Managing Change Northwest

Managing Change Northwest. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

As a farmer, how do you enhance the environment while improving profitability and quality of life. Maurice Robinette is part of a group that has this exact directive in mind and they are preparing a webinar presentation.

ROBINETTE: I’ve been active in holistic management for 15-16 years. I belong to a group called “Managing Change Northwest.” We’re all educators in holistic management and we’re a 501c3 and we’ve done workshops here and there over the years and we decided we wanted to get a little more serious about developing our consulting skills and business and we’ve been looking at this idea of a webinar for a couple of years now.

Robinette says they have been seeing some changes in the ag industry.

ROBINETTE: We’ve become aware that there’s a large group of new people wanting to get into agriculture on kind of a non-conventional orientation that they’re primarily what would be considered very small operators and looking at the sort of farmers market direct sales farm stand kind of retail level production...and there’s a lot of them. That’s who we’re really focusing on.

He says the principals they’re going to be talking about are as easily applicable to a 10-thousand acre ranch as to a 10-acre farm. Robinette talks about what to expect from the webinar.

ROBINETTE: This first webinar is going to be kind of introductory overview of holistic management with an emphasis on the section within holistic management on financial planning so financial planning will really be the focus point and then an overview of what holistic management is and a little bit about how it works. At the end of the webinar we’re going to introduce a six-week series of webinars that we’re in production on right that will go into much greater detail.

While a lot of what farming is today harkens back to a bygone era there are a lot of great new ideas and methods.

ROBINETTE: I think there’s a real awareness for somebody starting out the old ways aren’t working very well. There was always kind of a saying if you’re going to get into agriculture you either inherit it or marry it and I think that’s still very true on large scale operations but with a small scale operation, I mean very small less than 10 ares, there’s lot s of opportunity out there to get in without much capital and these new farmers are coming into this without much of a background in conventional and traditional agriculture and so they’re very interested in doing things differently.

For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.

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