If something interesting is going on in the realm of sustainable agriculture and local food systems around Albany, New York, chances are the Regional Farm and Food Project is involved. Harvest dinner for 200 people? RFFP does one every year. Farm tours? 13 this year alone. Three-day intensive workshops for farmers? At least two every year. Mentoring program for new farmers? Of course. A cheesemakers’ guild, children in agriculture, the Troy farmers’ market….a seemingly endless array of programs and energy pour forth from this relatively new non-profit organization.

At the center of this whirlwind of activity is Tracy Frisch, who first imagined a group like this in 1988, while she was a graduate student in entomology and rural sociology at Cornell University. She established the Regional Farm and Food Project in 1996, and has served as executive director since then. Tracy’s passion, and the dedication of dozens of farmers, students, consumers and other volunteers, have made the RFFP far more influential nationwide than one would expect of a group that professes to serve 12 counties along the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers. Many of the programs started by the RFFP have been replicated elsewhere, some have been taken over by government agencies, and farmers from have traveled from afar to participate in the group’s farming workshops.

Rather than being just a local food system booster, the RFFP has become a trend setter, sniffing out the next big thing in farming, and finding innovative ways to help save farming as a viable career.

In 1993, Tracy and a couple of friends who were interested in agriculture organized a harvest dinner of local food that attracted 90 people. “People were really energized,” Tracy recalled. “We started having pot lucks, and people were interested in getting together.” The core group, which was mostly CSA members and a few farmers, experienced that serendipitous feeling that they were heading in the right direction. “We talked at one meeting about how the area needed a local yogurt maker,” Tracy said. “The next month, a guy whose dream it was to make yogurt showed up at the meeting.”

With a small grant from a private foundation, the organization was launched. Its first effort was to organize a farm tour series, primarily for farmers to visit one another’s farms, but also to educate consumers about farming.

“The point in the first year where things started changing, where people were really affected in a deep way, was when we offered the first holistic management workshop. Word spread and people were pretty excited,” Tracy said. “We did three of those workshops that year.”

The next winter, RFFP sponsored a workshop modeled on those offered by the Michael Fields Institute in Wisconsin. “It was in a not-well-heated church, with porta-johns and hard chairs and too many presenters,” she recalled ruefully. Nevertheless, it was declared a success and the next year, the workshop was offered in a more comfortable location with three experienced farmers presenting on one topic. The workshop ran for three days. “I think the intensity of it was really attractive to people,” Tracy said. The workshops accommodate 60 to 70 people and every one ever presented has been sold out. Every workshop will pull participants from 10 or 12 states and provinces, and half of the people are repeat attenders. See the box on the next page for information about this winter’s RFFP workshops.

During the first three years, RFFP sponsored an annual dinner called “Through Women’s Hands” which celebrated women farmers and chefs. In recent years, the dinner has expanded to include men farmers and chefs and it has become an important fundraiser, raising $20,000 a year for the RFFP. Tickets sold for $45 to members and $60 to non-members; an “honorary committee member” who gets listed on the invitation pays $100 per ticket. The event’s 200 tickets sold out and, Tracy says, “We could have sold 350 tickets in a flash.”

Next year, she hopes to expand the dinner and get businesses to underwrite it so that farmers, who have until now donated the food, can be paid.

One of the spinoff benefits of the harvest dinner has been increased sales of local produce to restaurants. One of the chefs organized a dinner meeting in winter for chefs and farmers to get together, just to get aquainted and discuss forming relationships.

Another big push for the RFFP has been a value-added dairy project. “In March of 1998, we had 10 or 12 people on a tour in Vermont to visit dairy farms,” Tracy said. “Some of the farmers were very skeptical before we got there because they were milking five Jerseys. But when we got there, they saw how manageable it was – it was not high-tech, it was not a $100,000 operation to set up their cheese plants. Four of those farmers there that day are now making cheese.”

Every year for the past three years, RFFP has been bringing a cheesemaker from the highlands of Scotland to give cheesemaking workshops, which are in high demand. “The sexiest thing in agriculture right now is cheesemaking,” Tracy said.

RFFP started one of the strongest mentoring programs for new farmers with help from a USDA Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education grant. Veteran farmers were paid to serve as mentors to 20 beginning farmers. “It gave people such an incredible jump start,” Tracy said, “but I’m not sure what the future of it is.” The problem was that mentor farmers were hard to find.

“You need people who are really accomplished, all-around farmers, and are able to take the time, and are good, supportive teachers,” she said. “A lot of people have two of those three characteristics, but they disappear during the growing season.”

RFFP is also involved in a farmers network, which was created when a couple of young aspiring farmers visited many farms in the region and discovered the farmers didn’t know one another. Now there is a schedule of meetings and farm visits, and farmers are getting together to do bulk orders.

Tracy also orchestrates a monthly radio show on station WRPI. It’s called the Farm and Food Show and it provides interviews, news, commentary. “We’ve even done poetry,” she said.

Community forums and lectures on hot topics such as genetically modified crops are also sponsored.

Financing
Unlike most non-profits, RFFP gets a relatively small percentage of its budget from grants from government agencies and private foundations. Instead, the group relies on profits from workshops, the benefit dinner and silent auction, and donations from its 800 members. Tracy much prefers that kind of financing.

“We’ve had a lot of flexibility,” she said. “There’s so much we do because of a perceived opportunity or need that is not known a year in advance” to allow them to apply for a grant.

Although the organization was run by Tracy and volunteers during the early years, there are now two to three full-time equivalent staff members. In addition, a recent board restructuring is giving more authority and responsibility to board committees.

“So much has changed since we started in 1996,” Tracy said. “A lot of the things we were doing, even Cooperative Extension has picked up on – farm maps and directories, beginning farmer focus. There are a lot of entities in this realm that weren’t on the landscape when we started. That’s why we’re doing an evaluation. I’m interested in learning how we’re having an impact, and what it is that we should be doing.”

Not that she’s out of ideas for RFFP. That seems unlikely to ever happen. Tracy has noticed the proliferation of non-profit organizations that have their own farms. So she is organizing a workshop for the farmers who run them. “It’s a growing wave, and they have a lot that they could learn from one another,” she said.