The 2012 ASHS Annual Conference

Like many areas across the United States, Kansas City has a strong need to grow new vegetable and specialty crop farmers as well as provide education for existing ones. The Growing Growers Farmer Education program was established to address this need and to train these new farmers on effective growing practices. As a collaboration between K-State Research and Extension, University of Missouri Research and Extension, Lincoln University Cooperative Extension, the Kansas City Food Circle, Cultivate KC, and the Kansas Rural Center, we set the goal of providing educational opportunities to help new growers get started and established ones get better at what they do. We do this by providing apprenticeships for new growers at established vegetable farms. Many of the host farmers are graduates of the program, and each year new apprenticeships are made available for upcoming growers. Farm apprentices work on a local farm during the growing season to get first-hand, practical experience; they attend monthly workshops; and they get direct one-on-one training from their host farmer. The apprenticeships are both paid and volunteer.  We offer a first year apprenticeship that provides a broad overview of farming, proceeded by a second year apprenticeship that emphasizes more advanced farm management skills. The monthly workshops offered address many of the skill sets required to run a local farm, from soil management to production planning to marketing to farm business management. In addition, we’ve developed an email listserv for area networking, which includes area growers, restaurateurs, grocery stores, and others interested in the local farming industry that has been highly successful at maintaining communication between all of these entities. Finally, we organize special events to help develop the local farming industry and have been able to enroll the apprentices in a business short-course offered through the Kauffman Foundation, a local foundation dedicated to entrepreneurship and business education. As local food networks continue to grow, vegetable grower education and mentoring programs will be instrumental to the development of a stable local food system.