Farm Commons

Farmer Education: In 2022 we hosted about 130 farmers through our Discovering Resilience workshop, which saw 90% of attendees adopt at least one of the 10 best practices of legal resilience within 3 months of the workshop. In addition, 80% of attendees are still working towards implementing 4 or more best practices 3 months after the workshop. We launched a new Advanced Farm Employment Law workshop. We wrote and distributed 7 additional guides including in-depth material on auto insurance and property insurance for farm businesses. We delivered 22 webinars to farmers nationwide on essential farm law subjects. We launched a very succesful first year of our Farmer Fellowship (now called the Collaborative Learning Fellowship) where we support farmers in developing their stories of success in managing business law issues on their farm. We developed a framework to scale the Fellowship nationwide, empowering our Alumni to lead farm law circles of support in their own community. In addition, we addressed 60 individual questions and issues over our online Q&A platform, creating a community-wide discussion on farm law issues that affect farmers the most including forming LLCs, writing leases, and managing employment law obligations.

Research: Farm Commons provides essential services in doing complex legal research and in studying the impact and ramifications of legal realities on diverse farm communities. In 2022, this program was stepped back to allow staff to focus on our new Fellowship programs in the Farmer and NonFarmer Education programs, which are key to efficient scalability nationwide. We secured revenue late in the fiscal year for this program and did not yet incur the expenses to develop proposals and identify research needs for future support.

Non-Farmer Education: In 2022, Farm Commons developed its service to Extension Educators, nonprofit employees, and farm support persons nationwide to help farmers recognize and address legal vulnerabilities before a problem occurs. We delivered our comprehensive online workshop, Guiding Resilience, to 50 professionals nationwide. We supported 128 non-farming professionals with customized access to our resources and individualized webinars to their agricultural communities. Our data show that for every one non-farming agriculture professional we reach, that person provides our information to 22 more farmers in their local community, significantly magnifying our ability to achieve our mission. Considering the incredible impact and further potential of these partners to help us reach each farmer in America, we designed a new Legal Ecosystem Fellowship program that trains these partners to be able to lead farm law workshops in their own communities- a program that will launch in 2023.