|
NC Growing Together Wins N.C. Cooperative Extension Award
|
|
NCGT was presented with the 2017 "Outstanding Subject Matter Program by a Team" award from the North Carolina Association of Cooperative Extension Specialists (NCACES).
The NC Growing Together team, represented by Rebecca Dunning, Laura Lauffer, John Ivey, Matt Poore, and Joanna Lelekacs, accepted the award at the NCACES spring meeting on May 5 at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.
|
|
New Resource Spotlight: A Guide to Hosting Mini Food Shows in Your Community
|
|
|
Mini food shows are community-led events designed to showcase local farms and food producers to a variety of audiences, including buyers like restaurants and specialty shops, food distributors, and residents. This guide outlines the planning, preparation, and marketing tasks for hosting your own event.
|
Upcoming Webinars Support Food and Farm Business Development
|
|
Heirs Property & Succession Planning for Farmers, Foresters, and Landowners
 Presented by NCGT and the North Carolina Rural Center, this webinar will provide an overview of the importance of succession and estate planning to landowners and farmers around the state, with a special emphasis on the challenges and opportunities for heirs property cases. You'll also hear about ways that landowners can maximize their investments from land that is no longer in agricultural production, including through forestry management plans, conservation easements, hunting and wildlife leases, and more.
Hosting Agriculture & Food Entrepreneurship Training at Your Community College: A Webinar for Small Business Counselors and Cooperative Extension Agents
 Presented by NCGT and the North Carolina Rural Center, this webinar features two highly successful food and farm business training programs from Southwestern Community College and Vance-Granville Community College. Join us to hear how to develop these programs at your own campus, and potential solutions for funding, planning, and marketing these programs in your own community.
Crowdfunding Farm & Food Businesses: New North Carolina Securities Laws
 Because of legislation passed by the N.C. General Assembly in July 2016, startups in North Carolina can now raise up to $2 million from average investors using their own web site or a registered funding portal. A further simplified option, called the Local Public Offering (LPO), permits raising up to $250,000 without use of a web site. Think of this as a friends-and-family round except now any North Carolina resident can back an offering. These options include various safeguards for investors while expanding fundraising avenues for startups. A representative of the N.C. Department of the Secretary of State's Office will cover recent developments in investment crowdfunding.
Save the Date: The New Restaurant Model: Assisting Restaurants in a Farm-to-Table World
September 7, 2017 | 10-11 a.m. | Virtual | Registration & details coming soon!
Save the Date: Trademarking Your Farm & Food Business
October 10, 2017 | 10-11 a.m. | Virtual | Registration & details coming soon!
|
| About NCGT |
|
|
GOAL | Bring more locally-grown foods - produce, meat, dairy, and seafood - into mainstream retail and food service supply chains, thus enhancing food security by increasing access to local foods and by strengthening the economics of small to mid-sized farm and fishing operations.
STRATEGY |
Identify the most promising solutions by which local production and associated value-added activities can enter local retail and food service markets, pilot these solutions in North Carolina, and evaluate and report the results for the benefit of other states and regions.
|
|
|
|
Greetings all,
Thanks for reading our monthly newsletter and please let us know what you think.
Sincerely,
The NCGT Management Team
|
NCGT/Poole College of Management MBA Student Teams Work with TRACTOR Food and Farms to Increase Access, Profitability
|
|
|
|
|
NCGT/MBA student team (back row) with Yancey County Commissioners (front row).
|
MBA student teams from NC State University's Poole College of Management Supply Chain Resource Cooperative have worked with NCGT staff and partner entities since summer 2013 to investigate and address food business processes and supply chain issues across the local-to-mainstream food supply chain. Read about their research projects on the NCGT website, here.
 This past spring, one student team worked with NCGT partner
TRACTOR Food and Farms to increase profitability by more strategically planning delivery schedules, routes, and minimum orders. As team member Stephanie White describes, "the key question TRACTOR wanted [us] to answer was 'how much do our customers need to buy to justify a delivery?' In order to determine this, we needed to know the cost of transportation for each leg of TRACTOR's delivery route. While logistics providers like UPS have very sophisticated software to answer this question, we needed a 'free', small-scale solution to fit TRACTOR's needs."
The end result of the team's project was an Excel-based tool with multiple components to manage TRACTOR's business at each stage of the sales cycle: recording inventory, allocating inventory to customers, transportation route planning, and cost control. "We operate on such a thin margin," said TRACTOR's director Robin Smith. "The spreadsheet tool allows us to look at the logistics of a delivery and decide if it is feasible and what the best route and minimum order need to be." (Download
Excel-based tool and
User Guide.)
The student team traveled to Burnsville in May to train the TRACTOR staff on the tool and present their research to the Yancey County Commissioners. "We really wanted the County Commissioners to see how TRACTOR partners with local farmers and students to grow local food systems, and we wanted to make them aware of issues that a non-profit food hub deals with," said Smith. According to Smith, the County Commissioners have been very supportive of TRACTOR; in fact, she says that the food hub "wouldn't even be in existence without Yancey county government."
 This is the second time that an NCGT MBA student team based their work at TRACTOR. Last fall, an undergraduate team of three business students
analyzed the business case for a new local food box program for TRACTOR, which had previously only offered wholesale accounts. "People had been asking us how to buy our local produce, and we didn't really have a mechanism for that," explains Smith. "The direct-to-workplace local food box was a new idea for us." The team proposed working with a local hospital since a local produce program fit in well with the hospital's wellness mission.
The team analyzed competing box programs, conducted an employee survey at Blue Ridge Regional Hospital in Spruce Pine to assess interest, and created a product and pricing program. Response to the survey was overwhelmingly positive and, with the hospital's support, the CSA program was adopted and the first delivery will be June 15th. "We're incredibly grateful to Blue Ridge Regional Hospital for being early adopters," says Smith. "It has been amazing to work with them to get local healthy produce to their employees."
For NCGT partner organizations interested in working with an MBA team in the fall, please
contact NCGT Project Manager Rebecca Dunning.
|
NCGT Partner Cheney Brothers Pilots "Chef-Driven Agriculture"
|
|
|
|
|
Farmers, chefs, and NCGT and Cheney Brothers staff met from summer through fall 2016 to trade ideas on products for the 2017 season.
|
Last summer, Joel Sullivan, Director of Marketing for NCGT partner Cheney Brothers, Inc. (formerly Pate Dawson Co.), had a novel idea for his food distribution business. Observing the explosive growth in demand for locally-grown foods in fine dining and casual restaurants alike - and the growing interest on the part of chefs for ever-more unique produce to highlight in their food - he saw the potential for what he calls "chef-driven agriculture".
He envisioned a system where an intermediary distributor enables chefs and farmers to collaborate, with the chefs giving farmers input into what kind of specialty crops they are looking for, and farmers growing directly for them. This collaborative pre-planning across the supply chain, with the distributor mediating orders and delivering products, could lower everyone's costs and risk.
"North Carolina is one of the best states for agriculture because we can grow such a wide variety of produce here," says Sullivan. M
any growers tend to focus on staple crops like sweet potatoes and squash that are familiar to them. However, "the market is saturated in those products," he says. "The key is diversification. Restaurants will pay for unique and specialty products and many of them can be grown here in North Carolina."
Last summer and fall, Pate Dawson partnered with NCGT to convene a series of meetings with growers and chefs to begin the conversation. "If we want to explore new produce items we have to get a microcosm of the whole supply chain engaged and committed to make it work," says Sullivan. NCGT supported the efforts by contributing staff time for Trish Tripp, former NCGT Produce Supply Chain Lead, and Graham Givens, NCGT Supply Chain Scholar. "Trish and NC Growing Together helped advise the program and connect us to growers to get it started," says Sullivan. Givens interviewed all the participating chefs and farmers during the pilot to capture lessons learned.
"In this case
NCGT supported Pate Dawson's efforts with organizational support and a research component to better understand how the collaborative effort worked for each group involved -- the distributor, chefs, and farmers," says NC Growing Together Project Manager Rebecca Dunning.
It was a positive learning experience -- Sullivan says that there were several new produce possibilities explored, and valuable chef and farmer connections made -- and one that the company hopes to return to. "If the distributor is facilitating the process, it needs to be completely committed, and driving it with resources. It takes really solid communication with the chefs and farmers. It's a lot of work, but it's worth it," Sullivan says.
Cheney Brothers, Inc. is a sponsor of the Farm to Fork Picnic, which is a fundraiser for beginning farmer programs at the Center For Environmental Farming Systems and W.C. Breeze Family Farm. The Picnic is June 4 at Fearrington Village.
|
|
Sneak Peak at the 2017 Local Food Supply Chain Apprentices!
|
|
|
|
| The 2017 NCGT Local Food Supply Chain Apprentices with their mentors. |
NCGT's 2017 Local Food Supply Chain Apprentices are about to hit the ground running. Here's a sneak peak at who will be working where. Look for a complete write-up of their experiences at the end of the summer!
Erin Welty, University of South Carolina, Columbia:
Lowes Foods
Molly Riddle, Brevard College:
TRACTOR Food and Farms
Shannon Herlihy, University of North Carolina, Asheville:
TRACTOR Food and Farms
Kate Ford, University of Virginia:
Polk County Agricultural Economic Development Office
Kristen Wagner, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
NC Catch
Maria Elisa Vollmer, Virginia Tech:
FreshPoint
Katelyn Bailey, NC State University:
Small Business Technology Development Center
Casey Auch, University of North Carolina, Wilmington:
Feast Down East
Ali Huber, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
Seal the Seasons
Alex Borst, University of Mississippi, Oxford:
Working Landscapes
Ben Herndon, NC State University:
Foster-Caviness
Taylor Hayes, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
Piedmont Food and Ag Processing Center
Khin Hnit Oo (April), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:
Transplanting Traditions Community Farm
Chanel A. Nestor, North Carolina A&T State University/Appalachian State University:
Piedmont Triad Regional Council
Rhyne Cureton, North Carolina A&T State University:
Foster-Caviness
Chase McCurry, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: N.C. Cooperative Extension
|
|
|
|
Project Contact Information
Nancy Creamer,
Co-Director of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, NC State University; and Project Director, NC Growing Together,
[email protected]
, 919-515-9447
Emily Edmonds, NCGT Extension and Outreach Program Manager, [email protected], 828-399-0297
Laura Lauffer
, Project Coordinator, Local Farms and Food, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Cooperative Extension Program,
[email protected]
, 336-285-4690
JJ Richardson, NCGT Website and Communications Coordinator,
[email protected], 919-889-8219
This project is supported by the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative competitive grant no. 2013-68004-20363 of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
© 2013-2017 NC Growing Together
www.ncgrowingtogether.org
|
|
|
|
|
