The Vermont Agency of Agriculture is excited to announce a dairy business visioning and planning event as a direct outcome of the Northern Tier Dairy Summit. This event centers on envisioning the future of your dairy business and will be particularly useful to anyone who is contemplating a production strategy change, starting to add value to their own milk, or increasing their current value-added production.
This course will take place May 13-14 at the UVM-Extension office in Berlin and is free for farmers to attend. An application will open in the next couple of weeks as the seating is limited to 30, with no more than 2 people from each farm business. Application information will be available on the Agency's webpage and posted via social media.
This 1.5 day workshop is designed to give Vermont dairy farmers concrete and actionable tools, as well as frameworks you can use to help them plan the future of your dairy farm. This interactive session will lead participants through a series of exercises to help them:
- Understand the current financial state of your farm business
- Evaluate new opportunities for financial and operational feasibility
- Create a plan to develop new enterprises
- Map out checkpoints to track and measure progress and make adjustments as needed.
We will evaluate a real dairy farm business and then help you apply the tools and lessons learned to your own business. We will form strong small groups to help you learn from your peers and strengthen your network.
Julia Shanks, author of The Farmer’s Office, and Noah Munro of Kitchen Table Consultants will facilitate this workshop to ensure the farmers have a strong understanding of their farm businesses and what it will take to achieve and maintain financial sustainability
Please feel free to contact the Agency with any questions you may have, and share widely with anyone who may be interested.
Laura Ginsburg | VAAFM Agricultural Development Section Chief