Southern Illinois Farm Beginnings Program
About the Southern Illinois Farm Beginnings Program 2022
Enrollment is open now for the special 2021-2022 Southern Illinois Farm Beginnings Program! Click here to learn more and apply: https://www.fwsoil.org/farm-beginnings.html
This year Food Works is offering a special year-long program open to anyone wanting to engage in sustainable, entrepreneurial farming. This year we are looking for new and beginning farmers with less than 10 years of experience. The program is 56 hours of education and technical assistance that goes beyond developing a holistic financial management plan for a farm to provide skills development sessions for specialty crops (fruits, vegetables, honey), humane animal husbandry and land/resource access.
Applications are due by October 25th. Sessions begin November 7th from 1-4pm as an on-farm, outdoor, socially distanced gathering at Acorn Ridge Farm in Dongola. We still plan to have experienced farmers as guest speakers who share their stories of starting their farms, describe the challenges they faced and identify their successes. We will use two formats for meetings: several on-farm, in-person sessions will be held on Sunday afternoons and all other sessions to be online on Mondays from 6-8pm via Zoom. This makes it possible to participate in Southern Illinois Farm Beginnings even if you have children or live outside the Jackson, Union, Williamson county area. Food Works serves the 23 southernmost counties of Illinois.
Course books and materials are provided, on-farm meetings are planned for some topics, experienced farmer mentorships are set up to meet the farmer trainee’s needs and all trainees are given a free 1-yr membership to the Southern Illinois Farming Alliance. To increase diversity in farming Food Works received special support this year to expand programming and provide special scholarships for new/beginning farmers with less than 10 years of farming experience and a commitment to start actively farming by August 2022. This makes it possible to reduce tuition for everyone else during this 2021-2022 program to $450, down from $975. For more information see: https://www.fwsoil.org/farm-beginnings.html Once there you can scroll down to the application and complete it or if you need more information then send a message to program facilitator, Margie Sawicki, at margie@fwsoil.org.
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