Participants in Harvesting Our Potential: Growing Skills, Confidence and Sustainability with Women Farmers provides opportunities for increased confidence in economic self-sufficiency through agricultural careers while also building connections with other women in this field. This is vital for sustaining and growing businesses as well as local food economies. The project will offer continued mentorship support, a flagship part of this program, for aspiring, beginning and seasoned women farmers. It will also provide more opportunities to support mentee learning and growth in confidence through a mentee retreat at a designated mentor farm, travel to other mentor farms through a “farm swap” program component to increase their support network and exposure to a variety of farm methods and enterprise possibilities, and through farm-sitting – a unique one-of-a-kind program that allows for a trained individual to care for a farmer’s operations while they leave for additional training.
This project will also support mentor farms in marketing and outreach, through offering recording equipment, media outreach training, and editing services. We believe that farmers are always learning, no matter the number of years of experience.
