Ag Marketing Summit

This past week 2 of our team members, Gabriel Cassone and Emily Spencer, had the opportunity to attend the National Agricultural Marketing Summit in Indianapolis. The summit is a venue for agricultural business owners, extension professionals, and market managers, to share strategies for strengthening marketing practices and provide insights into the agricultural sector. General topics for this year’s conference included Building Partnerships and Community Collaboration, Market Research, Business Development, Managing Market Risk, and Direct Markets and Community Development, under which our own Emily Spencer presented Driving Engagement with CSAs.

Emily Spencer presented Driving Engagement with CSAs alongside Sadie Willis from the FairShare Coalition. In this presentation, the pair focused on the power of nationally and regionally organized campaigns and programming to drive consumer engagement with CSAs. They detailed farmer and consumer engagement numbers with the CSA-Innovation Network's National CSA Week campaign, as well as the local and regional campaigns hosted in several states throughout the country, including the KY Proud CSA Week that takes place twice a year in Kentucky.

Another notable presentation was Wholesale Expansion for Food Businesses: Lessons Learned from an Evaluation of LFPP Projects by Dr. Jairus Rossi and Dr. Timothy Woods, although Dr. Woods was unable to attend in person. This session highlighted several Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP) projects from across the country including Three Sisters Kitchen in New Mexico, Co-op Partners Warehouse in Twin Cities Minnesota, and the Chesapeake Ag Innovation center in Virginia.

Attached here is the full agenda from the conference.