The entry point for FarmLink’s business education programming is a nine-week course called The Resilerator ®. It’s like a business accelerator, but the emphasis is on long-term resilience and sustainable profits and practices rather than an unsustainable or accelerated sprint towards short-term profits. In this program growers complete an intensive self-assessment, take part in a comprehensive curriculum covering all the major aspects of farm and ranch legal and financial management, and end by setting realistic goals for improving business practices over the next 2-3 years.
After completing The Resilerator growers will have access to one-on-one technical assistance, loan discounts, and other programming offered through FarmLink’s Business Resilience Program.
Our goal is to make the participants feel resilerated!
Sarah Silva, of Green Star Farm in Sonoma County, participated in the 2019 program reported, “It helped me be prepared for all the many changes in circumstances that we encounter in our field.” Sarah will return this year as a co-teacher, along with other alumni of the 2019 and 2020 program.
The Reslierator is designed to help farmers and ranchers understand the legal and financial structure of their business and establish practices to ensure resilience, or the ability to respond and adapt to challenges and opportunities and remain viable and profitable over the long-term.
Open to farmers and ranchers operating a for-profit business with at least three years of experience, The Resilerator blends group education with one-on-one technical assistance on topics including:
- business structure,
- labor,
- land tenure,
- accounting,
- taxation,
- credit,
- insurance,
- regulatory compliance.
When people complete the course, they receive access to other educational opportunities within the Resilience Program including one-on-one technical assistance, bookkeeping clinics and occasional workshops on advanced topics such as determining your cost of production, shaping the tax treatment of your business, and accounting for value-added production. Growers will also receive a certificate good for five years and worth up to $500 to be against loan fees should you apply for financing through California FarmLink. We also provide new clients with one-on-one technical assistance to help apply for credit or access land.
The course started February 1st, and we’re doing our best to assure that farmers feel resilerated by this experience, and ready to vanquish any fears about the long-term resilience of their farms and ranches.
