New Entry's farmer library has hundreds of resources on sustainable farming, marketing, and operating a successful small business. Our physical library at our office in Beverly, MA contains books, CD's, DVD's periodicals, pamphlets, and videos in English, Spanish, Hmong, and Khmer. You can also search the directory below for downloadable digital resources, helpful web sites, and online farming videos.
Please visit or email us at nesfp@tufts.edu if you can't find what you're looking for here. Sometimes we are out in the field, so it's best to let us know if you're planning on stopping by.
Presentation from New Entry that outlines incubator farm infrastructure, compares do-it-yourself projects and hired contractors, and highlights funding requirements.
Word document outline for facilitators celeriac production class. Discusses planting, maintenance, pests, harvesting and marketing of celeriac. Paired with Celeriac class 1 of 2. May need additional prompts. North East Region. English Level: Advanced. Farming Level: Beginning. Literacy Level: High. Key Words: marketing, celeriac, new vegetable, pests, disease, planting, harvesting, Apiacea family
Example PDF of a client - incubator contract. Could be easily adapted to other programs. Includes client and program responsiblitlies as well as other agreements set forth by signing the contract. All Regions. English Level: Advanced. Farming Level: n/a. Literacy Level: Advanced. Key Words: organizational resource, contract, administrative.
How can small farmers attract and retain good workers, minimize their administrative burdens, and create new opportunities while doing so? What if a company could help small farmers across an entire region of the country meet their staffing needs, while at the same time covering administrative tasks from payroll to handling workers' compensation claims? What if this company could also guarantee farm workers year-round stability, either by connecting them with off-season jobs or providing them access to unemployment insurance? Further, what if this company gave both farm workers and farm owners the opportunity to take on leadership roles, or even invest and earn dividends? What if it helped farm owners capture social values that made them more enticing to workers and consumers alike?
As a group of partners in agriculture and academia, we have been gathering feedback on these solutions from both farm owners and farm workers through focus groups through a project supported by a Northeast SARE Novel Approaches grant. This report outlines the feasibility of collaborative solutions to labor challenges and proposes a path forward.
This report broadly refers to the proposed solutions as “collaborative labor solutions.” In some surveys and focus groups, the solutions were more specifically referred to as “Entity X” as part of a specific narrative used to solicit feedback. Broadly, in any collaborative labor solution, farms across a given region (possibly reaching across multiple states) would pool their resources into a new entity that would recruit and hire workers, distribute them across participating farms, and take care of the legal, financial, administrative, and Human Resources (HR) work involved in employing people. Farm owners would pay this entity an hourly rate per worker, and this would cover wages plus the entity's overhead. We used the shorthand “Entity X” to refer to this framework in our focus groups.
From there, the details of Entity X were meant to evolve to specific needs and desires. A collaborative labor solution could take the form of a farmer-owned cooperative, worker-owned cooperative, farmer-owned LLC, or a wholly separate temporary labor company. Depending on the structure and the specifics of the business model, farmers (and/or workers) could have the opportunity to invest—as well as the obligation of taking part in leadership and finding creative ways to generate a profit. Within any structure, participants would have to solve complex problems: balancing the scheduling needs of different farms, accounting for often unpredictable changes in those needs, ensuring the right balance of skills for different farms, maintaining fair wages, and providing housing and/or transportation for workers.
This guide discusses the understanding of producer and worker perceptions of labor problems and the potential for collaborative solutions and proposes a path forward.
Included in the guide is a discusion Toolkit for Farmers and fact sheets by Northeast state on the Basics of Farm Employment Law.
Working with towns and their agricultural commissions, New Entry Sustainable Farming Project’s Community Farmland Connections project uses spatial analysis to identify unused viable farmland and encourage landowners to lease their land to a farmer. Through spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and subsequent community education and outreach, this process can be a valuable way to increase the amount of viable farmland that is utilized in a given community. By reaching out to landowners in different areas, community groups can facilitate matches of prime farmland with beginning and existing farmers, in order to increase both new agricultural opportunities and local food for the town, county, and state.
This guide is intended to help municipal groups and/or agricultural non-profits think creatively about how to support new and beginning farmers finding land. It draws on the experience of the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project, a farmer-training program in northeastern Massachusetts, as we sought to find small parcels of farmland for the farmers graduating off of our incubator farm. It outlines step by step the spatial analysis and community process we went through with communities around Massachusetts.
This guide is written by the Community Food Security Coalition. The Community Food Project Evaluation Handbook (Handbook) is a practical guide to help community food project staff conduct rigorous program evaluation that will develop the kind of information about their programs that will be compelling not only to fellow staff but to funders, participants and community residents. It is full of basic concepts, specific examples and worksheets.
The Handbook is comprehensive, with 10 chapters covering information from planning, to implementation, to using your results for program improvement. While it may seem daunting, the Handbook clearly walks the reader step by step through the evaluation process. The Table of Contents outlines in detail the various sections of the Handbook and can help the reader find a specific topic of interest. A glossary is provided as the final Appendix to include definitions of research and evaluation terms used in the chapters of the Handbook.
The 2019 Community Food Projects Grant Writing Guide was originally written by Hugh Joseph and Kai Siedenburg. This version was updated by New Entry Sustainable Farming Project for FY19 grants. It is an extensive document walking through the process of putting together a strong proposal for the Community Food Projects grant program.
The Community Food Project Evaluation Toolkit (Toolkit) is a hands-on workbook designed to help community food project (CFP) staff conduct evaluations of their programs to develop the kind of information that will be compelling not only to fellow staff but to funders, participants and community residents. Packed with user-friendly tools as well as guidance for planning and administration, the Toolkit offers a concentrated blend of general, project-level and system-level instruments to address the diversity of community food project outputs and outcomes. The Toolkit is divided into three parts (general evaluation tools, project-level evaluation tools and system-level evaluation tools) and includes eight distinct chapters. The Table of Contents outlines in detail the various parts and chapters of the Toolkit and can help the reader find a specific topic or tool of interest
