The CCE Eastern NY Commercial Horticulture Team is happy to invite vegetable and berry growers to our virtual series of webinars on February 15, 16, and 17.

The Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) Commodity Procurement Program invites you to a live, interactive webinar on lessons learned in becoming an approved USDA
food vendor. AMS purchases approximately $6 billion of U.S. grown and processed foods annually for both domestic and international food assistance programs.
USDA purchases over 300 different food products that directly support the nutritional needs for millions of school children, families, and other qualified individuals. 

Thinking about becoming a certified pesticide applicator in New York?  Join DEC representative Brayton Pendell and ENYCHP specialists for a discussion on who needs a pesticide license, license types, examination procedures, and recertification. Participants will have ample opportunity to ask questions during the program.  

Join Cornell Cooperative Extension's Lake Ontario Fruit Program, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Broome County, and the CCE-Eastern NY Horticulture Team on April 4th for a remote GAPs training. Instructors will walk growers thru how to conduct a risk assessment on their farm utilizing the seven areas of farm food safety. Participants will gain hands-on experience in creating a traceability system for their farm, as well as learn about packing house design with food safety principles guiding placement of equipment and suggested materials. Students will also learn about how to train their employees related to food safety and understand what they will need to implement on their farm in order to pass a third-party food safety audit, such as GAPs.

Dr. Betsy Lamb, NYS IPM, will be presenting about integrated pest management in greenhouses and about the use of biologicals to control greenhouse pests. Chris Stoltzfus will provide a tour of the greenhouses and discuss their best practices for transplant production. 

Supervisors are critical to the success of farm businesses. They have a major impact both on employees' daily work experiences and on the production performance of the business. The  agricultural Supervisory Leadership certificate helps farm supervisors and managers learn and apply human resource management practices and leadership skills that foster rewarding workplaces and drive business results. Confident managers who thoughtfully apply leadership and management skills improve employee performance, develop teams, reduce employee turnover, and increase employee engagement. The courses within the certificate program will offer extensive practice and engagement activities to build confidence and skill sets.

Join Dr. Margaret McGrath, Vegetable Plant Pathologist, Cornell University, to hear the latest disease management considerations for pumpkins and vine crops including Cucurbit Powdery Mildew and Cucurbit Downy Mildew. Learn from Dr. McGrath what fungicides are working and which ones are not and get the latest developments on disease progression from across the region. 

University of New Hampshire Extension Field Specialist Emeritus, George Hamilton will demonstrate the importance of and best techniques to calibrate air blast sprayers. Proper calibration will ensure effective, efficient, economical and legal spraying.  Inadequate spray coverage is usually the cause of poor spray efficacy and additional spray applications. Overuse of some sprays results in unhealthy residues and can lead to fines.

Calibration should be done several times each season, or when you incorporate any new equipment or repairs - from the tractor to the nozzle.  Join us for a refresher or send new employees for training.  This workshop is open for any grower that relies on an airblast sprayer to deliver plant protectants to fruit or vegetable crops. 

Join us for a late-summer field meeting. Cornell researchers and extension specialists will give talks on management tasks to be mindful of late in the season as we head into harvest.  We will then walk through the orchard to look for some of the issues discussed, and further discuss their management strategies in the field. We will then discuss how the crop is shaping up around the greater ENY region, and will allow ample time for you to share your thoughts on this year's crop, and to answer any other questions you may have. 

Please join ASA for a field talk led by Brian Ziehm of Tiashoke Farm, Mark Anderson from Landview Farm, and Dr. Allen Williams of Understanding Ag.  Tiashoke Farm has participated in a three-year grant funded by Northeast SARE to experiment with interseeding diverse cover crops into silage corn at the V5/V6 stage.  In 2022, Tiashoke Farm partnered with Landview Farm to purchase an interseeder to sow cover crops into several hundred acres of silage corn.  We will take a look at some of the results and hear from the farmers about the benefits and practical challenges of interseeding.  Dr. Williams will discuss impacts he has seen on soil health and reduced input costs with the use of cover crops.

A workshop for any farmer looking for tools and information to improve soil health, reduce input costs, and increase profitability.

Join the Agricultural Stewardship Association for a day-long workshop with Dr. Allen Williams of Understanding Ag. Dr. Williams and his colleagues have been leaders in working with farmers and ranchers across the U.S. and around the world to increase their understanding of soil health practices and how they can make any farming operation more successful.

Your farm's big-3 financial records (balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flow) and how to use them to assess your overall financial situation. This information will help you assess what types of investments are likely to be viable for your farm business and whether or not you are likely to be able to use credit to finance that investment.  We will specifically cover Farm Profitability, Cash Flow, and Key Financial Ratios.

How do you create value?  How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?  In other words - what is your farm's business strategy?  Your investments should be in line with your strategy.  Different business strategies will result in investments in different parts of the Farm Business Value Chain.  Farm Business Value Chain - full range of activities needed to create a product or service.

Identifying the Enterprises in Your Value Chain.  Your Profit Centers and Cost Centers.  We will cover: Direct vs Indirect Costs and Cost Allocation and Variable vs Fixed Costs and Relevant Range (when does a fixed cost become a variable cost?)

Operating budgets are the overall financial plan for the business.  You can use a budget based on your current situation as the base to model new scenarios.

It is more time-consuming to develop detailed budgets for your enterprises, but it is worthwhile to do this for area where you are considering making major investments.  We will demonstrate how to move from an operating budget to an enterprise budget to model specific scenarios within that enterprise. 

Save the Dates for the following Winter Meetings:

• NOFA NY Virtual Winter Conference, February 2-5, 2023

• Empire State Expo, Oncenter Syracuse, February 6-7 2023

• Becker Forum, Oncenter Syracuse, February 8, 2023

• Eastern NY Commercial Horticulture Program Regional Winter Meeting, The Desmond Hotel, Albany, February 21-23, 2023 

Introduces a structured process for a manager to go through to decide among options for long-term investments, projects or changes to the farm business.

As you change your prices, volume of sales or costs of production how does your profit change?  What is your break-even point and what output level do you need to achieve a target income? We will also cover sensitivity analysis that will help you see how your results will vary over a range of likely scenarios from best case to worst case.  This will help you assess the riskiness of your plan.

Capital budgeting is defined as the process used to determine whether capital assets are worth investing in. it's the process of asking: is an asset worth the resources it requires?  Capital assets are usually long-term investments like new equipment, facilities, and other infrastructure upgrades. By incorporating strategically planned capital budgeting into their financial processes, companies can more effectively determine and prioritize which projects, programs and other investment assets could be most financially beneficial in the long-term.

Due to a lack of registrations, we have decided to cancel the advisory meetings scheduled for Tuesday, December 20th in Columbia County and Wednesday, December 21st in Saratoga County.  Please look for a survey coming soon in your email!