More information on this year’s conference: 

At this year’s conference we will be building off the conversation of our last Normalizing Farm Financials series session, and will look at drivers of growth and how they impact decision making around investments, family needs, end goals, and retirement. , and will look at drivers of growth and how they impact decision making around investments, family needs, end goals, and retirement. 

Panelists 

• Bethany Allen, Harvest Tide Organics
• Jeff Fisher & Ben Whalen, Bumbleroot Farm

Sprouting off of previous sessions that MOFGA has hosted, this session continues our efforts to normalize open discussions on sensitive farm financial concerns and create space for farmers to express a generosity and willingness to be vulnerable in asking and answering questions regarding current financial realities.

Flow of the Day

We will start the day with a round of introductions diving into the following questions:

• Where do you foresee the challenge in the year ahead?
• What are you running towards?
• What are you backing away from?

We will then hear from our panelists who will share their financial metrics before diving into the topic of the day, break for a lunch (bring your own!), and then open it up to farmer discussion.

The aim of the Normalizing Farm Financials series is to help farmers identify common challenges as well as highlight potential solutions for farms that are struggling with their financial viability. Our sessions ask farmers to express an incredible generosity and willingness to be vulnerable in asking and answering questions regarding current financial realities — and we realized the many benefits to sharing our personal experiences or concerns with the greater MOFGA farming community.

MOFGA intends this event to be one of many next steps in building space and encouraging comfort around the sensitive topic of farm financials, and will be looking to host similar programming for other types of farms, as interest and desire is identified in the future. In deepening this conversation, one long-term goal is to be able to build more universal support for farmers to address their common challenges (be it paying themselves better, labor, healthcare, childcare, etc.).

This work is supported by the Northeast Extension Risk Management project award no. 2024-70027-42540, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.