Fire and flood, drought and disease—the physical effects of disaster are plain to see whether they come fast or slow. The financial devastation that follows usually comes both fast and slow, and usually lingers years after the physical damage is done. You might be on top of clearing defensible space, and practicing emergency evacuation, but do you have a plan for how you will manage the loss of income and costs of recovery once the danger has passed?
While most disaster preparedness focuses on physical strategies, the FarmLink Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Learning Center focuses on financial tools to help you prepare to mitigate the effects of disaster when it comes, and to position you to be ready to manage loss of income and rebuilding expenses. You don’t want to be making up an evacuation plan with the river rising or the fire cresting, and you don’t want to be learning the details of your insurance coverage and ability to access credit in the weeks after, when you have no income and damaged infrastructure.
Resources in this Learning Center will help you evaluate aspects of your business to strengthen resilience, select the most effective risk management strategies, and prepare to be able to recover from disaster quickly and effectively.
As proud as we are of our new learning center - we have to let you know that an even better way to access them is through the online asynchronous course offered by our friends at Farmer Campus. Weathering It: Stories & Strategies for Financially Resilient Land-Based Businesses is a short course focused on real stories told by farmers who have been through intense disaster and have re-built with resilience and preparation infused into every part of their operation.
The Weathering It course includes the same materials you will find in the Learning Center, but contextualized with real farmer stories and questions. You will have access to podcasts and video with farmer and rancher stories, and video of those same farmers in conversation with course instructors Poppy Davis and Katie Brimm, and a small group of farmers like you who took the course together.
From the Disaster Preparedness and Recovery Learning Center, you can easily navigate to FarmLink’s other Learning Centers:
Business Basics Learning Center
This Learning Center includes resources for people who are thinking about creating a new business, and for people who have already started a business but have not yet researched required and recommended business management practices.
Business Planning Learning Center
This Learning Center is for established businesses that want to evaluate and strengthen their operations as well as for people thinking about starting a new business.
This Learning Center is for experienced bookkeepers who want to learn about best practices for farm and ranch books, and for farmers and ranchers who are committed to deep engagement with their bookkeeping.
This Learning Center includes beginning, intermediate and advanced resources. The beginning resources are important for first-time self-employed farmers and ranchers. The intermediate and advanced resources are for farmers, ranchers, and tax preparers with specific questions about agricultural taxation.
This Learning Center contains supplemental materials referenced in the other FarmLink Learning Centers. The best way to get here is from one of the other Learning Centers, but it can also be used like an encyclopedia of business management concepts and tools.
