Glynwood’s Keep Farming® Program
Empowering Communities to Save Farming
- Is your community interested in strengthening its farm economy?
- Would your community like to protect its farmland and open space?
- Is your community gearing up to develop a comprehensive plan that includes the future of its farming sector?
If your answer to any of these questions is YES, then Glynwood’s Keep Farming program can make the difference in translating your community’s wish to save farming into sustained community action.
What Will Keep Farming Do for Your Community?
Keep Farming staff will provide your community hands-on training, guidance, and materials to:
- Create and organize a constituency of community volunteers – including farmers, business leaders, civic officials, planning and land trust professionals, environmentalists, and interested residents.
- Research, assemble and use information to quantify and evaluate the role of agriculture in your local economy – information that will be presented at open town forums.
- Explore and select economic-development and land-use policies for strengthening your community’s farm sector – which will be adopted in your Keep Farming Action Plan.
What Makes Keep Farming Unique?
Keep Farming is unique and powerful because it starts by building an open, collaborative atmosphere in your community and a constituency that includes all stakeholders – including farmers. This constituency – the Community Agriculture Partnership, or CAP – becomes the foundation for community consensus and the political will needed to create and implement a plan for strengthening farming.
Keep Farming is also unique for training and equipping volunteers in your community to do the essential work of research and fact-gathering about your farm economy. This means that your Keep Farming constituency will possess the intellectual capital of first-hand information, which can be used to break through conflicts based on uninformed opinion.
Keep Farming is founded on the principle that the best solutions to your community’s issues will come from within the community itself, that solutions proposed or imposed by “consultants” from outside the community don’t stick. Your community’s Keep Farming Action Plan will succeed in strengthening the farm sector because it is the product of consensus, supported by a motivated and well-informed constituency.
How Does Keep Farming Work?
Glynwood developed, tested, and piloted Keep Farming in the real world laboratories of a dozen communities in the Hudson Valley. The result is a program that is ready to work in your community. The Keep Farming process involves three phases:
Phase 1: Building and organizing your Keep Farming constituency – called the Community Agriculture Partnership; selecting leadership; and briefing your community in an open forum about the Keep Farming process.
Phase 2: Organizing and equipping teams of volunteers, with assignments and deadlines for researching, assembling and fact-checking information about your local farm economy; presenting this assessment at an open community forum.
Phase 3: Developing your community’s Keep Farming Action Plan, based on information gathered by your volunteers, and weighing the best options for strengthening your farm economy, which may include economic-development strategies, land-use planning, and tax policies; presenting your Action Plan at an open community forum.
It takes 18-24 months for the 3-phase Keep Farming process to ready your community for implementation of its Action Plan – but our staff will remain available to advise you after the formal program concludes – indeed, we have continued to provide advice to some Keep Farming communities for several years.
Keep Farming’s work in your community will also involve collaborating with local government and non-profit groups, including farm bureaus, land trusts, and planning and economic development boards.
As part of the Keep Farming network – including communities in New York, New Hampshire and Massachusetts – volunteers and officials in your community can connect with their counterparts in communities that have successfully wrestled with similar issues. And as your community succeeds in implementing its plan and strengthening its farming economy, you will become a resource to others seeking to learn from and duplicate your success. Click here if you would like to read case studies of other Keep Farming Communities.
To learn more about how Keep Farming can help your community save farming, call or e-mail Virginia Kasinki at vkasinki@glynwood.org, 1-845-265-3338 x125.
