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Green Industry Risk Management Comprehensive Education

Marco Palma

Summary

This multifaceted project addressed several critical risk areas. We used the "Green Industry Management Guide", developed in 2008, which contains general risk management practices for all types of risk. While some of the topics address specific risk reducing strategies, such as diversification and risk management through crop insurance, other topic are designed to provide information and resources for producers to implement in order to ensure that they are using these tools to manage risk. The Immigration and Labor handbook provided a general understanding of labor regulations affecting agricultural production. To date more than 2000 handbooks have been distributed in Texas, and there is a high demand for trainings for this topic.
Given the current economic conditions, a lot of growers who normally participate in live training activities throughout the region have not been able to do so. Because of this, we delivered a series of webinars with a total audience of more than 1000 Green Industry Growers. With a pre-post test of the 365 participants we found that 41% of participants increased their knowledge in water quality and conservation; 19% increase their knowledge and understanding of the importance to differentiation of their products. Participants estimated that as a result of this program they would save or profit economically $972,000. After the webinars were reported, 550 people have viewed the recording of the webinars. If they benefited at the same rate as webinar participants, that would represent an additional 1,465,000 of additional profits, for over $2.4 million in additional profits/savings.

Details

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