Direct Farm Marketing Conference 2009

FMAM received funding from the Manitoba Food Charter and Heifer International to use as bursaries for our member vendors and coordinators to attend the Direct Farm Marketing Conference (DFMC) on February 27 & 28^th, 2009 in Brandon. As part of the “Passing on the Gift” process, bursary recipients are asked to “write” about their day(s) at the conference. In particular, they are asked to touch on:

• what this sponsorship meant to them,
• what they learned at the Conference, and  
• how they plan to put the new ideas learned to use next season at their farmers' market. 

The Farmers’ Market stream at the DFMC for 2009 is:

• Economic Impact of Farmers’ Markets in Manitoba (Blair Hamilton)
• Revising the Temporary Food Market Guidelines (Tamela Freisen)

If you are from a FMAM member market you qualify for a 75% rebate on you registration fees!

For Rebate please save your receipt (found in your name tag) and send it along with a few words expressing your experience to:

FMAM-DFMC Rebate

618 Manchester Ave.

Selkirk, MB R1A 2B7

҉҉   FMAM would like to thank the MB Food Charter and Heifer Int'l for their generosity in making this project possible!   ҉

Here are excerpts from last year’s bursary recipients:

What this sponsorship meant to me…

Thank you for the opportunity to submit a summary of the DFMC sessions that the FMAM sponsorship enabled me to attend. 

Thank you to FMAM for having the foresight in understanding that conference fees can be an expensive undertaking for a small farm operator.  Farm conferences are very important, they stimulate ideas, provide an excellent education opportunity and help to ensure improvement in our farming operation.  We appreciate your support of the small farm and the ever growing important Farmers’ Market Movement.  “Let them eat fresh produce!”

What I learned at the Conference…

Vendors at Farmers’ Markets should offer more free samples of our products.  Giving out free samples draws people in and I think we would all like to see more customers come to our Farmers' Markets.

The three takeaways for me were that I need to update my canning methods to offer a better product to my customers, the second was creating an interesting method to illicit customer feedback rather than the typical survey, and thirdly was to focus on creating a customer database.

The Safe Food Handling workshop confirmed that we are doing some things right.  I was also able to get some posters on the importance of hand washing and will be placing those in areas that are visible to our summer staff.