberty to divulge too many details. Seems there is quite a bit of friendly and unfriendly competition on this front. What you need to know is that a great deal of research and preparation is complete and when we get sufficient numbers of prospective customers OR have the dollars required to set things in motion, we are ready to flip the switch to the ON position. Most likely we will start out with general liability insurance offerings. Once those are well enough in place to flatten some wrinkles, we’ll probably move on to health insurance.

Central to the Conservancy’s work is education. While quite a bit has been done to date on the question of apprenticeships and on-farm education inquiry, we mustn’t forget the opportunity represented by the public school system. School boards across the nation are regularly challenged to come up with textbooks which satisfy curriculum requirements and at the same time reflect accurately the changing times. With local foods, bio-diversity, and environmental concerns uppermost in many minds, we see a prime opening to influence the content of textbooks with regard to the good new farming. Most of these books are still stuck in the Butzian 80’s (the get big or get out era) when it comes to agribusiness propaganda. Our children don’t need dogma from them or from us. They need information about the need for farmers and how rewarding an intellgient farm enterprise might be. They need information about the incredible genetic diversity of poultry, cattle, goat, sheep, swine, and equine breeds. They need information about the economics and fertility of rotational cropping systems and well-made compost. They need an honest farming history of regions, telling the good and bad stories of crops and disasters of the recent and distant past.

We’ve conducted meetings in Maine, New Hampshire, Oregon, Minnesota, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and California. We assisted individuals and groups in organizational efforts and legal reviews. We are making ourselves available as much as our limited staff and resources currently permit. And as things grow we know those efforts will also grow.

As to how you can help? We need to bring in more supporting members and more donations. We have some keen young people who are volunteering to help us with designing an expansion of our grass-roots membership campaign. They will need volunteers to help. We need money, we need members, and we need volunteer help. Please visit www.smallfarmsconservancy.org for more specific information on all of these fronts.