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Identifying the needs of Wisconsin’s beginning and specialty crop farmers

Katie Wantoch and Stephanie Plaster

Summary

Wisconsin farmers are experiencing prolonged farm stress due to challenges from variability of markets, prices of inputs, and new technologies and practices affecting both crop yield and quality. This stress has contributed to beginning commodity and specialty crop farmers re-evaluating their financial situation and business plans. A UW Extension funded-project worked with key industry stakeholders using focus group methodology to gather the important needs and relevant information of these audiences. The project team sought to learn from focus group participants such things as current use of risk management programs, market outlook data, marketing decisions, planning and use of crop insurance, the level of financial management education, and their ability to employ skills in effective insurance and marketing decisions. This session will share the planning process efforts developed along with the results from these focus groups and key industry stakeholder support. The results from these discussions will be utilized in future UW Extension outreach programming, such as a year-long farm management webinar series with Wisconsin Cranberry growers. In addition, future curriculum, Farm Pulse: Grain Marketing and Crop Insurance, will be developed with educational materials, creation of videos for use as stand-alone content, and to be included in a Canvas (LMS) course. The hybrid online course delivery will use numerous interactive teaching activities for farmers to apply grain marketing and price risk management principles and crop insurance decisions to a case farm and their own farm information with interacting with peers at in-person Extension meetings. 

Details

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