Events Calendar

Online Webinar
Facilitators/Instructors: Cade Staff & Farm Commons

It’s every farmer or rancher’s worst nightmare: Someone claims to have gotten sick from the food they produced. No matter how safe the operation is, the risk is always there. The good news is there are ways to manage and mitigate the impacts of this risk. We’ll discuss the best practices every farmer or rancher can adopt to get a foothold in managing their food safety liability exposure.

Farm Commons helps farms build a common cause for legal resilience — and a new future for small business law in the United States. A single legal vulnerability can be make or break for a farm. But farmers, ranchers, and agriculture communities already have their hands full taking on goliaths like monopolistic agribusiness companies. Local farms need a leg up.

Farm Commons empowers agricultural communities to resolve their own legal vulnerabilities, within an ecosystem of support. Farms today are getting squeezed by gigantic social and economic forces. They need shared tools for resilience.

Through Farm Commons farmers, ranchers, and agricultural professionals are enabled to:

• Understand farm business law as it is now, and how to effectively use the tools it offers

• Shape the evolution of farm business law to achieve their shared goals, and

• Work effectively with attorneys and other professionals to create long term legal resilience.

Farm business owners should be in charge of the legal dynamics that shape their destiny every day. Farm Commons assists agri-businesses achieve much of that without courtrooms or legislative change.

Online Webinar
Facilitators/Instructors: Cade Staff & Myron Thurston, CCE Oneida 

Are grants free money? Are you prepared to apply, accept, monitor and evaluate the grants that you are interested in? Guest speaker, Myron Thurston, will walk participants through the process from how to find funding opportunities to ensuring they align with your holistic goals and business plan. Participants will learn to decipher eligibility and requirements to help assess what funding opportunities are right for your business.

Facilitator Myron Thurston is the Food Supply Chain Marketing Specialist for Cornell Cooperative Extension of Oneida County. The grant that funds his position is an Assembly Grant that was secured by Hon. Marianne Buttenschon, District 119. The goal of the grant is to connect farmers, distributors, and processors in Upstate New York with distributors, food banks, and individual customers in New York City. 

Prior to his work with CCE Oneida County, he was the Agricultural Economic Development Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Madison County. Myron also teaches courses in access to capital and business planning for the Cornell Small Farms Program and is an adjunct professor of microeconomics at Mohawk Valley Community College. 

He also reviews and scores grants for the USDA Agricultural Marketing Service and National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Myron is an avid endurance athlete and can be found running marathons and participating in triathlons during the competition season. Myron lives in Sherrill, NY with his wife, son, daughter, and two fur kids.