West Virginia Food And Farm Coalition

Programs: Farmers market promotion program durning the second year of farmers market promotional program funding wvffc organized an event to bring together stakeholders including market managers, west virginia department of agriculture, west virgnia farners market association and our media consultants,verglas media, to create a marketing strategy for the project. A visually dynamic farmers market promotional campaign was produced as a result of the meetings. Farmfreshwv. Com, billboards, commercials, flags, bags, flyers, rack cards and postcards. The project also embraces social media marketing. The campaign was set to roll out in the 2018 market season. The wvffc facilitated three foodshed gathering events to gain feedback on the campaign and provide training to farmers and markets financing, insurance, marketing, production and product pricing were topics of training.

foodshed development wvffc completed the first foodshed pilot in 2017, which included an aggregated csa. The coalition developed an assessment addressing who the producers are in each county, available markets, restaurants, retail stores, infrastructure, transportation, technical assistance, training, and community development. A directory was produced in our annual magazine that includes food farm businesses across the state grouped by region as a resource for not only farmers, but also markets, restaurateurs, and consumers. The coalition collarborated with the try this wv staff to provide mini-grants to local comunities to create more food access opportunities for low-income communities. The coalition collaborated with wvu food justice lab participating in their nourishing networks initiative a series of county-wide healthy food planning workshops. These workshops help counties look at their food security and brainstorm different solutions to enhance their communities access to healthy foods. We particpated in these workshops to better inform future foodshed development work

beginning farmer the wvffc has continued to organize the wv incubator farm network wvifn, which includes monthly meetings and quarterly training with beginning farmer-training programs in wv. The wvifn hosted a training with rogue farms corps, in october 2017, focused on program structure and curriculum. The training was followed by a strategy session to develop the most effective and impactful training for beginning farmers that measures the skill level of trainees and translates across farms. The network developed marketing marterials that were distributed to each training program, local career at wvffc events, and through social media. The coalition developed a partnership with the wv land trust to create more land access opportunities for beginning farmers in the state and developed a plan to create a land access strategy in wv. The coalition developed craft collaborative regional alliance for farmer training