 Hi, thanks for coming, everyone. As Mike mentioned, my name's Matthew Josie. I run a small farm about 1 and 1 half two acre special farm in Indianapolis. And he's a Matthews tree, has a similar size operation on a different side of town. Anyway, so the two of us, as well as a couple other growers, were sitting in the Sarah Grant. And we'll talk about it here. All right. So these were the original member farms. South Circle Farm, which is a big city farm, which is myself. Growing Places, Indy, Roquette Farms, Sprout Urban Farm, Central Greens Farm, and Q Farm at Butler University. Anyway, it's a mix of non-profits and for-profit farms on different scales and sort of different objectives. The main shared characteristics, though, we're all focused on growing vegetables. We all had overlapping restaurant clients. And I believe everyone had some sort of form of a CSA program as well, some scale. So that of shared farmers market presence. And we're all small under two acres in general. Some of them we've been sub one acre or whatever. So what were we trying to do with the Sarah Grant? We wanted to increase our market presence. We wanted to possibly create more efficiencies with restaurant sales and distribution. And we felt like the combined volume, if we were to do this successfully, the combined volume would enable us to better serve restaurants and potential institutional clients. The idea of all of us were sort of limited by our size and the thought was, well, if we can aggregate in some way, achieve those efficiencies with scale and make our presence known a little more successfully. So with the Sarah Grant, we talked about the facilitated development of the group's mission and goals. These are the elements of the Sarah Grant as they were originally laid out with our application. So trying to figure out what Ingram wanted to be. Create a brand and logo and website. Test pilot, shared marketing distribution strategies with select restaurants. Shared infrastructure build-out, including cooler and wash stations. Basically trying to get everyone sort of up to modest levels of efficiency so that the pick-ups should be avoided. And then establish an annual income farm to it. OK, so those are our ideas. And you know when you write a grant that a lot of times your ideas turn out to be wrong in a lot of our work. So the obstacles we came across were attention, please, there are the views. OK, so some of the obstacles we came across were simply time and prioritizing, and extra piece of work for all of us. That was pretty hard. We always schedule meetings. That would be difficult. And then we all get there, and someone would call and you know someone, no matter what day of the week or time of the day, someone would show up just like disheveled, and like dirt had to come out related to time. So these things were really hard to manage. Farms disappeared. So we started talking about it with seven farms at the table, so seven or 10 people. And by the time we submitted, we had six who were still engaged in their farms. And by the time we really got down to the work of it, really there's four core farms that still existed. The two farms that aren't with us still, they were at very beginning stages. And we had high hopes that they were the ones we would help bring along. And they ended up not even continuing on their farm operations. So they were both kind of smaller operations. And we thought, that's ideal. That's who we want to plug into our market stream. But everyone knows how far we go and how small businesses go, and we just didn't keep going. So we even had a smaller group to start with. And that also kind of led to our biggest problem. Well, another concern we had that didn't really turn into a big concern was we had a lot of farmers teach with our own presence. And we weren't sure if adding any grown was going to confuse the public issue. So that was just a concern we had, including the marketing topic. But the real obstacle we ran across was the solution to our original big problem, which was we're kind of stepping on each other's toes with marketing and kind of stumbling around with our own restaurant sales and distribution. We realized that when we got together to work it out, that we can't actually work this out. Getting together to do this in our head was going to streamline it. To do this, this, then it's going to be more efficient for everyone. And we got down to the work of it and we just kind of threw our hands up and we're like, this isn't more useful to us at all. So I guess I kind of talked about this. We thought that we'd reach some kind of family scale. We're still too small, and the market was too big to reach any more scale together than separately. Small size limited our efficiency of delivery. So again, even though we're all in the same city, going to a lot of the same places, we realized we're so small. Most of us might have a couple of part-time people working with us that we couldn't even change from like a Tuesday afternoon to a Monday morning. We couldn't even make those changes to get together. And that each of us still relied upon our individual strengths, even if we're working with the same restaurants. We still relied upon going to see that chef when we dropped off and doing what we do when you drop off the chef and kind of top things up and your face is there. So we realized we still couldn't get that off. We were too young in our businesses and it was still too small. So that was a big realization. But we did find successes in our first year. That was all in our first year. We struggled through that. We formulated our shared goals and missions. We found an organization in Indy that helped small businesses develop and we decided to think of ourselves as small businesses. So they volunteered their time and I think we had three or four sessions with the executive director of that organization. And again, it was a little funny because it was during the day and we all had been farming and we usually like would write our blights to the very center of our downtown district. Went up in a high-rise bank building and met with this executive director. And she really helped pull us together and find our common ground. So we did find some common ground. So we basically kind of reframed our objective. We kind of lessened our focus on the, let's be so efficient and market together to these restaurants. And we kind of dropped that and realized that we all had a lot in common. So going through that process felt hard at the time because we all had like plants put in the ground but she helped us realize like one of our main objective was to just increase the profile so that urban farming in Minneapolis seemed like a viable way to use two acres of land in our city. And she felt like we needed to step it up and not do marketing to do that. So we wanted to gather more information and we'll talk about that. We wanted to improve our quality of our products together. So we felt great about branding ourselves together too. And we all just needed to do that. And then as we are branding together, we want to make sure we're all reaching those new safety benchmarks to gap. So we included that in our. So our second year's success in the long run lets us more encourage and listen maybe than the first year's success in the long run. So with the refocusing, I would say that allowed us a tremendous amount of comfort in pursuing some of these new projects, new objectives. So the main appeal was that after that first year it was definitely the sense of how do we right up pursue something and make something successful that it did not work. So I would say that the SAIR program was remarkably understanding. So the second year's successes, we continue to engage the four core member farms where a core member farm is still around and still operating and still moderately successful, which is great. We created a logo promotional video and a website which is in progress, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it is, if anyone's ever gone through it for a single business and then for a shared like elaborate business, I developed an idea in the aesthetic and a brand is included. Sort of the challenge. We worked with a regional farm consultant who approved our drumming and marketing practices. And this was a really great opportunity for us to interact with this guy who lives and works primarily in Indiana, but he's helped other farms. He's worked, he wasn't here, but he's working for you in delivery and establishing some of their off-site farms. And so working with him and getting his expertise on how we can improve our operations is really fantastic. We did a restaurant survey that I could get a sense of the product, some of the logistics that chefs that we were already working with, how we could better serve them. And then our price compares in price. So one thing that we found is that there's a lot of concern, not concern, but questions about with new farmers in the market, as well as existing ones who have been doing this for a while. I mean, a sense of what the market can bear in terms of pricing, in terms of product. And so this was our first step in trying to make Indiana grown a current and future resource for new and emerging farmers. But for new farmers to be able to sort of pick the ground as running as quickly as they can, I guess if they start to maybe not as soon as they can, one of those steps. We all attended gap training courses and began improving our post-harvest training facilities and practicing. Again, this goes back to both two things. One, sort of the individual priorities for the farms and increasing rare the communists and food safety of their operations. But then also it sort of ties back to that notion of branding. And if we're all saying that we're Indiana grown member farms, what is Indiana grown in the country? We wanted all of the poor farms to be found and practicing at the aisle level so that we hosted a public farm tour. It was a wonderful success in the past fall. We successfully raised $3,000 additional dollars in outside farms to support the long-term. This was the sort of thing that that women coming back without the surgery. And that was just a really great opportunity that was presented to us as a young business leadership group. It's a great, you know what? We love what you're all doing. This is really exciting. How can we help? We love to get you all started. So, this is our logo. It took a while, it's a nice one. How was it? Good. It sort of gets to what we wanted in terms of really straightforward but also what we're trying to do, find it to see on that screen. I can see it, it's fine right there on here. It's a pork. Yeah, I'm sorry about that. But it's a pork with essentially like leek type consumers. So basically, very much acknowledging the role that consumers play in the success of the problems. I think all of us try to reinforce that with our own customer base and present. You, the customers, are really what help keep us going. So. And you can see part of our web, future web presence there. So we're able to hire a graphic designer to do that for us, it's awesome. And there's a website there that can't see too well but it'll have all of our profiles and kind of package us. And the goal is that we want citizens to start to just, this isn't a very prominent thing in our city yet as it is in some other city. So we really wanna make the case to people that like this is gonna improve your quality of life. You know, Indianapolis is going through lots of rebranding itself, like to attract everyone. We just want this to be part of it. So we did a great farm tour, we had 50 people, which was our max for the provided transportation. We got our chefs involved. They provided, here's some pictures from it. You can see our four farms up there, various sizes. The one farm is kind of a raised bed and micro green operation. Mine's in the bottom and Matthews, you can, they're all quite close to the urban center, which was nice to time together in this tour. So lessons learned, we really should have someone who keeps us in check and ties it together for us and outside coordinator. We were able to hire out a lot of these tasks, but we realized like you still need someone corralling four farmers together, four or six farmers together. That would have been really helpful. A shared brand, you know, can result in things outside of just our sales. You know, we're originally thinking of it as like, ooh, we can increase our sales and be more efficient, but we thought much more broadly by the end. A lot of the benefit to all of us is just like forcing ourselves to get together in a busy season and, you know, share information at the time when we realized like, oh, we could buy that together or we could, you know, we just need that reason to do that and that integrants provided that for us. And that was a big benefit. And I think that would be a huge benefit to you, this brand you grow are coming on. So we came up with this brand, it was an engineering stand for, and then we'll show you a quick video that we had made with part of this project. So this is sort of our mission, I guess, what we're going to stand for. How we want folks to trust where their group is coming from. So we're trying to be as open and engaged as possible. Organic and regenerative. We want to follow both organic practices, but also, the sort of vitality of the city, the health of the city is in all of the aspects of physical and social and aesthetic and environmental. All right, sustainable farming is a viable living. This is an important thing, but it's sort of back to where it needs to be said. We want to, there are even more farmers who want to be able to offer slightly re-assuring terms of living in the whole living environment. And we want to do it with the example of all. What does the engineering want to do? Inhering works of support, this is sort of just very basic, works of support, sustainable farms and farmers in the Indianapolis. All of that. This is what we want to do. Cooperative network of urban farmers, very vibrant and active farmers that provide the funds to help the farmers across the Indianapolis. So again, sort of broad shares, but fairly specific to what I was saying. It took a lot of time to reach that. We're getting that point to develop those things. And I think through that, it was that's something that we're all committed to. It was, I mean that was it. As far as the side, we got that short video. I'll show you a promo video that we also made to introduce ourselves, basically. And then we'll have a minute for questions, maybe. You're off, you got a time? I think we have two minutes before the next one. Do you have any questions? That was a lesson learned that that would have been a great idea. So we didn't have one. Well, I'm sorry. She asked, how did we find an outside coordinator for our project, for our group and how did we pay for that and everything? So that was one of our bigger lessons is that it would often fall on one of us just to corral the group and get projects moving forward. And we would have asked for funding or tried to find funding or pay someone to do that. We were able to contract out a lot of the tasks though that we had. We had graphic designer. We had the person who made the video. Someone helped coordinate the tour. So things like that we were able to fund. We wouldn't have been able to do that otherwise, but we would have liked to have someone, you know, very part-time just to kind of head up the project to the project manager to... In terms of if you're going to try to find someone to start to speak to that real quickly. So the woman who did the coordination for the farm tour is sort of a long-time volunteer at Amy's farm. And I think that was my guess was that any farm wherever it might be has some sort of base of community, individual community members support that you can draw from. And I think that for us that was a great... Instead of just a random person, this was someone who at least one in the farms she knew really well. And to be able to trust in her to convey our priority goals through that organization of the farm tour, that was wonderful instead of just trying to find a person or an opportunity. What kind of programs or opportunities for each access for low-income individuals? So I'll speak to that a little bit. So in addition to big city farms, I help farm in the organization, help farm in our city that tries to do just that. One thing that we, and it's the time that we've taken is raising money for farm foundations or treatments for individuals. And so trying to figure out where, what that motivating factor is might be for individual farmers. It's been a learning process for us. One example is we work with a developer who says he has a customer of mine. So he owns a lot of land from the house in Indianapolis. And for him, he purchases vegetables from the farm or the residents. And for him, it's a win-win, he feels good about it. He also is sort of a golden star on his future applications for tax credit financing for his product. So I think trying to figure out what people want to do. I assume most people want to increase access to coffee booths for all individuals. And so trying to figure out where that motivating factor might be, is it through their business, through their church, through their neighborhood, kind of the export. The question was about lowering access to produce. And that is one of our goals. And we, at my farm, we tried two other things. One was when my farm's a private LLC poor product, but it started with startup from community groups. So in that, those asks, while we were waiting for, while we were asking for funding for whatever startup capital we needed, we threw in grant dollars for what we called Benchy Box. Basically, they were like a lot of the programs you've heard like double up box for a staff and things like that. So we just kind of incorporated that in the cost of getting going. Easier when, since we're in the city, people can think of this as part of their solution. So just thought of it as part of the startup capital, like we have to provide that. And we all are certified to accept WIC and things like that at our farmers markets. I think we have time for this last one. What work of business did you choose to organize to be grown under, and what were they, maybe a couple of decisions, maybe a couple more. That's a good question. How do we organize the business legally here? So not at all, so far is the answer. I think in the future, probably the best key scenario is it gets absorbed under another nonprofit. I don't think for us to operate in kind of a lean way or a fast moving way, I don't think we'll ever incorporate as a nonprofit ourselves. And in the future, it might make sense to be an LLC, but right now it doesn't. So right now we just sort of exist on the web as ourselves. So yeah, that's a good question. Thank you.