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Farm Pulse: Crop Insurance and Grain Marketing - A Hybrid Canvas Course for Wisconsin Farmers

Katie Wantoch

Summary

Wisconsin farmers are experiencing prolonged farm stress due to challenges from variability of markets, prices of inputs, and new technologies and practices affecting both crop yield and quality. This stress has contributed to beginning crop and retiring dairy farmers re-evaluating their financial situation and business plans. Farm Pulse: Crop Insurance and Grain Marketing is an online course with in-person meetings for farmers interested in learning the importance of risk management, crop insurance, and grain marketing.

The project leveraged existing relationships and focus group results with these audiences to support the curriculum development. Farm Pulse reviewed previously drafted curriculum, updated and adapted materials into a more relevant format for use in-person, as stand-alone videos, and an online course. In addition, new material was developed to assist farmers with estimating their cost of production and evaluating crop insurance products.

Farmers attended regional kickoff meetings to increase awareness of these topics before enrolling in the Farm Pulse online course, which includes video segments, interactive quizzes and activities, a case study example, and application exercises. The online course builds participants’ knowledge of evaluating risk management, calculating cost of production, crop insurance products, and production and price risk management tools for grain marketing.

Farmers progressed through the online course while also participating in in-person meetings. This hybrid approach to delivering the curriculum assisted participants in increasing their knowledge of topics before meeting with Extension educators and fellow farmers. The in-person meetings included simulation games that also provided for hands-on experience in using grain marketing tools. Hands-on education and opportunities to try using these tools in a simulated setting assisted with the adoption of these tools and practices in their own farm business.

This session will highlight the results of the 2023-2024 course delivery, including the steps to develop this curriculum by the project team. The Farm Pulse curriculum will assist farmers in identifying production and marketing risks of their farm business in order to assist them in making decisions that will improve their farm profitability.

This material is based upon work supported by USDA/NIFA under Award Number 2021-70027-34694.

Details

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