I was so pleased when Karen contacted me today to give me the news: her 3-year old organic blueberry farm won a USDA Value Added Grant to change the landscape of organic blueberry growing in Michigan! This was a really exciting and fun project to work on. My role was to conduct a thorough and objective feasibility study to demonstrate whether or not the value added activities could be financially and agriculturally viable. The answer turned out to be a resounding YES! The financial projections I prepared and market analysis I conducted provided strong evidence in the farm’s favor, supporting the assertions in their business plan.<\/p>\n
With this grant Big Head Farm will create a facility for processing organic blueberries on-site. This will not only help this farm get its organic product to market more efficiently, but will enable other berry producers to ‘go-organic’ because there is no other open-source organic blueberry processor in the state. This is good for farmers and good for consumers — farmers will be able to demand a higher price for their wholesale berries and consumers will have more access to locally grown berries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was so pleased when Karen contacted me today to give me the news: her 3-year old organic blueberry farm won a USDA Value Added Grant to change the landscape of organic blueberry growing in Michigan! This was a really exciting and fun project to work on. My role was to conduct a thorough and objective feasibility study to demonstrate whether or not the value added activities could be financially and agriculturally viable. The answer turned out to be a resounding YES! The financial projections I prepared and market analysis I conducted provided strong evidence in the farm’s favor, supporting the assertions in their business plan. With this grant Big Head Farm will create a facility for processing organic blueberries on-site. This will not only help this farm get its organic product to market more efficiently, but will enable other berry producers to ‘go-organic’ because there is no other open-source organic blueberry processor in the state. This is good for farmers and good for consumers — farmers will be able to demand a higher price for their wholesale berries and consumers will have more access to locally grown berries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[44,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=755"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":758,"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/755\/revisions\/758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/aaronrome.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}