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Soil Health and Climate-Smart Project

Build soil health and improve on-farm resilience. Enrolled farms have access to direct technical, educational and resources and receive incentive payments from implemented climate-smart practices. This project supports farmers who want to add or expand climate-smart practices (e.g. cover cropping, perennial planting, rotational grazing), collect data on outcomes and engage with emerging markets seeking positive environmental and climate impacts.

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Farmer Field Days and Workshops

Farmers learning from farmers - from this context, OAK creates on-farm Field Days, half- or full-day Workshops, and online webinars to provide spaces where farmers meet up with their peers, experienced host farmers and agricultural professionals to share their learnings. Hosted or created on working farms, these events allow attendees to experience organic crop and livestock systems and explore best practices in production, marketing, business and resilience on Kentucky farms. Keep up to date with the details of every field day, webinar and workshop - subscribe to our Field Notes newsletter Visit our past field day summaries on our website, and view recordings, snapshots and lessons learned from host farmers on our OAK YouTube page. Let OAK know if you have suggestions or ideas for future farms, practices or topics to highlight.

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Organic Transition and Organic Production Technical Assistance

Need organic production technical assistance? Considering transitioning into organic certification? OAK staff are available to provide free technical assistance to Kentucky farmers by phone, virtually, and on-farm.

Organic Transition Technical Assistance:  OAK's Organic Certification Specialists are available to answer initial questions, work with you to develop an Organic System Plan (OSP), assist with record-keeping templates, and provide support while you complete organic certification paperwork. OAK also offers an Organic Farmer Mentorship Program connecting experienced organic farmers with farmers who are in transition. 

Organic Certification Technical Assistance

 

Organic Production Technical Assistance: OAK’s Organic Production Specialist is available to support farmers in production planning, troubleshooting challenges, implementing new systems, scaling up, and more. OAK Organic Production Assistance is a resource that can save you time, track down evidence-based resources, develop or locate useful planning or record-keeping tools, or get a referral to outside resources.

 
Organic Production Technical Assistance

Annual Organic Farming Conference

OAK's Annual Organic Farming Conference offers multiple days, formats and content tracks to empower farmers with inspiration from local and regional speakers; practical tools for production, business and support; useful Trade Show resources and connections; and abundant networking opportunities with other farmers, ag professionals and food system innovators. OAK's annual conference programming focuses on agricultural production systems, farming techniques and organic best practices, alongside interwoven threads of community, conservation and collective action - each inseparable from the sustainable agriculture movement. Since 2011, the OAK Conference has included a growing audience of hundreds of Kentuckians and neighbors active in the region as farmers, researchers, nonprofit professionals, federal and state agency partners, allied service providers and conscious consumers, working collectively to build a local, resilient and healthy food system for us all.

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Kentucky Farm Share Coalition

Kentucky Farm Share Coalition (KYFSC) focuses on increasing access to local, organic vegetables and supporting Kentucky farmers through Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). KYFSC makes CSA shares (aka local vegetable boxes) more readily available, convenient, and affordable for Kentucky consumers. Through this program, OAK provides additional CSA marketing and technical support for CSA growers, coordinating worksite and community CSA pickups, and facilitating employer-sponsored CSA discounts for Kentucky employees.

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