Food Processing

Showing 1-20 of 24 results

Scaling Up Your Vegetable Farm for Wholesale Markets

For direct market farmers, expanding your operation to capture local and regional wholesale markets can represent an opportunity. But such a shift brings with it many changes to how you run your farm because the expectations that wholesale buyers have is much different than your direct market customers. Scaling Up Your Vegetable Farm for Wholesale […]

Cottage Food Success: A Labeling Guide and Toolkit for Creating Canned Food Products that Sell

Ideas and step-by-step instructions to increase sales of canned products made in your home kitchen under your state’s cottage food law.

A Farmer's Guide to Crop Quality for Wholesale Outlets

A simple guide to crop quality focused on tomatoes, cucurbits and greens, with photos of good and poor crop quality as well as best practices for post-harvest handling.

Investing in the Next Generation of Agricultural Scientists

Sustainable solutions to today's agricultural challenges arise when scientists, educators and producers work together to test theories in real-world, on-farm situations. For this approach itself to be sustainable, there must be opportunities for the next generation of agricultural scientists to use collaborative, applied research to address the real-world needs of farmers and ranchers. The SARE Graduate Student grant program is one such opportunity—since 2000, the program has supported the work of 600 master's and Ph.D. students.

Farmer Panel on Cover Crops

Farmers Skip Paul (Rhode Island), Jeff Frey (Pennsylvania) and Perry Lilley (Maine) share their experiences with cover crops, including their motivation for using them, successes and challenges, factors that play into decision making around cover crops, and advice for ag service providers who want to encourage farmer adoption of this vital conservation practice.

Farm to Table: Building Local and Regional Food Systems

More and more, farmers, ranchers, ag professionals, community organizers and others are striving to reconfigure the nation's food system so more value stays in food-producing communities.

Farm to Hospital Toolkit

Tools farmers and hospitals can use to increase direct hospital purchases from local producers.

Farm Food Safety

This website provides educational resources for farmers interested in learning about GAPs. Some materials available in Spanish.

Safe and Profitable Oil Production Fact Sheets

Information on edible oil production for small-scale producers.

Sustainable Bioenergy Course

In association with an NCR-SARE Professional Development Program grant, the Bioenergy Training Center, in collaboration with the Farm Energy CoP, has developed a Sustainable Bioenergy Course to provide educational training resources focused not only on the technical feasibility of bioenergy generation, but also on approaches and processes that assist communities in understanding the comprehensive implications of bio-based alternative energy. This course can provide foundational materials for teaching undergraduates or for community education sessions.

Working With Your Food Safety Inspector

How food safety inspectors and small scale processors can work together to meet regulations.

screenshot from the winter production, storage and sales website

Expanding Winter Harvest and Sales for New England Vegetable Crops

This University of Massachusetts website offers resources on winter vegetable crop storage, marketing and low-cost season extension through structures such as hoop houses and low tunnels.

Managing Field Operations to Reduce Energy Costs Webinar

This webinar makes the case for using minimum tillage, timely routine tractor maintenance, crop rotations with legumes and shorter maturity corn to reduce drying costs.

The Organic Seed Grower

The Organic Seed Grower is a comprehensive manual for the serious vegetable grower who is interested in growing high-quality seeds using organic farming practices.