Jennifer Hashley Speaks

Here, in its entirety, is the letter Jen sent us as a thank you after the dinner. In addition to helping run Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds, Jen works for the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project. Some very interesting stuff in here.
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Hi Friends,
I would like to thank everyone again for taking the time to attend last week’s delicious donor appreciation dinner at Beacon Hill Bistro and especially for your leadership support of the MPPU project through the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Tufts Friedman School. It was great to meet many of you in person and to see all of you in this context - sharing in the delicious food made possible through your contributions and support of this vital project. For those of you unable to join us for the dinner, you were certainly there in spirit and we hope to catch you at a next event.

Since the restaurant venue was a bit loud, I didn't get the opportunity to share a few highlights of what New Entry is all about and how much it means to me, both personally, and to the new farmers we create through our programs and how all of this ties in with your gifts and leadership support of the MPPU project (an update of where the MPPU project stands is below).

I hope you've had some time over the weekend to explore the information about the project we shared with you on the thumb drive and I'd love to share with you some of the thoughts I had hoped to verbalize during the dinner (get cozy, read on!). In my role with New Entry, (the other "hat" I wear in life), I have the opportunity to work with all of the incredible individuals New Entry has helped train as new farmers in Massachusetts. I have gained an incredible education from the amazing individuals we work with on a daily basis – helping them achieve their farming dreams and goals and truly become the next generation of culturally diverse farmers.

New Entry was originally founded to assist socially-disadvantaged immigrants, refugees, and asylees with agricultural backgrounds “re-enter” agriculture in Massachusetts. We have worked with individuals from Southeast Asia, Latin America, African Countries, the Middle East, and beyond. Many of our participants are low-income, many with English as a Second Language, varying degrees of education and literacy. This has been an incredibly rich experience where folks who had no idea (living in urbanized areas in Massachusetts) that there was the potential to farm here and to grow their traditional crops. It’s been a learning curve for everyone – for the farmers – to learn what will actually grow here (most of them are from tropical climates) in our short and finicky growing season, and for staff to learn all of the exotic crops and growing methods such diverse farmers bring to the project. Over the past two years, with the growing interest in local food production, we have expanded our target audience and are now also working with traditional US-born individuals (gringos) who want to farm. This has increased our ability to serve additional clients and expand our current network of food producers. We are now an extremely multi-cultural program with participants hailing from over 30 different countries. It makes for interesting celebrations and meetings – we all learn from each other and it’s a truly rich experience!

You might wonder what we do and exactly how we do it. Briefly, we offer a series of training programs and services for new farmers:

• An Explore Farming! Program to provide folks with an orientation to our programs and services and what it means to operate a farm business in MA
• We have a 6-week Farm Business Training course that helps prepare folks with a first-year business plan they use to develop their markets, crop production, equipment and supply resources, and figure out how they begin to farm.
• The project leases over 30 acres of “Training Farms” from private landowners and Land Trusts that we develop with all the infrastructure a new farmer needs to get started (storage, greenhouse space, small equipment, irrigation, etc.) where individuals can rent land from the project for up to 3 years to build their skills and capacities in production and marketing.
• We offer practical skills training – a series of 12+ on-farm workshops throughout the growing season to help folks get the hands-on training they need to succeed with the latest technology and approaches.
• And, we offer hours and hours of individual technical assistance to help people address all the farming-related needs they have –whether production, business planning, market access or preparing for the “transition.”

After farming on a training / incubator site for the 3-year period (if they choose), we help folks transition to independent farmland that they can continue to grow their business on their own indefinitely. In doing so, we are continuing to keep scores of acres of farmland in active production. Our other programs include:

• Our World PEAS CSA program – to help new farmers with market access, we coordinate a multi-producer CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) where we combine the products of 30+ farmers in our program and deliver 218 shares to over 300 families in the Greater Boston area. What’s unique about our CSA is its ethnic flair where folks get exposed to veggies they might not be familiar with – we of course provide recipes and instructions!
• Farmland Matching Service– we help landowners find farmers and we help farmers find land to expand, or grow their business.
• Farm Employment Connections– we also help folks connect to farm jobs if they need more skills development or need to work for a paycheck before they start their own farm business.
• Agricultural resource development – we also produce training materials, resource guides, and other educational resources on agricultural related topics.

People always ask me – “what do you do in winter?” I always have to chuckle and inform folks of all the program areas I just mentioned – and noting that developing new farmers is a full-time / year-round job. We do much of our trainings, ag conferences, and one-to-one planning and marketing work with individuals in the winter months. And part of my focus is ongoing development work. Our biggest obstacle to farm training is ongoing funding and we rely on the generosity of private donors like you, foundations and grants to carry on our work.

MPPU Update:
You might also be asking yourself, how does New Entry's work relate to the MPPU project? Over the years at New Entry, we always have individuals (new farmers) who would come to our program and not be exclusively interested in vegetable production (which is the bulk of our training curriculum)…so, we began to think of ways we could incorporate a livestock production training component into our programming. Me, being a pragmatic optimist, thought we could easily start with a poultry project at our training farms. Poultry is an “easy entry” livestock product that is great for beginners learning new skills – it doesn’t require a significant amount of land, it’s a fairly limited financial investment to start up on a small scale, there is incredible market demand, and if someone realizes it’s not right for them – in less than 8-10 weeks, there is a harvestable product and it is possible to recoup most of the initial investment.

Then reality set in, and I realized New Entry would be setting ourselves up with the same challenge Pete and I were having with the lack of processing infrastructure, and I determined that before we begin training new farmers in livestock production, poultry in particular, we should begin to address the infrastructure piece of the equation. Thus the MPPU project was born! My entire goal for this project was not just to meet an immediate “Pete and Jen” need, but a growing statewide need for us to truly have a sustainable local agriculture infrastructure. We need access to processing facilities that are in decline in the Northeast and across the US. I’ve been working for the past 2 years in my role as New Entry director to secure funding to address the regulatory aspects of the MPPU and to get the existing unit “up to snuff.” We accomplished that and we are ready for expansion. We were recently awarded a training grant to help train new producers in the MPPU regulatory protocol and food safety components, and we had over 25 producers attend our first May 29th training event. The challenge has always been that there is only 1 MPPU currently serving all of Mass, and as we continue to reach out to more farmers (and the market demand is creating interest among more farmers every day) – we need more capacity. The best part is – you’ve already put your resources where your values are and recognized the importance of this project – hopefully not just for Pete and Jen's Backyard Birds, but also for New Entry who can help take this project and expand it to a broader farmer audience throughout the state (and beyond – we have folks from RI, CT, NH, NY and others looking at our model). Currently, there are 4 farms using the MPPU in Massachusetts – but we expect that by 2010, there will be at least a dozen, if not more, producers licensed to use the MPPU and it will continue to grow exponentially. This will mean more local, tasty chicken at farmers’ markets, being served at restaurants, such as BHB, as meat shares in CSAs, and elsewhere. It means more demand for more MPPUs and the continual rebuilding and energizing of a vibrant local food and farming system. It’s pretty exciting stuff!

So, our next steps with this MPPU project is to leverage the funds we’ve raised and get the next unit constructed. We currently have $27K raised toward our $35K goal (which is now turning into a $45-50K goal to build the next iteration of the unit we want with a few upgrades and fancier bells & whistles than we originally envisioned). We have submitted a proposal for a USDA Community Food Projects grant that may provide additional resources toward a new unit and help us get our New Entry Poultry Demonstration project off the ground at our training farm sites in Dracut, and we are submitting a USDA Rural Development grant this week in partnership with the New England Small Farm Institute (who owns the existing unit) to fund 2 additional units throughout the state and develop a better management and business model for ongoing operations. With your contributions toward this project, New Entry would then lease and manage one of the units for our Eastern Mass farmers to share.

Need for continuing support: I wanted to wrap up my update with a quote from the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture - "A dollar spent on food from a local farm buys more than just groceries. In addition to sustenance, real nutrition and good flavor, it also buys vibrant rural communities, food security, and confidence in your food supply." That said, I can assure you that your dollars spent toward the MPPU project are supporting more than just a trailer that processes chickens – we are helping recreate vibrant communities of food producers, keeping farmland in active production, and assuring the future of our food supply. The generous contributions from all of you provide New Entry with the critical resources needed to expand in new directions and help us cover our continuing expenses related to these types of new initiatives that we are developing now and into the future. So thank you once again for your generosity and support, and I hope to have your support of New Entry for years to come!

If you have any questions about your gift to the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project at the Tufts Friedman School, please contact me or Sean Devendorf, sean.devendorf@tufts.edu.

I hope to see all of you at our August 6th Farm Tour in Dracut - if not before.
Thanks so much again!
Best, Jennifer