Conferences
New Approach for Annie's Project Curriculum in Iowa for Benchmarking Family Living Expenses
Ann Johanns, Madeline Schultz, Carol Ehlers, Charles Brown, and Kelvin Leibold
Summary
Farm and family finances are often intertwined, impacting family budgets and benchmark practices.
Understanding family finances can be a challenge. Fortunately, now there are tools and resources available to assist farm families through the process.
This new curriculum came about as a result of research indicating many farm management institutions and advisors were writing about the farm family living expense trends and impact. Yet there were no interactive educational programs directly addressing the need to manage family living expenses. The Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Human Sciences Family Finance team and Farm Management team worked together to develop a new lesson to include in Annie’s Project 18-hour farm management courses in Iowa.
In the new one-hour lesson, Annie’s Project participants learn how to compare farm family expenses with trusted data, establish a reality check on how much living expenses a family can expect the farm to pay and explore how benchmarking can help them make better decisions. The lesson explores how the business skill of benchmarking can be applied to the family budget as well as used to analyze farm financial performance.
In this session, the lesson designers will share an overview of the new curriculum and discuss feedback and survey results from participants. They’ll also talk about working through the development and delivery process during the COVID-19 pandemic and the future plans for this curriculum.
Presentation Materials
Details
| Conference | 2022 Extension Risk Management Education National Conference |
| Presentation Type | 30 Minute Concurrent |