Michigan CSA Network - Getting Your Ducks in a Row: Preparing for a Successful Grant Proposal
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EmailFebruary 26, 2025
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Join the Michigan CSA Network for a virtual workshop to prepare farmers for writing grant proposals that stand out. Learn what funders are looking for in successful applications and how to pitch your ideas effectively. Participants will also learn about a new online grant writing course available from MSU Extension.
The Michigan CSA Network exists as a platform for CSA farmers and support organizations to meet, learn, collaborate and network to achieve the goals of small farm viability and increased food access and equity.
The 2025 MI Ag Ideas to Grow With conference was held virtually, February 24 - March 7, 2024. This two-week program encompassed many aspects of the agricultural industry and offered a full array of educational sessions for farmers and homeowners interested in food production and other agricultural endeavors. More information can be found at: https://www.canr.msu.edu/miagideas/.
Registration for this specific session is part of the larger overall MI Ag Ideas to Grow With program—by signing up for the overall program, you'll gain access to attend this session along with all other program offerings.
Video Transcript
Hi, welcome, everyone. I wanted to also thank our platinum sponsor for the MI Ag Ideas to Grow With Conference, AgriStrategies, LLC. Steve is here with us in the room today also, so a special thank you to Steve for your support of this conference and allowing everyone to be able to participate for free. It's really a great resource for folks in our state. So thank you for your support. Welcome everyone. This is our session all about farmers getting skills to write grants, which is something that's super useful in funding your farm business. One of the tools that we have to fund farm businesses and there's lots of different programs available out there. This session isn't going to quite focus as much on the specific programs, but really the skills writing a successful proposal. My name is Mariel Borgman. I'm a community food systems educator with MSU Extension. And I have several of my awesome colleagues here today joining me for the presentation. I'll let them introduce themselves. This is also being put on in partnership with our Michigan CSA network. So we'll have some information about what the Michigan CSA network is if you're not familiar with that. Just a couple of quick housekeeping things. You can go to the next slide, Kelly. I forgot to mention one other resource that we wanted to make folks aware of. I'll put the link in the chat for this one as well. But we do have lots of farm stress resources available at MSU extension. We know that it can be a stressful time for farmers now and always, so please take advantage of those farm stress resources. With that, I would love to turn it over to my friends here, Kelly McClelland, Wendy Wieland, and Erica Tebbins who are going to be presenting today. Wonderful. Thanks, Mariel and welcome everyone. It's good to see you on this Wednesday afternoon. My name is Kelly McClelland. I'm a community food systems educator with MSU Extension based in the Flint area. Maybe, Wendy and Erica, if you want to introduce yourselves really quickly before we get started. Sure. I'll jump in. I'm also part of the Kelly/Mariel team with MSU Extensions Comm Food Systems Group. I have additional role that I play for the university and that is I'm an MSU Product center innovation counselor, so business counselor. And I'm Erica Tebbins I'm Director of Impact at Tastes Local Difference, and I overlap with both of these groups with MSU Extension as part of the Michigan CSA network. We collaborate together on that really great project, and TLD has also done amazing work in partnership with folks that go through MSU's incredible product center. A lot of times they come to us after and we help them with marketing services. Fantastic. Throughout the next hour and a half, you're going to hear from myself and Wendy and Erica on getting your ducks in a row, preparing for a successful grant proposal. Enjoy this wonderful photo of rubber ducks in a farm field. But we're really going to talk through, as Mariel mentioned before, not so much specific grant opportunities, but more of the skills and the things that you can be thinking about right now to be a successful grant writer and grant seeker as a farmer or food business owner. But I'm going to be leading us through the slides today and Wendy is going to jump in with some of her fantastic experience and knowledge from supporting farmers and food business owners across Michigan. And then towards the end, we will hear some specific ways that tastes a little difference, has worked with farmers seeking grants and can work with you as well from Erica. So before we jump into the specifics of the presentation today, we want to give you a little bit of background information about the Michigan CSA network. Hopefully, we have a good representation of our CSA network members on the call today. You see on the screen our mission and vision, really to support farmers using that community supported agriculture model in their farm business. Really, we're focusing on engaging both consumers and farmers and making sure that CSA works for them. The Michigan CSA Network is led by a group of partner organizations, MSU Extension, Taste Local Difference, who you're hearing directly from today, and then our friends at the Michigan Farmers Market Association and MIFFS, Michigan Food and Farming Systems. I think we have some of our partner members in the Zoom room today, so feel free to say hi in the chat if you are part of our leadership team. I should mention too, we also have a farmer advisory group who help us lead what we do throughout the year. Finally, we have a website and a social media presence. If you are a farmer who's thinking about maybe jumping into the CSA model of business for your farm or you just want to learn more about what that means. Our website, michigancsanetwork.org is a place where you can learn a ton about that. Mariel just put the link in the chat. I'm also going to share a link directly to where you can join our Listserv, our email list to get the latest and greatest updates from the CSA network. We're going to go through really the basics and really focus on the different components of a grant application or grant proposal, as well as where you can look for potential funding. As we mentioned before, we're not going to speak really to any specific grant and grant guidelines and the grants that are available change all the time. But this information we're sharing will help you strengthen your farm business, but also your ability to apply for grants in the near future. We'll also spend some time talking about some very specific things you can do right now. Um, related to seeking grants, and then we'll end with some questions and discussions. Most of the information we're going to dive into today is adapted from this grant writing for Food and Farm Businesses online course that one of our former colleagues on our community food systems team, Katje Armentrout, really developed in her time with MSU, and then Wendy and I have further taken that course and launched it. It's a free online, self paced course that you can go through at your own pace. You click through, you learn about the different parts of seeking a grant and applying for a grant, and then you actually put those skills into practice and submit drafts of a grant application that you can then change and work from in the future. I just put the link in the chat to this D2L course and definitely encourage all of you after this session to check that out. All right. Here's my wonderful beautiful art piece keeping with the duck theme where we're starting from. You may have all of these things. You have your crop plan, you have your farm budget, you have maybe a needs assessment, or maybe it's just a wish list that's written on a whiteboard in your garage or something like that. You know the pieces of your business and you know where there's some area that if you had maybe just a little bit more funding, a little bit more wiggle room, you could really meet your goals and meet the goals of the people who you're giving providing food to. Um, So with getting these things a little bit more refined, it's understanding how they connect to the grant landscape, you can be a lot more successful. It's important to know what a grant is and what a grant isn't. Grant writing is only one way of seeking funding for your farm business, and most, if not all businesses will need to invest their own money first before bringing in outside sources of funding or before outside funding sources will be interested in contributing. Um, There are other options for raising money for your farm such as crowdfunding, loans, direct fundraising, sponsorships. Again, a grant is not the way to fully fund your farm business. Also is usually not going to be startup funding for a farm business. If you're brand new and haven't been in operation very long, a funder is not necessarily going to see your grant application as one that they really want to spend their money on. Wendy, anything to add on this? Yeah, unfortunately, Kelly is correct in that startup money really for any kind of business. I've been a business counselor for other kinds of businesses as well as food and farm businesses is the hardest money to find. It is the truth. I can't think of the years that I've been doing this that I have found more than a handful really targeted startup funding pieces for farms or food businesses. But yeah, never say never. There's always an exception, but mostly Yes. Another important thing to know when thinking about approaching grants for your business is that there's also a lot of administrative costs and administrative time. Obviously, the time to write the grant is not necessarily paid time and thinking about whether or not a grant is really right for your business in this moment is also something we'll dive into in some of the next slides. But if you are an established business, you have an idea that this is where you want to go, where do you go to find a funder? Who are the people who are giving grants, especially for farmers or food businesses? This resource on the slide here is a really fantastic resource from our friends at the MSU Center for Regional Food Systems, and I'm going to put the link right to it in the chat for you all because it is something grab a cup of coffee, spend an afternoon really either leafing through it if you print it out or scrolling through it online. Um and it outlines different funding sources for farms. The main granting sources are going to be foundations. These can be family foundations, private foundations, community foundations or corporate foundations, and these generally aligned with their goals aligned with a specific set of projects that they fund and many of them fund food and farm business projects. Additionally, there are government grants. These happen all at the federal, state, even local, county, city, township level. We know that there's been a lot of news and discussion about funding at the federal level right now. There are also opportunities at the state level, local levels, things like that. Additionally, some corporations give directly. Some may give through a foundation associated with their company, but some might give directly. Especially I'm thinking of more local giving or really aligned, even if they can give in kind products or things like that. Then non profits, we included on here as well. Nonprofits are often the recipients of grants themselves, but sometimes they're able to re grant funds or are tasked with regnting funds by larger funders. All right. Once you have spent your afternoon with the finding funders resource and you've found a funder who you're really interested, do you think that their grant opportunity aligns with the needs in the possibilities of you and your farm business, you are going to find something that may be called a request for proposals, a grant application, a call for proposals, a request for applications, grant guidelines, notice of funding available, notice of solicitation of applications. We put all these on here to say, this is the document that's going to communicate what the funder is offering, the criteria for receiving that funding, and the process or requirements for Sometimes it'll include a template for your application. Sometimes it'll just say, you must answer these seven questions and provide all of this information, and you'll have to do that in your own format. Pictured here is just an example of a recent Michigan Department of Ag and Rural Development grant program, just the first of many pages. They're often very long, very dense, have sometimes some technical language and really this is where you can decide between, is my farm business even eligible to receive these funds. Wendy, anything else to add on this? Looking ahead, maybe to the next slide, if you want to. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So you think that the hardest part is writing the grant. No one of them is understanding all of these eligibility aspects of the grant, which you have to come to that go no go decision before you even start the application process. So really, and some applications can be very straightforward, very user friendly. More often, it's somewhere in the middle that, yeah, there's some jargon and maybe some even terms that you're not familiar with or need to have defined, which in a federal grant, there will be definitions of exactly what they mean when they say this. So the first job as a potential grant writer is to know if this is, will this fund what I want to do and what are the other eligibility requirements? And I know I you know, just in my experience, I'd say a couple two thirds of the time when someone's interested and wants to meet with me about a particular grant, it turns out that what they specifically need for their farm and CSA at this time isn't an allowable expense or there's some other criteria that they can't meet. So that's really the first part. And even someone like myself who works with grants all the time, Sometimes the answer is somewhat ambiguous as to, will work for this? We can talk about that later, but that's when whoever is regulating this program, whether it be a private funder or state or federal funder, working with them, asking questions, getting in communication with them, can be really helpful. Absolutely. Yeah. We always recommend connecting with the funder, whoever they are, in whatever avenues they offer for that. Wendy did a great job going through a lot of these things. Some things I want to highlight is this bullet right here, is there a portion of the total budget that I must contribute. In some grants, there's a match requirement, which is basically a percentage of the total project cost that you need to fund either yourself or with other funds that you can demonstrate that are already committed or can be committed to the project. Additionally, a lot of grants are given on a reimbursement basis, and so you may need to analyze whether or not you could pay for this project or this improvement upfront and then be reimbursed a period of time later by the funder. And some of you unfortunately may be having that experience right now with some of the NRCS grants for equip projects that were reimbursable type programs, and farmers across the country had outlaid those buying those supplies, whatever. And then there was there was not the ability or time, at least, to get reimbursed. So that was a little frightening and very, very unusual. Never seen it happen before. Yes. We will move on to the next. Once you've, again, found a grant opportunity within a funder who's aligned with the project you want to do, you've gone through all of those no go questions. Does this work for me? Am I an eligible applicant? You decide you're going to start writing the grant proposal. With all of that information in mind, these are the common elements of a grant proposal and we're really going to dig into what these are. This is what a lot of the content of that online course I shared about earlier gets into. If you want more after this discussion, definitely encourage you to check out that online course. Just like a CSA share, a grant application is not complete without all these different components and everything. Thanks for listening to that cheesy joke. The first part of a grant proposal is going to be an introduction to your farm business. This may be a separate question that they want you to answer exactly in one question. This may be something that's built into a longer narrative that you write about the proposal in general. Some things you want to highlight are here on the screen. The really big thing you want to focus on is what makes your business, your farm ok. When I'm thinking in the context of CSA farms and community supported agriculture programs, I think that that really can make your farm unique and align with the priorities and the principles of the funder who you're hoping to work with. Some of this you may already have drafted as maybe a mission statement or a vision statement for your farm. If not, you may just want to come up with some concise paragraph about who you are, what you do, and what makes you unique. Next, you want to demonstrate the specific need or specific problem that this grant funded project would meet. Sometimes that is directly from what the funder will fund. Sometimes they give a little bit broader parameters and you can say specifically within a theme of food access, maybe I want to meet this goal on my farm of um, setting up an online presence in storefront for my CSA Farm or something like that. This is really explaining why you need grant funding. If you can support it with any data, whether that's data that you've collected, data of your region or customer base as a whole, any customer feedback, statistics, things like that. Really, again, this is your place to align your goals and the goals of the specific project you're hoping to fund with the goals of that funder who is offering to fund some projects. All right. You're giving the why and then you're going to get to what you will accomplish, the specific goals, objectives, and expected outcomes. On the screen here are some examples of some very specific goals, maybe not wouldn't specifically be the goals of CSA farms, but you can see that they're very specific. They focus either on production capacity or profit expansion. Whatever is outlined as a priority for the funder, you want to make sure you're demonstrating as something you will accomplish by spending their money on your farm. And I'll just jump in, Kelly. I've seen in more than one case that those goals and the metrics associated with them will in fact turn out to be part of the evaluation. If you are successfully funded, the grantor is going to look back. You said you would create 3.5 jobs. How did you perform? So there's something to think real carefully about. I'm not saying every grant does use that, but it can happen. That's a really good point, Wendy, that having ambitious goals is great, but if it's too ambitious, if it's not realistic for you and your farm, that may not lead to the greatest relationship moving forward with your funder. I think that's so true. And if I could kind of make a generalization, I think, you know, we really want to get this money, and so we are overly optimistic sometimes or the list of things that you're going to accomplish is lengthy and a lot of grantors can see through that and realize that probably that is ambitious and would rather see some really tight but a fewer number of goals than being real broad. That's a commonly, a common mistake, I think, is being too all encompassing. Absolutely. It's this balance of what's reasonable and what you can actually accomplish. All of the pieces that we've talked about thus far, the pieces of the grant proposal, again, like I said, they may be specific bullet by bullet questions that the funder wants you to answer, but it may also be in one larger project description. There may be some place where you need to incorporate all of these things together or they may be answered as specific questions. But really, you also will need to communicate how you accomplish this goal. And one thing to highlight here is everyone's favorite planning tool of smart goals. Just a reminder that helping get to what we just discussed, making sure that what you say you're going to do is ambitious enough but not too ambitious, you can really think of them through the lens of smart goals. So again, these are goals that are specific measurable, attainable, or achievable, relevant, and time bound. These goals that we showed on the previous slide definitely fit into that smart goal category. If you really start with the smart goals and then build your narrative around that, you'll have a really strong communication of what you are doing related to the grant. Some proposals will have you include a very specific timeline. So again, you'll mention it in the narrative, but you need to be clear about when the key actions will take place. Something that will be communicated in that request for proposals or information about the grant is, what is the allowable time frame? How much time do you have to spend the funds that the funder is giving you? Is it 12 months, 18 months, 24 months? Within that allowable time frame, you need to demonstrate to the funder that you have a plan for the activities that are going to take place and then in turn the money that's going to fund those different activities. This may be in a narrative format, it may be a table. They may even offer a template for you. A project management tool I love is a Gantt chart. Really it's just a visualization of all of the different tasks that need to happen and when they will happen. Sometimes it goes a step further by adding who will do each task. This is just an example of one. There's tons of templates and tools you can dig into online for creating timelines and Gantt charts and things like that. But again, keep in mind the timeline that the funder has communicated to you and make sure that your proposal reflects that timeline. All right. So probably one of the biggest elements of your grant proposal is going to be your budget. This is where you are showing the funder how you're going to spend their money. You've said what your goals are. Now you're going to demonstrate how you spending their money to either purchase things or pay for time for people or pay a contractor to do certain services. This is where you show specifically where that money is going to go. As with all of this, follow the grant guidelines. If they specifically say you cannot purchase equipment with this grant, do not put equipment as a line item in your budget. A lot of times a buildings or building costs are not allowable or have very specific regulations and restrictions around them, so that's something to be really mindful of. Again, your budget should line up very clearly with the project description. Someone should be able to read your narrative of what you said you need to do and what you're going to do, and then look at your budget and see very clearly how all of the items purchased align with that goal. If you are applying for a grant for, like, is pictured on the screen, time and marketing services to increase your marketing ability for your CSA farm, but your budget includes a refrigerator, that would raise a red flag in a grant reviewer's mind of, what does this refrigerator have to do with this project, even though your farm probably desperately needs a refrigerator, does it align specifically with that grant project? Wendy, what else do you want to share about budgets? Yeah, one little trick that I think has helped some folks that I've worked with in the past is hand your budget in whatever format, especially in this format over to a friend, a fellow farmer that you feel like sharing this information with and see if it makes sense because what happens inevitably in grant writing, you're going down the rabbit hole and a big grant that you spend a lot of time on. There's no way to have fresh eyes anymore. It's a little tip to set at least some part and usually it's the math and the budget part. In front of someone whose eyes are fresh and just say, okay, so you're going to spend this on this, the cost is you have to kick in 30% and that math doesn't come out here right. If someone can help avoid some of those mistakes, it's probably a good idea. Yeah. One or two things that I thought of with what you just said is definitely have someone go through behind you with a calculator. Even if you're making your budget in Excel and you're relying on the addition formulas and everything, have someone double, triple check to make sure that all the numbers line up. Then also just something to note. This is a very, very simple representation of a budget. If you were required to give a grant match, that would probably also be recorded on the budget that you have to turn in. That math and especially when it gets into 30%, 20%, really, really combing through and fully understanding what that match requirement is is really important. The last thing I'll highlight on budget, and this is what Erica is going to talk a lot about once we hand it over to her leader is the importance of getting quotes for contracted services. Taste the local difference, local food marketing company. The contracted marketing service budgets, this isn't just a random number that was pulled out of thin air. This is the result of an email or a consultation that says, Hey, I'm thinking about this sort of service. How much would that cost? Erica is going to go through more in depth the process specifically with TLD for doing that. This might be a good place in terms of what you just said, Kelly, to add. One of the very first to dos on your list, once you've decided you're going to go for this grant, go through the requirements and list off things that involve other people that are going to take time. Other people and or other sources of information and getting quotes is exactly one of those. If you start writing a narrative and some of the other things that you're bubbling over excited about this project that you want to do, and then get within a week of it being due and you don't have your letters of support, you don't have those quotes, always start first, at least with a list of these things, it's going to take some time to generate and get going on those as soon as possible. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, in addition to creating a timeline for the proposed grant project, creating a timeline for you for the grant application or proposal creation makes a lot of sense. So Wendy mentioned letters of support and some notes on letters of support is sometimes they are required, sometimes they are optional, sometimes a grantor or a funder doesn't want any letters of support. So again, really understanding what that funder wants is important. But if they do offer the option or require letters of support, this is really a place where you can share some outside verification of the situation, of your ability to be the one to solve that problem or meet that need, whether that's with your farm business, with this specific project, Um, sometimes it's with from someone else in your industry, a business advisor, maybe a product center innovation counselor or MSU extension educator, some subject matter expert who can really vouch for the legitimacy of what you're saying and you and your business. If you're doing anything in partnership, so if you're applying for funds where part of it's going to go to you, part of it's going to go to another farmer, you definitely want a letter of support, you definitely want that agreement to be documented. One of the absolute no's in my mind when grant writing is writing in a partner and naming them in a grant without telling them that you've named them in a grant. That's step one. Step two is get a really enthusiastic letter of support and make sure you're both on the same page with that. Again, double check the grant requirements. Some grants have specifically said, we don't want letters of support. Some have said you have to have at least three. Again, knowing what your grantor is requiring. In relation to what Wendy said just a minute ago, make sure your letter writers have enough time to complete these letters. Make sure they also have enough information. So when you reach out to someone to potentially write a letter of support for you, you should also include a summary of the proposal, like your draft or your high level bullet points of what the project is. You can even provide a draft letter for them and say, Hey, here's what I'm thinking, edit this as you will and then send it back. I will say as someone who receives quite a lot of requests for letters of support, the more time you can give your letter writers, the better because depending on who they are, there may be approval processes they have to go through or things that take time on their end. All right. We just did the lightning round of grant proposal components. Again, there's a ton more info to dive into and I encourage you all to go into the DTL course that was linked earlier. But once you have all of those components compiled, you're going to want to build in some time for editing, reviewing, and then making sure you get that grant submitted before the deadline. So again, do that final comb through, make sure you've answered all the questions. You have all of the materials that they're asking for. Also make sure you're following guidelines for page limits, word counts, character counts, formatting. Some grants will be as specific as telling you what font you need to use if preparing it electronically. And then as Wendy mentioned earlier, have multiple people read and review your application. These can be friends, family members. It may make sense to have people who are close to your farm business as well as people who are not as familiar with it, read it to make sure it makes sense to a wide variety of people. And maybe an MSU Product Center counselor is someone who you want to connect with to review an application as well. One thing we added on here, you can use AI, artificial intelligence to help proofread your proposal. I wouldn't necessarily rely on it to create your proposal, but you can put things in and say, Hey, is this clear? Does this answer these questions? Or something that I've started using with AI is putting some information in and saying, what things are unclear? What questions do you still have after digesting this information? Wendy, anything to add on that? Back to letters of support. And again, there's all sorts of flavors of grants out there and the ones that do really prescribe a go as far as a font or something like that. I don't see that as much as I used to. But character limits within now both the Michigan Department of Ag and Rural Development and USDA Rural Development are using online portals and, you know, sometimes they will have a character limit in the field where you need to answer that question. So That can be tough. Writing a tight, succinct grant proposal is much harder than waxing poetic for pages and pages. And In those cases where there's a really important point that you want to make, but you're out of space, I have seen this happen and worked before in the past where if letters of support are allowed, one of the authors of that letter, especially obviously if this is their ballywig, their background and area of expertise, where they can say in their letter something very specific that you weren't able to fit into your narrative. And it gets in there, the reviewers reading it, they get the point, but you still were within the guidelines of that actual the technical aspects. And on that note, I'm not sure if we're going to hit it on a further slide, Kelly, because in those two instances of those grant funders, there is an online portal. There at least the first time we all use the portal from the state, you know, there was a learning curve to actually just getting your application in and uploaded from a technological standpoint. So yeah, don't wait till the last moments before it's due to try to upload your application. Most of these are you work and save your work as you're going on. But there's been places in the past where you had to submit electronically your whole packet of information and you couldn't get in at the last minute because everybody else was trying to get in at the last minute, so Hopefully, really good points, Wendy. We don't have specific info on submission on here, but I think that, know what that portal is. Sometimes, especially with maybe smaller funders, it might be email your proposal to this person. But most of what I've seen is a portal where you're inputting the information directly into their own system. Yes, do not wait till the last minute because the worst thing to happen is that you have spent all of this time drafting and creating your proposal to at the last minute have tech issues get in the way of you getting that information to the reviewers of the grant. Speaking of, while your grant is being reviewed, this may be what you look like, just dreaming off into, the distance about, I wonder if they're reading my grant yet. I wonder if they're impressed by my grant yet. Grant review does take time because there are real humans and oftentimes many real humans reading that grant and combing through and making a lot of times really tough decisions on who to fund and who not to fund. Definitely, during this time, watch your email closely. Make sure that whatever email that you're communicating with that funder through is able to make it into your inbox and maybe even is starred or flagged or something so that you know when communication comes from them. There may be a possibility too for some clarifying questions to come through, or a funder may ask for some further information if they have some lingering questions based on your funding proposal. You will ultimately hear whether or not your project is funded. In some instances, a partial funding offer may be communicated, and this is something that's tricky to navigate because you need to really figure out, okay, with less money, can I still meet my really ambitious goals? That's where that back and forth communication with the funder is really important. Unfortunately, with grant funding, rejection is common. It's hard. Yeah, it's tough. I think that you can ask for feedback from funders, specifically, some bullet points and they may even send them automatically, some feedback on, we're not funding you at this time and here's why. Know that you're still an awesome farm business and your goals are still so relevant and real, there's just never enough grant funding to fund every project that's submitted. Yeah, that's true, Kelly. Many times over, there's more submissions than there are funds to be awarded. But I definitely seen in more than a few cases that, yes, the grant Rejected its first time through. And then sometimes there is that opportunity to get some feedback from the grantor and the resubmitted, you know, improved grant has received funding. So it's not necessarily all for naught given, you know, that the project still makes sense for your CSA at this time. Those things can change too. But yeah, it can be resubmitted and be awarded for sure. Absolutely. One thing we don't have a slide on, but Wendy brought up earlier and I want to mention just now is if you are funded, there will be expectations generally of some reporting ongoing communication with that funder. It's not just you get the award letter and you run with it, it's you get the award letter and now you're in this agreement with the funder. Whether or not the funding is on a reimbursement basis or not, you will have to submit financial statements and record keeping records and give some account of what you have accomplished related to the goals of that project. Yeah. The reporting, we're focusing on the getting the grant, but then comes you've gotten the grant and now you're actually in case with governmental units, you are signing a contract with USDA saying, this is what I agreed to do on this day and in many cases, although that has varied in some of the recent grant proposals that came through the ARP money, the COVID relief money, that you cannot ask for reimbursement for anything that you've spent money on prior to the obligation of that grant when that contract is signed. Again, there's been a few exceptions recently, but generally speaking, grantors don't want you to start spending them, I got the award. I'm going to go and get this equipment on sale. Maybe not. You know, it's worth asking if that's available, but in many cases, you cannot start spending the money. You will not be reimbursed for, you know, the grantor's portion of that expense until you've actually done that grant obligation piece, so Yes. Yeah. The specific things are not the rules and requirements aren't over once you read through the request for proposals. And this is separate, but related, but I'll just throw it in here so I don't lose it. When you are doing your budget, In most all cases where you are required to bring some kind of money to the table, which is your match, which is often the case. You know, there's been a couple of things that have come down. There's been lots of exceptions in the past 18 months to the world that I knew of grants there's been some really unusual and wonderful opportunities that never existed before and maybe never will exist again. But when you are doing your budget, in most cases, say it's a 30% match, you don't have to line item on, okay, I'll pay 30% of this piece of equipment, you know, this bottling machine and the state will pay 70%. You're making more work for yourself from a reporting standpoint as you then become the awardee and you're having to do reports. So there can be some forethought, depending on the grant, of course, to how you can maybe minimize some of your work on the paperwork side because you're doing the work of the project and then you're also having to report back to the funder. So that's a little user friendly tip and it's minutia, but with big grants, complex things, it can be pretty important to think about that before the grant proposal ever goes in, so Absolutely. Thanks, Wendy. All right. So like I said, that was speed round of grants one oh one, what to know, the different pieces of a grant proposal. For the rest of our time together, we're really going to focus on some specific actions that you can take right now. So you see them listed on the screen here. We're going to go through each of these one by one. The first is just reiterating what I shared before. If you were like, oh my goodness, I want to dive into this information more. I want to flex my grant writing muscles, our grant writing for farm and food entrepreneurs, online course will be for you. Again, the links in the chat, there's a registration process, and then you have access to the course materials and can go through at your own pace. All right. The next thing you can do, as we talked about earlier, is get some quotes and talk with potential contractors or vendors for grant funding. I'm going to turn it over to Erica to talk about TLD's experience with that. Erica, take it away. Yeah, thank you. For anyone who doesn't know about what we do at Taste of Local Difference, so we do marketing for farms and food and beverage entrepreneurs and also anyone that would be adjacent to that. Folks who do agritourism, food trucks, restaurants, et cetera, et cetera. But that is what we specialize in. We specialize in local food marketing, and that is why people who do that as a business love working with us because they don't have to explain their business to us, they don't have to explain their ideal client, who they're selling to, any of that, we just know we get it. Um, So yes, so we have this blog post that is on our site that is now in the chat box there that talks a bit about what you've already been hearing about today. But you can always go back and you can always reference this. It has some other ideas and things that you can refer to and reference about, you know, places that you can look for funding. Obviously, as has already been touched on, some of these things, especially if they're federal, might be a little more nebulous right now, so just keep that in mind. But it's important, as was already stated, and I just really want to re emphasize that rather than just strictly looking at grants or particular types of grants that you get creative and think about other things such as micro loans and community lending. Different things of that nature. I know for myself when I used to have a small, I had a micro farm and an apiary in upstate New York before I moved to Michigan. I actually used kiva.org, which I mentioned in that blog post. I actually used it twice. It's a really interesting community based lending platform. It's a global lending platform and usually at least as of several years ago when I was using it, they are zero interest community sourced micro loans. They're really great. It means that if you're taking out a few thousand dollars to get supplies to get started, especially if you are in those earlier stages, as Wendy was mentioning, it can be hard when you are a newer farmer to qualify for certain grants, I was certainly a newer farmer and so Kiva was a great option for me and there are probably other micro lending platforms out there that could be great options as well that you might want to look into. There could be community foundation funds near you, potentially even your own Chamber of Commerce, or other ones, especially if you live in a rural area or anything, there might be specific ones to your county, your township, your city, your village, whatever it might be, check those out as well, especially different philanthropic organizations might have things for you that could be $10,000 or under that would be incredibly helpful. Then also getting creative with ideas, even just thinking about, you know, sort of doing your own creative funding. I mean, that's sort of how, you know, CSA was born out of that the concept of CSA. So yeah, a lot of different ways to get creative with funding there. And then obviously, of course, grants as we're talking about. But you can go to the next slide. And what is really, really essential is, as has already been mentioned, but really important, be prepared in advance. I cannot tell you how many times even in my role here as the director of impact, sometimes we will take advantage of different grants or we'll go in with somebody else in a grant, whatever. We are writing RFPs probably not as often as a nonprofit would, but often enough, and it is shocking how quickly we will learn about an opportunity, and then the turnaround time on that is so fast. When you're already really, really, really busy, it sneaks up on you and it can be a lot of work. What we really, really, really recommend is especially if you feel like there could be a point that you want to a You want marketing services paid for by a grant or a grant like thing where you're going to have to show somebody else and prove to them what you're going to be spending the money on. For instance, Wendy just put the Value Added Producer grant in the chat. This is great. I mentioned it in that blog post actually. Let's say if it makes sense for your operation, that grant, the u getting a marketing proposal is perfect for that. Let's say you're going to take one of your crops, you're going to do value added. You are going to probably need some packaging design. You might need other marketing things that are going to be going along with that. You can come to us or whoever you want to and we can talk through what it is that you might need. We are here to advise you, so we don't expect you to come to us and say, I know exactly what marketing services I need. You just come to us, we will ask you all the questions, you tell us about your operation, your goals, et cetera, and we will put together a proposal like what is on this slide here, and we will send that over to you and it will have all of the info, and then you can just have it there and it will be ready. Now, of course, sometimes if you've had this for six months or a year, sometimes pricing might change a little bit on our end, but still it's better to have something and just be ready to go in case all of a sudden you see that the value added producer grant is open, and let's imagine you're seeing it a week before the due date. If you have all of your ducks in a row, as we're talking about today, you will be a lot better prepared and you can just pull this PDF right out from your email and be all set to submit it. You can go to the next one. And how you do that is if you go to local food marketing.com, there is a button in the upper right there that says, get in touch and usually we have a little thing in the top banner as well that talks about reaching out to the team. It'll all take you to the same thing, this marketing services basic inquiry form. You just fill that out. It's going to send an email to our team, and then we will reach out to you to schedule a time that works, and then we'll be in touch. We really, truly do not mind, there's no pressure, there's no anything. We are here to support farms and food businesses and we want you to succeed, we want to empower you with the knowledge about different things and what they cost. One of the nice benefits of talking to us and getting quotes is, let's say that depending on what you're applying for and depending on if you hear back and let's say it is, you're approved, but you're not approved for this whole amount, you're approved for this smaller amount. By talking to us, what it enables us to do is we can help you prioritize. We can say, okay, you can't do all of it with us at once, and that's fine. So let's figure out what is most essential, and then we can do that first and we can create a full project plan for you. Awesome. Thanks, Erica. Thank you for sharing about what that process looks like of getting that information and working with TLD. Wendy, I might put you on the spot really quickly. What are some other things that farmers or food business owners might want to get quotes or price estimates for? Just to give people ideas. I know my brain is blank. Well, actually, I was just going to put something in the chat that has to do with a specific, for instance, and it is the USDA Valued Producer grant. What I listed in the chat is what everyone wants to go for. There's two different types. Working capital is the type of Valu added Producer grant that I've had one person over all the years that actually wanted to do the other one. Working capital is what people are looking for. But the planning grant for the VAPG actually will help fund someone writing your business plan, someone doing a feasibility study. These are really important as your project gets more costly, larger, to be able to go in a two step process. First, get a outside party to do a really, knock up job on your on a business plan marketing plan, same thing. And so you would be coming to an agency like TLD or whomever saying, I'm going to ask for money to be able to pay you to do this marketing plan and you need to get some quotes surrounding that, or someone who's a professional business plan writer, which I'll say just a caveat, you're still going to be very involved in writing your own business plan, at least you should be because it is your plan. And then feasibility, the MSU Product Center, we can do usually a limited number per cycle of these big federal grants. Feasibility analysis, which are third party. Sometimes that obligation has been lessened, that it doesn't have to be a third party expert. But so those are the kinds of things that you might have to go outside besides supplies and all of the other working capital expenses that you would need to get somebody to quote you for their technical advising, basically. I love that you said that and it made me think. I just wanted to say too that we do it frequently where people come to us and they get their proposal and they're doing it on behalf of a grant. We are also familiar with those like the letters of support or other supplemental things and because of the niche that we're in and because of the, what has been mentioned before about these lenders, these grantors, they want to know that what they're funding will be successful. So it really helps because rather than just having like a random $5,000 for marketing versus that clear proposal is when they see it, they know that you're serious, they know it's legit. And they can also see like, oh, it's like an actual, let's say, local food marketing agency, right? And and know that what you get is going to be really effective. So it can help make a big difference when somebody is evaluating to realize that you've done your due diligence as well, you've done your planning, your prep, and you've also sought out expertise and expert service providers in the process. The other thing I would say too is that I would say a lot of times people don't Because there's so many costs and things with getting supplies and different operating costs that go into farming, and all of those are important and essential as well. I think that marketing often gets overlooked. But then what we see on the other side is people struggling to DIY it and it often doesn't happen because you're exhausted at the end of the day and who wants to try to build their website or their ecommerce at the end of the day. But then it becomes a chicken and egg situation because then you're struggling to market and sell as much as you could be and taking advantage of having somebody else take that task off your plate with funding that you're getting is really great because then we can do it all for you, we can make the website, we can build the ecommerce, or whoever it is that you partner with. Get somebody else to do that. With grant funding or funding from another source, and it will also take that whole project off of your plate, and it will be amazing, and they will hand it over to you, and then you can just use it, right, and you can just get the benefit from it. So I feel like there's so many so many added benefits to incorporating marketing into what you're funding. I know it seems like I'm biased because this is what I do now, but I've also been on the other side of it of having my own farm working for other farms and it really is it's such a crucial thing and it's so nice to not have to do it yourself. Absolutely. Something that just made me think of and I know that this is true in some grants. So grants will have, I think some have called it a turnkey or a very prescriptive project that they want to fund and sometimes the only thing they'll fund is money to pay a marketing consultant or a feasibility planning entity or something like that. Just something to be aware of as you're exploring grant opportunities. All right. We're going to go through a few last things that you can do right now before we really open it up for questions and discussion with you all. Some notes here on business planning pieces and record keeping pieces that you will probably want to have in place before you apply for a grant. So you're going to want to be incorporated in some business structure. There is a lot more information. We could do a whole webinar on what these different business structures are. I'm going to share a really fantastic resource from our partners at the MSU Center for Regional Food Systems, Great Lakes Midwest Regional Food Business Center, who are getting ready to hopefully launch those business Builder grants soon. But they have put together this really fantastic resource sheet that links you to the different places where your business should be registered in order to be an eligible applicant for these grants. As John McCarthy said in the chat, that's him. John, anything to well, I'll give you an opportunity on the next slide, so we'll run through this. But on the slide here is some of the registrations or requirements that you will need for your farm business, an EIN number, a UEI, which is a unique entity identifier that's for any of those federal or government grants. If you are incorporated as a non profit organization, you will need your 501C3 determination letter, and Additionally, if you're a nonprofit, many grantors will ask for 990 forms from the past two fiscal years. You'll need to submit a W9. Many times they'll ask for your budget for the past two years and your current budget. All of these things that you should have in your business side of things will also be things that will need to be submitted when applying for grants. We also here at MSU have tons of resources on farm business management, farm business record keeping, connect with us for more info on that. Wendy, did I see you pop your camera on? I did. I was just thinking about besides the federal requirements and I'm putting it in the chat right now in anticipation of the Michigan Department of Ag and Rural Development grant that we think is going to be coming out again another cycle in the spring, you do need to get signed up to be on that portal, and I'll put that in the chat. Fantastic. Thanks, Wendy. A good point is, as we mentioned earlier, many of these grants are submitted through online portals and you have to set up your own profile and your own access to that portal. A lot of times you need the many things listed on this slide to set up that profile and access to that. All right. The final thing that you can do and maybe this is how you'll spend the rest of your afternoon today is explore open and upcoming grant opportunities. A few here on the screen that as far as we know are open as of this moment, as was mentioned earlier, the USDA Value Added Producer grant. Um, there's a grant opportunity through Greenstone Farm Credit that seems to be pretty evergreen for a small amount of funding. And then as was mentioned earlier, really get to know your community level, local level funders, things like community soups. So that's kind of a community grant making event where you pitch your business and get the money from the group that's assembled there, your local community foundations. I know my local Chamber of Commerce just awarded some five, ten and $15,000 small Business grants, which is really exciting. Um, If you know of any other farm related grant opportunities open now, feel free to throw those in the chat for the group. Then coming soon, as I mentioned before, the Great Lakes Midwest Regional Food Business Center where our friend John is on that team now. John, any updates to share on what's going on at the RFBC? Nothing yet, but we will have some new information soon about all the different grants that we'll be offering through the Regional Food Business Center. But I can drop the overarching site for the RFBC in the chat. Then MSU also has their own site as well. My emails in the chat, and then I will have a phone I just started there a couple of days ago, so I'll have a phone number set up and ready for people to talk to me soon too. Fantastic. Thanks, John. We are so excited for any future updates on that. Then as I think Wendy has put this last one in the chat, the MDARD Value Added Grant. Any additional to share about that, Wendy? Yeah, I didn't have an opportunity to check with the grants division at Michigan Department of Ag to see, but the word on the street is that it is coming out and Just in general, I will say you can never start early enough in writing a grant application. I mean, I've even told people that with the big grants, the USDA ones, that starting nine months ahead of time. I mean, farming, there's no way that it won't always be something that will trump you needing to sit down and write that narrative or fix that budget. The longer lead time you can give yourself and it's helpful because with some of these big governmental programs, there isn't a tremendous amount that changes from year to year. So even if the cycle isn't open, you can go and look at what last cycles requirements were, and there might be some changing in the priority points of if you're this kind of a farmer, you get five points extra in the scoring criteria. But looking to the past for what the application said in the last cycle is never a bad idea. Also, on that note, Go ahead and look and sometimes this is harder to find, but on MDARD's grant page, it's very apparent. Look at who was funded for what. It is public knowledge, by the way, that if you receive this grant, your name will be associated as an awardee and a short description. It won't give any big details. But that can give you also a sense of Oh, they seem to be really funding projects along these lines. So that will be really very overtly stated that just last week, the grant that came out from Michigan Department of Ag that was targeted very specifically to food shops and farm stops and you had to be one of those two kinds of business organizations or you couldn't apply unless you were. They'll tell you in many cases, but also look at what was funded in the past. It can be really helpful. Absolutely. Yeah, I just want to reiterate that it's never too early to start pulling together the different components, even though the criteria change, the basic components of grant applications universally are pretty standard. I'll share from my experience doing grant writing as a nonprofit director You know, I would any new grant that came across my desk, I opened up my version of the last grant I applied for and adjusted from there. A lot of the pieces, a lot of times the first grant that you write for your business or for your organization is the biggest lift and not necessarily takes the longest time, but takes the most brainpower of like, Okay, how do I answer these questions in a way that really conveys what I want to say? Then moving forward as you apply for any more, you can pull different pieces of that previous grant application to use in the future. All right. Thank you, everyone. That's what we have. We've got about 15 minutes left together with you all. What questions or discussion topics can we dive into in the next few minutes? The question is, would you ever recommend hiring a grant writer? Yes, I would I would always recommend that if the stars align, you have money to pay said grant writer, you have the time. Many of the best grant writers that are real familiar with specific industries funding opportunities will book up pretty early, even before the cycle opens because people are anticipating that that grant cycle is coming open. And I've actually been able to do some the training with one of the, I think the country's leading grant writers for that value added producer grant. They are not cheap. But in that particular instance, with that individual who sadly has retired, wow. They were probably worth every penny that the farmer paid because they were incredibly knowledgeable, had deep connections with the funder, which doesn't mean you get preference. It just means they know the questions to ask and it Did a lot of work with the farmer ahead of time and then follow up after the grant was awarded. So if you figure out all the hours that that person and their team, he actually brought a team to bear to do different, you know, these are the bigger projects. It probably was, you know, really not that expensive when you looked at it. But the biggest one of the biggest challenges right now is finding a grant writer who has expertise in this in this, you know, real specific area, and all kinds of industries have their real specific area. Farming is one of the few for profit businesses that actually can apply for a grant. I mean, I can assure you that lots of our, you know, mom and pop downtown businesses throughout all of our communities throughout the state, that they're not eligible because they're a for-profit business. But agriculture is different and rightly so, you know, for a lot of reasons that we don't have to go into today. But yeah, there is funding available, although right now things are tenuous, as Erica pointed out, the funders that I work with also don't know. They don't have a crystal ball either, so But you can't get awarded a grant application unless there's a grant application in for your CSA. So, the people I'm working with on grants right now, federal grants, we're applying, and then we'll see what happens if the funding is available. I see a question from Chris. What have been the things that most trip people up? I can answer and then maybe one if you want to give any insight. I think in what I've seen, it's Again, what we spent the beginning really emphasizing understand what the grant will fund and what it won't fund. So you know, making sure that you don't automatically put your application that you spent hours and hours of work in into the no pile by being a for profit business applying for a grant only meant for non profits or, you know, putting expenses in your budget that they've specifically said they won't allow, or as nitpicky as it is, going over the word limit on, you know, specific sections of a grant that you're preparing and, you know, yourself. I think just really, really making sure that you're checking, double and triple checking, that you meet the grant requirements, that you're eligible for the grant, and that you're following and providing all of the information that they're asking for. Yeah, of what Kelly said, definitely. Aside from the technical things, which these grants are so competitive that things that just are technically ineligible, like I had a farmer that I worked with, she prepared an amazing grant application, I thought. And this was back in the old days when you actually, snail mailed in an application to the office, and when the program director got it and opened up the packet, she had forgotten to sign the grant. And that made it ineligible after all that work and it was just painful for it was painful for the program director too because, you know, they had gotten to know each other through that farmer calling and asking questions. And yeah, I guess I will include that in the answer here. Don't be afraid of these, you know, civil servants, government officials that are administering these grant programs, running these grant programs. They're there to answer questions. I know they're incredibly stretched and they are the ultimate authority. I can tell you how I believe this thing that you have a question about what I believe the answer to be, but I never will say it's the definitive answer because I'm not the program regulator and things sometimes change subtly from year to year. Something that might have been the way it was last cycle perhaps isn't this way. Don't be afraid of emailing them. They offer webinars. We've helped with some of the big value added grants going around doing webinars. There's a recording up from this last year's session, by the way, that's due April 17, if you're thinking about that. And certainly MDARD does live webinars, I think before they release all of their cycles as to, you could ask questions live. They're there to help. So don't wait until the last week with a question that you maybe thought of weeks before. They're really great resources to use them. Okay, really awesome question from Chris. What is the coolest thing people got funding for? Oh, wow. Hmm. That's a great question. That is a really good question. Well, I don't know how cool it is because it's still in process, but the most unusual funding that I ever saw. I mean, there was a lot of things during COVID that were amazing, especially on a local level, where community partners just helped with food insecurity and all sorts of great projects. So that would certainly rank up there. But the recent USDA rural infrastructure grants, RFSI grants, which were administered through MDARD. So if you're like, Wait a minute, I thought that was a Michigan Department program, administered through the Michigan Department of Agriculture, but it is federal funding, and that would actually pay for some things that USDA never pays for. Equipment, at least this part of USDA, that's an overreaching statement, but the USDA rural development typically wouldn't pay for farm equipment, processing equipment or even building construction and that opportunity, which came out last spring and no was due in June of last year. We're still waiting to hear about Michigan's awardees, but that was really neat because it never had happened before that federal funding could pay for such a wide variety of things. I see Mariel put in the chat the link to SARE projects. They have a searchable database of different SARE projects, really cool education or research projects often happening on farms across the country. Yes, SARE is a great resource that I've only worked with a few farmers that have applied and gotten a SARE grant. But if you're doing something unique and innovative, it's smaller parts of money parts of money. I don't recall Mariel how but the largest farmer rancher award would be in this day and age, it used to be 15,000, but I'm not sure. Where they're at right now, but wow, why not get some help in demonstrate. The great thing about that is because it is education. As part of your proposal, you need to be sharing this information. If it's a cool thing you're doing, you don't want anybody else to know about it, SARE is not your grant. But if it's a cool thing you're doing and it could really help a lot of other growers, SARE is something worth looking at and getting some funding to help you do it. Okay. There you go, 15 for thought for individual farmers and if you go together, it's twice that. I'll just throw in it's totally normal to be uncomfortable with grant writing and these subjects. So please do not count yourself as out. That's why we're here to help you. The only way you become comfortable is like anything else is dive in and get some help and there's help to be had. Hey, can I jump in for a second? I totally raise my hand. Joe from the Michigan Farmers Market Association. I have had the pleasure of sitting on review committees before. If you are freaking out about writing a grant, I would totally recommend trying to sit on a review committee because you will see a lot of different types of grants come in. I will tell you, I always go with whatever the heart says. When you're writing your grant, don't forget to leave a little piece of yourself in it because that really makes a difference, at least to me as a grant reviewer. Great advice, Joe, thanks for chiming in with that. I am so grateful to you, Wendy, for sharing all of your knowledge and experience with us today. Really grateful, Erica, to you, for sharing both your personal experience and information about how TLD is here for farmers in the state.
