Listen: Nebraska FARMcast
Skylar Falter, program coordinator with Buy Fresh Buy Local Nebraska, discusses the upcoming Local Foods Collaboration Summit and how growers can work with each other to improve their businesses. Find this episode on your favorite platform here.
Selling into local markets means growing the product, finding customers, handling delivery and keeping costs in check. On many farms, one or two people handle all of it. On a recent episode of Nebraska FARMcast, Skylar Falter, program coordinator with Buy Fresh Buy Local Nebraska, talks about how collaboration can lighten that load and what producers can expect at the Local Foods Collaboration Summit on Nov. 9 in Lincoln.
Falter says collaboration doesn’t mean merging businesses or giving up a farm’s identity. Producers can keep their own customers and make their own decisions while coordinating deliveries to cut transportation costs, sharing equipment, storage or processing space, pooling money for a joint marketing campaign, or buying together to get better rates on services like workers’ compensation and health insurance. She points to Wildflower Grocer in O’Neill, which farmers and food advocates started so local producers would have a place to sell. It now carries products from many farms, runs a commercial kitchen that producers and bakers can use, and offers a collaborative CSA, a local food subscription box sourced from multiple farms.
Deciding how formal to get starts with what the group wants to accomplish and whether everyone’s needs line up. Coordinating deliveries or cross-promoting products may only take a conversation and a simple agreement. Pooling money, sharing equipment or building something together over the long term calls for clearer agreements, and sometimes a cooperative. Falter says the biggest barrier often isn’t geography or logistics. It’s finding the time to build and maintain relationships, which takes communication, trust and a willingness to work through disagreements. Her advice is to start small and be honest about what everyone needs.
Local Foods Collaboration Summit Details
The summit runs from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Lancaster County Extension Office, 444 Cherrycreek Rd., in Lincoln. It’s free, but registration is required by Nov. 1. It’s open to Nebraska farmers, ranchers and growers selling into local or regional markets, at any scale, and attendees don’t need to be working with other farms already. Falter describes it as an interactive, farmer-focused day with sessions on collaborative marketing and cooperative business models, plus plenty of time to sit down with peers facing similar challenges. “You don’t need to arrive with a plan,” she says. A marketing strategies session means there’s something for producers who aren’t ready to collaborate yet.
The conversation doesn’t have to end that day. Groups that identify an idea they want to pursue can tap technical assistance funding through the network, which can pay for a marketing firm or a cooperative development specialist to help them get to the next step. Communities that can’t attend can contact Buy Fresh Buy Local Nebraska about bringing smaller-scale programming to them, and webinars are planned through the group’s events calendar and monthly newsletter. The work is funded by the North Central Extension Risk Management Education Center and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Listen to the full episode above, then register for the summit and find more details here.
