Farmers as educators

Just back from the FBE conference, I want to share some of my own reflections on the excellent Business Planning workshop that Jed Beach gave, and ask for feedback...

I think I understood Jed to be saying that most successful FBE farms fall out more or less into two types...

“Integrated” - Farmers are also educators, farms are small (1-10 acres), educational mission is primary-farm profitability is sacrificed for the educational mission; small staff in a close horizontal network

“Non-integrated”: Farm is production/profit oriented, education is secondary; education may happen in a separate educational garden; farmers are not the educators; farms can be large; staff can be large and segmented into departments.

I think Groundswell (and maybe Hawthorne Valley Farm?) may not fit so well into this dichotomy - in that we are basing our programs on working farms and also rely on "real" farmers as our primary educators. Maybe the difference is that our programs are more geared towards farmer training and not younger children???? For us the farm needs to remain a production- and profit-oriented business. Yet the farmer also needs to be the primary educator because a very high level of knowledge and experience is needed. So it’s critical that the process of training students and future farmers also contribute to the profitability of the farm. The farm has to gain enough benefit from the services provided by its trainees to balance the cost in time spent by the farmer as educator. In Groundswell we're trying to strike a workable cost/benefit ratio by finding ways to pay farmer-educators for the time they spend as educators, and by ensuring that all educational programs include work sessions where students contribute meaningfully to the needs of the farm business. But as our programs grow, we anticipate that we'll reach the limit of our farmers' availability as educators and will need to engage a "farmer-teacher" whose job is education, not farming.

Any thoughts on strategies for doing "advanced FBE" on farms where the educational mission cannot be allowed to detract from the farm's economic viability? Thanks for your insights...