Project Overview
“Dairy
Grazing Apprenticeship: A National Program for Training New Dairy Farmers” was
a renewal Standard Grant building on work previously supported by USDA-NIFA’s
Beginning Farmers and Rancher Development Program through a 2010 Development
Grant “GrassWorks Apprenticeship Program: A Pilot Project for Training
Beginning Farmers” and a 2011 Standard Grant “GrassWorks Apprenticeship
Program: Career Paths for Beginning Farmers.” Accomplishments of this project
include establishment of Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship (DGA) as a national
program under the United States Department of Labor-Office of
Apprenticeship, strengthening of DGA in all states by developing a systematic
approach to providing services to participants, and development of programming
in Missouri, especially, but also with partner organizations covering the
states of Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York,
Pennsylvania, and Vermont.
Our target audience consisted of current dairy farmers seeking to
transition out of farming or grow their operation by investing in the next
generation and aspiring dairy farmers who are seeking a pathway to independent
farm ownership. Among aspiring dairy farmers are young people, students, women,
veterans, hired hands, herdsmen, farm managers, and farm workers. Barriers for
aspiring dairy farmers include a lack of a) skills and experience in
sustainable methods; b) opportunity to farm full-time, as dairy production
requires, while learning; c) training in financial management and business
planning; d) familiarity with agricultural infrastructure; and e) access to
capital, land, and cattle.
The first formal
Apprenticeship for farming in the nation, DGA directly addresses barriers to
commodity-scale dairy farming by combining paid, work-based training on private
dairy farms with related instruction and providing support for aspiring farmers
to transition into independent dairy farm ownership. Over the course of this
project, DGA provided a combine total of more than 79,000 hours of on-farm
training and 5000 hours of related instruction to over 70 Apprentices.
Number of Participants: 188
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