Farm Classes & Tours Part 3

harvesting broomcorn during last day of work

Hi friends,

Thanks for reading my blog.  I’ve completed my internship with RFC but I still have a couple more entries I’d like to post about the experience, the first of which is this one about the remainder of the farm classes that I attended.

Running a Small Farm Business

Maud Powell (who you may remember as Siskiyou Sustainable Cooperative co-coordinator) gave us many tips on starting a small farm business.  Beginning small farmers face many challenges, including access to land, access to capital, and managing labor needs with a personal life.  There are a lot of important tools a farmer (like any businessperson) can use to help plan and track their business: a business plan, cash flow statement, income statement, and enterprise budgets are some examples we learned about.  In this class we also learned about good local food marketing from staff of Thrive (an organization that promotes local food in the area) and Rogue Valley Farm-to-School.

a book that excites RFC interns

Food & Farm Movement

Our last potluck of the season was about the food and farm movement, and more specifically about legislation on local, state, and national levels that support small and beginning farmers.  We learned about the Agricultural Reclamation Act, which was coordinated by Friends of Family Farmers to support family farms throughout the state of Oregon.  It includes a plan for policy that will support small family farms and their communities.  We also discussed legislation about genetically modified crops and foods, from Jackson County’s GMO crop ban that is on the May 2014 ballot, to Oregon’s bill that requires decisions about seeds to be made on a statewide level (known as the state's Monsanto Protection Act), to Washington State’s I-522 campaign to label genetically engineered foods.

Promoting family farming in Oregon!

an infographic about GMO labeling (click to enlarge)

Seeds @ Dancing Bear Farm

I had the internship-equivalent of this 3 hour class.  Steve discussed some of the things to think about when growing seed crops and everyone got to try their hand at cleaning corn and lettuce seed.  Since I’ve already written a number of posts about seeds (such as this one and this one), I won’t go into much detail here.  

Steve demonstrates tomato seed cleaning

Steve demonstrates lettuce seed cleaning