News from the Cornell Small Farms Program, Summer 2022

Futuro Project Launches Spanish-Language Resources

Are you interested in joining a community of Latino/a/x farmers? Are you considering owning your own farm? Do you want to learn from other successful Latinos/as/x farmers? 

Join a growing community of Latino/a/x producers in New York State and beyond. The Cornell Small Farms Program has launched a new project, Futuro en Ag (Future in Ag), to create educational resources and training opportunities in all areas of farm production; including farm finances, accessing markets, starting a farm business, and more. 

The Futuro project is an agricultural education program for Latino/a/x farmers who want to improve their farm management skills. We believe Futuro will help pave a pathway to success in agricultural careers for all. Futuro connects Spanish-speaking agricultural producers and provides information tailored to the needs of a diverse community of Latino/a/x farmers. The project will also provide training for all members of the farm business using appropriate methods that yield positive results. 

At the Futuro project, we speak Spanish and English. For more information visit the Futuro en Ag project page at https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/projects/futuro/. 

As part of our Spanish-language and bilingual educational efforts, we have worked in coordination with Latino/a/x producers to develop a new center for resources that will provide access to the vital information needed to grow their agricultural business. The Centro de Recursos features innovative bilingual financial management tools such as the farm financial glossary and calculation scorecard, and a complete farm record keeping and chart of accounts workbook. The Centro de Recursos will also include Spanish-language versions of our most popular free resources: The Guide to Farming in New York State and the Plan Your Farm self-paced online course.

To see the full resource collection, visit the Centro de Recursos on our website at https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/recursos/?lang=es. 

Futuro nurtures our agricultural roots, our love of the land, our love of food and our desire to build a community of successful Latino/a/x agricultural producers. At Futuro we learn together; and we learn from Latino/a/x farming experts. We learn how to succeed in agriculture while receiving training in Spanish. Futuro is the path to a successful farming career. To be a part of this exciting project, you can sign-up for our email list at https://smallfarms.cornell.edu/projects/futuro/join-the-futuro-community/.

Reduced Tillage Field Research Continues, Field Days This Summer

Our Reduced Tillage project has started another season of field research, our 8th season managing a long-term organic vegetable cropping systems experiment using permanent beds. We’re using tarps to maintain a continuous no-till system and comparing this system to conventional tillage practices by documenting changes in our weeds, crop yield, labor, and our soils. This year, we’re shifting our focus to understand the legacy effects of these practices and we’ve started measuring the soil arthropod community as an indicator as soil health. Soils harvested from our experimental plots are being brought to the lab and put under heat lamps, forcing a migration of all the sand grain-sized organisms for collection and identification under the microscope. We look forward to sharing the results in a future issue, stay tuned for in-season updates via Instagram.

Join us for a Soil Health and Climate Resiliency Field Day at the Thompson Vegetable Research Farm on July 25th (Freeville, NY) to talk about how to use tarps to suppress weeds and use less tillage. We’ll be sharing our research results alongside other Cornell researchers in partnership with the NY Soil Health Initiative. You’ll tour the fields and learn about cover crop breeding, mulching strategies, weed technology, and more. This field day is part of a statewide series, featured in this issue.

Learn more about our research and events at the Reduced Tillage in Vegetables project page. 

Farm Ops Continues to Bring Veterans Together with Cohort Learning Sessions

During the Small Farm Program’s online course season, extending from September to March each year, Farm Ops, our military veteran project, provided veterans with free enrollment into select on-line courses and conducted veteran learning cohort sessions to supplement the course material. Veterans should be on the lookout for these opportunities, which will be posted on the Farm Ops Event Series page.

Read more about the veteran learning cohort sessions.

New Livestock Resource Website Now Available from CCE

Our livestock specialist, Erica Frenay, collaborates closely with the members of the Cornell Cooperative Extension Livestock Program Work Team (PWT). This team has recently launched a new website, full of resources for producing and marketing livestock at https://www.ccelivestock.com.

One of the key features of this website is the NYS Slaughterhouse Map, which was formerly housed on the SFP website. While this is a hard resource to keep current, it’s incredibly valuable to producers and the Livestock PWT team in charge of that website will make every effort to update the map as they learn of changes.

The CCE Livestock Program Work Team recognized New York livestock producers need to have a trustworthy central location for all things livestock and developed the website in response. The website is organized into themes based on species and information can be found on a variety of production topics including breeding and reproduction, nutrition, and health as well as marketing.

“Our goal is to continue adding resources and have it be the go-to place for workshops, trainings, and webinar recordings”, states Nancy Glazier, Regional Small Farms/Livestock Specialist.

Dana M. Havas Ag Team Leader from CCE Cortland expressed “It is exciting to have extension livestock experts from all over the state working together to develop a robust and valuable collection of resources for our communities”

As the website grows they look forward to hearing how you use the website and invite you to tell them what you think by contacting the website administrator at https://www.ccelivestock.com/contact-us.

The CCE Livestock Program Work Team is comprised of educators working to build a collaborative network of experts and resources to foster the success of livestock farms across New York State.