Many professional service providers and advocates in the Farm Direct Marketing and Agritourism industry need additional funding to support their work in the related fields of farming, conservation, entrepreneurial development, direct marketing, agritourism, rural economic development, community development, and other interconnected areas. Especially given extremely tight public budgets, it’s crucial to make maximum use of existing resources. Federal Funds can help to expand the terrific work now being done in virtually every region of North America to support farm direct marketing and agritourism on the local level.

NAFDMA enables this unique opportunity for professional service providers to gather at our convention, share trials and tribulations, expand ideas, and engage in valuable networking together. Imagine the creativity that can be generated when you brainstorm together with your peers from all across the continent. Movers and shakers from state departments of agriculture, Cooperative Extension, departments of tourism, farmer’s market managers, private consultants, county developers, state and regional association board members, fundraisers and executive directors and still other professional segments too, will be in attendance. The NAFDMA stage provides this fertile arena that will catapult your imagination and project ideas to the next level.

The networking opportunity alone is more valuable than the cost of the workshop. The emergence of new ideas resulting from cross-pollinating past geographic, cultural and project emphasis lines will transform your programmatic outlook into a more fundable reality. This one-of-a-kind professional development opportunity, with its focused cross-section of enthusiasts, is only available at NAFDMA. It’s professionals from different corners of the country. It’s professionals who represent different segments and cultures. It’s professionals who seek different project agendas. Above all else, it’s professionals with the same passion to embrace farm direct marketing and agritourism as a corner stone of their careers and their life.

Margaret Krome, of the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute (MFAI), and a leading expert in Federal Farm policy, leads this workshop. Margaret’s high energy and enthusiastic style lends itself perfectly to our objective of generating innovative new projects and developing cross-boundary relationships as an equally important outcome to honing our skills in the necessary tools of grant writing and identifying most appropriate funding sources. What a refreshing approach to the otherwise mundane world of program funding development!

The Fertilizing Workshop is an entirely informal and interactive full day event. It consists of three important modules and two open discussions. The modules are:

1) Developing sound projects;
2) Identifying federal programs offering potentially useful resources and choosing among them (using the guide described above and other resources); and
3) Maximizing success in getting funded, i.e., grant writing basics.

The open discussions are

A) The things we’ve learned to hate about applying for Federal Funds and how laughing can make it all better, and
B) Cross-pollinating existing ideas to cultivate hybrids that will blow away the conventional wisdom.

ALL workshop registrants will get a hands-on review of actual proposals, time to discuss individual projects and what funding programs might be suitable for them, and plenty of take-home materials including a 146-page guide to federal funding sources titled “Building Better Rural Places: Federal Programs for Sustainable Agriculture, Forestry, Entrepreneurship, Conservation and Community Development” together with a number of other handouts.

Those registrants who PARTICIPATE OPENLY AND BOLDLY will also get a boost of energy and enthusiasm, a regenerated interest in pursuing the projects they’ve only dreamed about until now, and the tools to become a hero back home where successful local farms and the families who operate them are what we believe to be the measurement of our success.