Conferences
Building Farm and Ranch Resiliency in the Age of Financial Uncertainty
Jim Jansen and Allan Vyhnalek
Summary
The “Building Farm and Ranch Resiliency in the Age of Financial Uncertainty” extension outreach meeting addressed the COVID-19 pandemic-caused uncertainty and heightened risk impacting the agricultural sector during 2020. This meeting focused on reducing financial uncertainty, approaches for operation succession and minimizing legal risk, and utilizing USDA farm programs to preserve operation viability. As part of the outreach during 2020, this meeting series was piloted as an online workshop, due to COVID-19 in-person gathering restrictions, with a total of 96 Nebraskans participating.
The educational objective achieved by this program aids farms and ranches in financial management by promoting: the understanding of financial trends to minimize shocks, the development of strategies to facilitate succession and mitigate legal risk, and the utilization of management practices utilizing USDA farm programs to reduce uncertainty. The delivery method for this meeting included online engagement lasting 2.5 hours, which allowed for interaction between workshop attendees and instructors. The target audience for this project included limited-resource producers, retiring or transitioning producers, women producers, and allied stakeholders serving or working with agricultural operations across Nebraska. The program was also electronically archived and made available online.
In the evaluation presented to the pilot participants (N=96, n=70), 72.9% responded to a pre- and post-workshop survey to rate change in participant understanding using a scale of 1 (none) to 4 (high). Program topics included, with ratings: understanding financial trends-increase 1.25 (2.32 pre to 3.57 post), operation succession and analyzing legal risk-increase 0.94 (2.16 pre to 3.10 post), and USDA programs addressing business shocks and uncertainty-increase 1.37 (1.91 pre to 3.28 post).
Presentation Materials
Details
| Conference | 2021 Extension Risk Management Education National Conference |
| Presentation Type | 30-Minute Concurrent |