“Delivery Of Agricultural Risk Management Education
To Extension Officers And Small-Scale Farmers”
The liberalization of markets globally and changes in domestic government
agricultural policies will drastically affect the agricultural sector
in the U.S. This will ultimately increase the risk and uncertainty to
Small-Scale Farmers who are challenged with the responsibility of managing
these variables in their operations. The limited resource farmers, a subset
of this group, while not new to the impact of limiting variables on their
operations, now find it increasingly hard to adopt the new changes due
to a more risky environment while grappling with the age-old nemeses of
economies of scale and limiting financial resources. Institutions that
provide technical assistance must now arm themselves and their officers
with the requisite information and data to help this group to make better
and sounder farming decisions. To this end, a team of public-private partnerships,
spearheaded by the Mississippi Small Farm Development Center at Alcorn
State University, has designed a project to address the above-mentioned
problem.
For small-scale and limited-resource farmer groups, risk management education
(RME) is quite limited. Additionally, most technical assistance agents
are not aware of the RME tools and materials available, as well as new
technological models that could help farmers to reduce exposure to risk.
The above-mentioned group's enterprises are of three types: traditional
row crops (cotton and soybean), alternative enterprises (fruits, nuts
and vegetables) and livestock (swine, cattle and goats). The project is
design to be delivered in two phases. The first phase, for which we are
seeking funding, emphasizes reducing production and marketing risks. The
second phase focuses on reducing financial and legal risks.
The objectives of the project are:
- to develop area specific risk management techniques which include
enterprise specific diversification models, crop insurance, contract
production, futures market and adaptive new on-farm technologies;
- to expose advanced students, extension officers and farmers to risk
management by conducting focus groups and workshops in those areas specified;
- to develop marketing plans on behalf of individual farmers and cooperatives;
- to assist farmers and their organizations with forward contracts,
direct cooperative marketing and sales to brokers; and
- to develop and implement sector specific workshops and seminars in
the areas of strategic financial management and planning, loan and debt
management and planning, and legal and regulatory procedures.
This project meshes with the mission of the university and incorporates
measurable performance indicators to gauge the magnitude of successes
of technical assistance agents and farmers participating in the project.
These indicators will include the number of producers relying on traditional
disaster payments, the number of diversified operations, the number of
farmers having access to and participating in crop insurance programs,
the number that develop and use marketing plans, the number and size of
cooperatives that can negotiate better deals for their members and the
number using new options in financial and legal risk management, especially
debt and loan management, and estate management.
Please Click the Button below to see the Powerpoint Presentations on
different Risk Management Education topics:
