Happy 2023, and welcome to our kickoff of Mad for Ag—the Madison County Cornell Cooperative Extension Ag Team’s weekly blog!
As we jump into all the programming and resources we are gathering together for 2023, this blog is one of the ways we hope to share with you what’s going on at CCE Madison as well as in the wider NY farming community. We have big plans in the making for 2023…
…but to start, this week I want to let you know about the local events we have going on in January 2023!
- CCE Meet and Greet
- Community Survey
- A Calendar filling up with Workshops
- Kickoff for our monthly beginning/intermediate farmer series
First of all, my name’s Maryellen and I’m one half of the CCE Madison Ag Team (along with Patty Catalano). Until just a couple months ago, I’ve predominantly worked as a commercial produce farmer (most recently, I ran Hartwood Farm CSA with my husband in Fenner, NY).
But my passion has always been how to train and support new farmers, share resources to troubleshoot challenging production issues, and figure out how to keep operations profitable and sustainable even as our weather gets wonkier. As I got older, those tote bins of cucumbers weren’t getting any lighter, so when I saw the opportunity to become a part of the CCE Madison team, I was excited to switch gears a bit.
For the past few months, I’ve been learning the ropes of being an extension agent and started gathering input from farmers across the county to help us fine tune our programs for 2023.
But the work we do here comes from what YOU want—our jobs are to serve the needs of Madison County, and we do this best when we get input from farmers, businesses, and residents. Which is why we are hosting a:
CCE Madison Meet and Greet on Tuesday, January 17th!
This coffee hour meet and greet runs from 10am to noon in the Ag Center at 100 Eaton Street, in Morrisville.
Stop in for a minute or an hour to meet our local ag team and CCE staff as well as our great CNY Regional Dairy, Livestock, and Field Crop Team. We’ll have coffee brewing, plenty of snacks, and look forward to connect in person!
When you stop by, there’s a chance for you to see some of the resources we offer here at CCE Madison, our physical event space and Ag Business Center, AND a chance to share your two cents on what you would like to see from us for programming and resources.
Community Survey
We also are running a community wide survey right now to get wider feedback on this programming (and there’s an extra section there for farmer feedback!). I would love to have as many farmers participate as possible, so I can get a sense of what folks are interested in and what sort of workshops and tours would have most appeal for this summer’s lineup.
We plan our programs 100% around what YOU want—our job is to support you, our farmers, farm and food business owners, landowners, and residents. Whether you want field crop and vegetable programming or yak wrangling and emu ranching, we will work to bring the resources supporting those enterprises into the county!
Thank you in advance for your input.
A Calendar filling up with Workshops
We’ve been starting up the event and program planning for the year, so make sure you keep an eye on your email inbox or our website event page over here.
(Our newsletter has been on a hiatus and is restarting this month – if you haven’t received our CCE Madison newsletter in the past, you can sign up here for the relaunch!)
Winter is a big time for farmer education and conferences, and we’ll be sharing links to loads of events through our re-launched newsletter. Locally, we have a great slate of events to start the year: apple tree pruning 101, advanced beekeeping, backyard poultry, quickbooks training, annual crop planning, and producers discussions!
If you have specific workshop requests, you can always send them my way at ms3573@cornell.edu.
Next on the Docket: Kicking off our beginner/intermediate monthly series!
Speaking of workshops, I do want to highlight a new monthly get-together on the last week of each month aimed at beginner farmers (the day will rotate between Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays until we find the time that works best for everyone).
This monthly session will start with a brief presentation on a seasonal farm topic (mostly annual cropping like veggies or flowers to start), and then have time for questions and discussion of both that topic, or any other issues or challenges that might be coming up for you in the season. While aimed at farmers in their first ten years of production, this is open to all experience levels! Bring your questions, share your operation’s successes or challenges, or just come to listen and get ideas—everyone is welcome.
January’s topic is crop planning and how to use that planning process to prepare your seed and supply orders. We’ll also cover sources for those seeds and supplies convenient to Madison County.
February we’ll hit on greenhouse and seed starting tips and techniques, March is slated for soil management and field prep, and April is irrigation.
If you have any questions or ideas for this series, please let me know!
So, that’s just a little bit of what’s going on as we start off the year… we hope to hear from you (or see you at one of this month’s events) on how we can help your farm or business start off 2023 strong!
