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Extending Our Reach – Training Agricultural Professionals to Facilitate and Teach Price Risk Management in a Marketing Group Setting

Bret Oelke

Summary

Several Regional Extension Educators for the University of Minnesota within the Agricultural Business Management work group have been actively involved in facilitating, teaching, and managing marketing groups across Minnesota for a number of years. The demand for this type of Risk Management education has exceeded the supply of University staff available to effectively and efficiently reach the producers that are interested in participating in these marketing and management discussion groups. A pilot program was implemented to train non-University Agricultural Professionals, in coordination with several local farm organizations, to facilitate and to lead discussions in a Marketing Group setting with training and support from University Staff. This concurrent session will outline the steps that were taken to identify interested facilitators, sponsors, and producers; the training and support that are provided to the facilitators; and the format and tools that are used to improve the commodity marketing and price risk management of the marketing group participants. Additionally, we will discuss the process used to start these groups within the fee based sponsorship model that is used by the University of Minnesota Agricultural Business Management Educators and the non-University facilitators that they support.

By extending our reach and training agricultural professionals we have been able to effectively reach many more farm families than we can with the limited resources of our Land Grant University.

Details

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