Beginning Farmer Institute

The National Farmers Union has just announced the students for their fourth annual Beginning Farmers Institute which includes one student from the northwest. Kent Wright is the president of the Washington State Farmers Union and talks about the program.

WRIGHT: It's just about giving a good chance for - and I won't even say younger, I'll say beginning farmers and ranchers in every sense of the word whether it's young people taking over the family operations or people who haven't been in the farming and ranching industry for 20 or 30 years. NFU, National Farmers Union they kind of give these people a chance to go out and see what National Farmers Union does and you meet other farmers and ranchers and kind of learn a lot of different facets of the farming and ranching industry.

Erin Bailey of Eastern Washington was chosen as one of the 15 participants this year. Wright was also a grad of the Beginning Farmers Institute.

WRIGHT: It just gives them a different set of tools that I would say a lot of farmers and ranchers don't have starting out. There's a lot of grants and loans and things like that they teach about. They kind of give people a heads up and then offer being able to be around peers of a lot of different enterprises and industries.

The program is sponsored in part by Farm Credit, CHS Foundation, FUI Foundation and the NFU Foundation. Institute participants will meet several times over the next year to learn about financial planning, farm management and farmer-owned cooperatives. In addition, they will help determine the agenda based on what they have identified as important to their operation. Topics include marketing, understanding U.S. Department of Agriculture programs, renewable energy, recording keeping, farm transitioning and understanding the local food system.

That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.