Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.**, beginning, small-acreage, and…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.**, beginning, small-acreage, and specialty crop producers' data is underrepresented in the national farm business management and benchmarking database. New producers scaling operations lack standardized benchmarks for assessing profitability and growth potential of various enterprises. Incubator farm programs nationally propose to develop resources for financial management, record-keeping, benchmarking, and expand smaller scale, direct market and specialty crop farm metrics represented in the fbmb database. The project will adapt lessons from prior vegetable benchmarking studies and work with 35 small-scale direct market farms across 7 states: MA, CO, CA, WA, IA, KS, MO. A learning community of 8 incubator farm training programs will gain skills in supporting producers with record-keeping, enterprise analysis, market channel assessment, and financial management resulting in data-driven business decisions. These efforts will assist beginning producers to use benchmarking data to manage risk and improve profitability. Specific goals of this project include: developing new tools to track financial performance among small-scale specialty crop producers; providing professional development training to incubator programs in order to ensure consistency and integrity of data collection processes; increasing the breadth and utility of data from specialty crop farms in the fbmb database; expanding collaborations with farmer training and farm business management programs; and creating resources to help producers and educators interpret and apply benchmarking principles to improve profitability and efficiency, support business growth, and address other farm viability measures. This project addresses both objectives and measures 1, 2, 4, 5 as outlined in the fbmb RFA, part I, C.