 I'm John Mesco, I am with the Sustainable Farming Association. We're an organization out of Minnesota. Some of you may be familiar with us. With me today also is my wife Lisa. Lisa, in addition to being my wife, is a partner on this project. She worked with us in developing the entire proposal as well as carrying out some of the curriculum development that we're working on right now. We are farmers in addition to this. We farm in East Central Minnesota, we raise grass-fed beef as well. We use Twitter, and if there's anyone here that uses Twitter and you want to let folks know in your network that you were here and you learned about this, well, there's some Twitter handles, mine and laces as well, and then we use the hashtag Adjust2015 if you're doing anything with that. Real quickly on the Sustainable Farming Association, very similar organization to what you have here in the Northern Plains Sustainable Ag Society. We've been partner organizations for many years. Our key focus though is on farm to farmer networking. And so our solution, our way of arriving at solutions to Sustainable Ag issues is bringing farmers and farmers together to develop solutions, present solutions, share solutions with one another. We have a lot of partners in that process though. SARE obviously is one of those. Lots of other organizations, government agencies, other non-profits, other entities that we work with to carry out our mission. And that came in handy when we developed the team to put this project together. I was the project lead, Dr. Valentine Caddow from the University of Minnesota worked on human subjects as well as helping to develop the curriculum or the, excuse me, the surveys and the interviews. Dr. Mike Roseman from the Agri Wellness Incorporated. He's a syndicated columnist and a rural psychologist. And he really was helpful in helping us understand the importance of dealing with people when they're talking about difficult subjects. And you'll see why. Jan Joanidis from Renew in the countryside, Lisa, as I mentioned, Jerry Ford and Jason Walker are SFA staff members. We also had an advisory team. We have three farmers on there, Dennis Engel, Josh Reinhards and Chris Kudner. Kevin Marl from University of Minnesota, Kevin Palante from Minnesota Department of Agriculture. Tony Nye from Ohio State, Keri Stroh from here at Northern Plains and Beth Larrabee from the Iowa Organic Association. So as I said, obviously this was funded by NCR SAR. The genesis of this project really comes out of the understanding that, yes, we need more farmers on the land. We need more people farming in sustainable ways. We need to continue to transition corn and soybean land into farmland that is raised or managed more sustainably. But we need those farmers to succeed. When we have a constant cycle of people coming into farming and then hitting a wall and dropping out or reducing their impact and then another new farmer coming in, that's not helpful. And so that's really the genesis of the project. How do we keep farmers in business for the long haul? So in the work, we surveyed over 200 farms and farm families from all over the country. Obviously most of those folks were in Minnesota and the surrounding states, but we had people in the survey from the West Coast, California, East Coast, New York, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Canada. We had all different types of farms represented in the survey. We had mid-sized, small-sized, large hog operations, dairy farms, beef cattle farms, vegetable farms, corn and soybeans, fruit and nut growers. Lots of different types of producers represented in there. We selected a subgroup of those and conducted face-to-face one-on-one interviews where we went into a lot of depth about how they started their farm business, what some of the challenges they ran into, what some of the successes they had, what advice they might have for folks coming in. And the final phase of this is to develop an add-on curriculum that can be used by beginning farmer education programs. It's not a full-blown new beginning farmer ed program. It's an add-on curriculum that can support existing programs. So I want to give you just that we don't have time to give you all the information that we collected. It's available on our website and I'll give you that link shortly. But I want to give you a little bit of a flavor of some of the information we found out. So 71% of the people we talked to said that when they started farming, they intended their farm to be a full-time income. And in reality, about half of those people make less than 25% of their net income from the farm. This is like at three to five years into their farming operation and a third of the people make less than 10% of their income from the farm. So the result is that of our surveyed people, most, the vast majority of people are way below where they had initially planned to be. We don't call that failure necessary, but it necessarily, but it is an indication that things, something didn't match up. Something played out differently than what they originally planned. And so consequently, most people are not satisfied with their level of income on the farm. One of the quotes that summarizes a lot of what we heard from people, a lot of what we ran into. We have dozens and dozens of anecdotal quotes that we collected as well, but this one kind of summarizes what people are thinking. The reality of how hard it is to take on all that we planned and dreamed and to build our business from the ground up has been a shock. I admire people who have gone before us and set up great farm businesses, especially the people who have done so without a partner. There are just so many hurdles to get over when starting a farm business. And that's really, we heard that message a lot throughout the process. So we took all this information, as I said, there's information, more data on the website. We took all this in and we developed a set of learning objectives, things that if we could have a chance to take these people through before they started farming would address most of the issues that they highlighted for us. So those learning objectives that are in this curriculum are to acquire a basic understanding of soil literacy. As you just heard, we're talking about how do we build successful farms that starts with the soils. So one of the things that we want to incorporate in that is the soil literacy. The next thing is identifying progress benchmarks. We really heard from people that they were surprised when they got three, five, seven years down the road and something happened. Or they woke up one day all of a sudden they were out of cash. Or they woke up one day all of a sudden somebody got hurt. One of the farming partners or the labor, the person providing the labor got hurt and then that threw their whole business out of whack. So what we want to talk about, and I'll give you an example of that later, is how do we set those benchmarks in place so you can begin thinking about if this were to happen, what would we do? If somebody were to be injured, if we lost labor, if we had a child, how would things change when we get to that point? So we'll talk about benchmarks. Basis for business plan assumptions. Anybody who's made a business plan, you know you can't predict the future. You have to make assumptions on what's going to happen. But what we found oftentimes is people are making assumptions really literally out of thin air without a whole lot of foundation underneath them for whether or not this is a good assumption. And so we, in our curriculum, we take people through their assumptions and we just have them explain what their basis was and in the process uncover some of those flaws. The most successful farms that we surveyed, the one distinguishing characteristic of those farms was that they had developed community networks. That those successful farms had a set of advisors, formal and informal, maybe a paid consultant but also maybe a neighbor that knows more about this particular enterprise than they do. They had networks of community people, they were involved in a church or they had some kind of social activity in the community. They had a network of support around them. So that's one of the things we talk about in the curriculum. A lot of problems popped up with employee management, particularly on small and mid-sized vegetable farms which very quickly as they grow they need to add labor. That type of farm brings labor in quickly and so a lot of problems early on as they bring in labor, how do we find good labor, how do we pay for good labor, how do we keep them employed. And contrary life patterns, in some of the more tragic cases that we uncovered were situations where somebody had an addiction that they managed in their life but when they started farming all of a sudden the stress and the pressure of having to make a farm payment or to make ends meet all of a sudden that underlying life pattern that they were able to manage when they had a full time job, paying the bills, all of a sudden now that pops up and becomes a major problem. So we're going to identify those things, business plan alternatives, what is it that if we do need to shift gears, if we do need to make a change in midstream, where are we going to go from there. I'm going to have Lisa come and talk a little bit about the last objective that we're covering and that is family roles in the farm and children, what that entails. Apologies, we rehearsed this last night but we had a different computer. So I mentioned to you that I was going to talk about benchmarks, okay. So when we say benchmarks, we would like to see people think about red lights on the dashboard of your car. Does anybody have a dashboard light that doesn't go off? Okay, yeah. We had a car once where the light burned out and it went off so we were okay. Some lights on the dashboard are really not that big of a deal, right. I mean my mechanic says sometimes just the gas cap being loose can cause the light to pop on. So well that's not a big deal but some lights mean you need to stop the car right now, right. Anybody have that one come on? Like if you don't stop right now you're going to do some permanent damage to the engine. So what we want to do is have people think about what lights on the dashboard of their farm operation over the course of time. When that light pops on, what are they going to do, okay. So I'll talk a little bit about that. So what are the indicators of a need for change? So we ask in our curriculum, we ask people to lay out the course of their farming career on a timeline. Now this is not something that is obviously perfected or etched in stone but it's something to get people just thinking about what they might do. It's not hard and fast but it gives you that perspective of the long term. So if we want to look at somebody that's going to start farming at age 20 or 30, we give them a 30 year window that's reasonable and so we take them from 2015 out to 2045. And so some of the, particularly some of the smaller farms that we talked with, they made a decision early on they were going to incur credit card debt to get the process started. So a lot of people do that. Might not be the best option but that's what people do. So we ask people if that's, for example, if that's what you're doing, then when will you have that paid off? Put it on the timeline. Make it a firm commitment. Maybe you've decided you're going to start farming with some kind of rough used equipment but your goal is to get a better tractor five years down the road. So put that on the timeline. Maybe you have promised your spouse that you're going to remodel the kitchen at some point. You know, just stick with me. Stick with me. I know this isn't right but as soon as we get this farm going we'll remodel that kitchen. So put that on the timeline because you know what, if you don't, if you don't actually fulfill that commitment that's going to be, may be an issue that affects the sustainability of your farm. So a lot of people start farming with kids in that five to ten year of age range or maybe newborns for that matter but a lot of people that we talked with wanted their children to come into the farming operation at some point in the future. And so what we tell people is alright well let's put that on the timeline. You know if you're, if ten years from now you want to have the farm operation far enough along that you can support an additional full time worker, put that on there and then in addition to the timeline when we go further into this we connect financial benchmarks to this. So in other words what's your debt to asset ratio need to be ten years down the road in order to have that happen. What kinds of financing will you need to make that happen? Maybe you need to save up for college education down the road and of course then at some point you'd like to have the land paid off. So let's put a timeline on that and you know that if your goal is by 2034 or whatever to have your land paid off and you're still have, you're still borrowing a tremendous amount of capital resources in the years prior to that you're probably not on track to get it paid off. So that's a red light on the dashboard. So we're just, just asking people to take that. So of course once you get your land paid off then you've got to fulfill the promise of the trip to Europe and so you put that on there maybe before you hand off the farm you want to do a new barn and you start a formal transition and then a scaling back. Now again we know that you're not going to say today what things will look like 30 years from now but to begin thinking and to begin having a long term perspective and say if this doesn't happen that would be a red light and we're going to make an adjustment. Now I'm going to ask Lisa to come up. Thank you. Alright. Okay. I want to add too that the feedback that we received from the farming participants were was overwhelmingly positive. So they were very grateful to be able to share their stories in the hopes that this would help others. So thank you for funding it. Alright. With regards to the family farming and roles on the farm, with our surveys we found that 45% had experience with farming, half had little or no experience, 34% had no formal training in farming. This is why family tensions arose. So we found that there was a need for knowledge about integrating farming and family roles. So we decided to equip them with a framework of knowledge and we did this through lecture, workshops, worksheets. And just briefly we went through the roles on the farm. We encouraged them to keep their off-farm jobs. Farm work and chores, we encouraged them to define what those look like on their farms. So whether they were a CSA, a grain farmer, thank you, or a livestock farmer, a combination, they needed to define what chores are specific to their enterprise. And then family management was also a role that needed to be discussed. So we took them through what it looked like to have children on the farm and covered child development issues on the farm, different roles that children could play. We talked about child safety and we also talked about the benefits of raising children on a farm. We talked about household management because we all know that's another role that needs to be played when you're farming. And then accounting and marketing, we received a number of comments from the participants that indicated that accounting and marketing were aspects of the farming enterprise that overwhelmed them. They were surprised at the amount that would require of them. So it's definitely a role that needs to be considered and somebody needs to take it. And we had some tools that we could refer them to to learn further. And then networking is another role, so there would be business networking and then social networking for the family, so community networking. Let's see. Oh yeah, we also referred them to Strengths Finder, Gallup Strengths Finder. This is a personality test. Dr. Michael Roseman was a very helpful member of our team. He is a farmer and a psychologist as well as an syndicated columnist. And he agreed this would be a good tool for them to use. So we encourage them to take that test, it's very simple, it's inexpensive, and it helps them to identify their top five strengths. And what Gallup found in their research was that people operate better and are engaged more in their work if they operate within their strengths. So we also referred them to a tool that Dr. Roseman provided for us and that is how to have a family business meeting. And then conflict management and mediation are referrals for people who just need a little bit of extra help in this area. And then what we had them do is have their own family business meeting, just the two of them. We wanted to start out with the partners and we had them go through the rules on the farm with some of them not having any kind of an agricultural background or very little farm training, it was helpful to sit down and discuss what rules need to be taken and who can take them, who fits best in those roles and strengths finder can also help with that as well. And we had them pencil that out for their farm and also engage in discussion. Okay. Yeah, so we encouraged them to continue having family dialogues as well with their children to encourage children to take ownership if that's a part of their picture in life. So communication was a big element of what we encouraged. So that's it. All right. So the result of this work is a curriculum we call the new farm reality check. It's there's several different formats for that, a short workshop. We could probably do something in an hour, but we really like to have two or three hours. We've presented the short workshop a couple of times already. We have a day long workshop that is currently in development. There's a couple of items that we want to add to that, extending that beyond the depth of the short workshop. That would be a day long something like a pre-conference workshop like you've all seen and heard. The website for this project is right there, sfa-mn.org slash adjust 2015. And you can see the more of the results. You can see a lot of the anecdotal information that's out there. And that is where we will be we're behind on posting the worksheets and that kind of stuff out there. That'll be in the next few weeks. We also have at sfa our own beginning farmer development program called the deep roots farmer development program. And this will be incorporated into that curriculum as well. Like I said we've presented already a couple of times. We've presented at the Iowa Rural Psychology Association, the Minnesota Organic Conference we're presenting here today obviously. The SFA annual conference which is being held February 14th in Ding, St. Joseph, Minnesota why you should try and come there we'd love to have you. And as I said the deep roots farmer development program and more. So if you know of events or activities or organizations, groups that would benefit from this let us know. We'd be happy to work with you to bring this to you. I want to say thank you to Sarah, Beth, the whole team. Thank you for your help in getting us through the process and getting us here to talk about this. Your team has been a wonderful asset to us promoting the work and talking about the work very, very helpful. So I do think we have some time for questions if there are any. Thank you. The question is what types of farms are most successful in becoming full time operations. We saw no distinction in that data. Now, as I said, most of our data, most of our farms were in the mid to small size. We had all of them represented, but we were skewed that way and one of the challenges that we've identified is trying to get a wider range of farms. We had some representations throughout, but I'd say most of them were not small and mid-sized range. Most of them probably were not livestock farms. So we didn't see a distinction. All farms had the same types of issues, but I'm a little hesitant to say that's any kind of definitive answer. Yeah, thank you. The question is what kind of prior experience did people have? Lisa had some information up there that I think was 45 percent had no formal training. 34 percent had experience and 34 percent had no formal training. By formal training, we meant that they went through a curriculum or a degree program of some kind. Some people would say, well, that's growing up on a farm is formal training and we had that as a category, too, right? So about a third, I think, of the people that came through had grown up on a farm and then we had about a third, roughly, that had had some kind of formal training. And then the rest of the folks identified their training as coming to sessions like this, coming to conferences, reading literature, going to workshops, no, like, program. You follow what I'm saying? The question is, were those who had a farm background or some kind of formal training more successful in becoming full-time farmers? In our survey, no. They were not significantly more successful in becoming that full-time operation. I think one of the distinctions is what is a full-time farmer? If you're, for a lot of people, if they're just paying their bills and only work they're doing is on the farm, they might consider themselves to be a successful full-time farmer. If you were to look at it from the perspective of a small business, a non-farm-related small business, agriculture is the only business we think that that's okay, right? If you talk to a small business owner that runs a business in town selling t-shirts, they've got a plan for their retirement, they've got a plan for their college education, for their kids, they've got all that planned out. And if they're not meeting those objectives, they don't consider themselves successful. But in agriculture somehow, most people think, well, we've got money to put the crop out this year, we must be doing okay. And so does the family have health insurance? Does the family have the kinds of things they need to grow and prosper? So in answer to your question, we did not see any distinction in that. That's a great suggestion and I'll repeat that and summarize that for the video. There's a suggestion from the audience here, a very good one, that we take this material and adapt it as needed to help farms that are maybe stuck in a rut or are looking to begin a new enterprise or stretch or grow in some way to bring some of this to help them in that development process as well. And I think one of the things on a much broader scale that we need in sustainable agriculture is leadership development. The corporate ag side of agriculture, the commodity producing side of agriculture, has a full-blown leadership development program for their growers. And it's kind of almost like a career path for someone in that role and we need that. We desperately need that. And so that's another share grant coming down the line.