Building Trust with Farmers
Spending time with farmers helps build trust reciprocal relationships that are key to successful farmer-researcher collaboration. “We (farmers) are most interested to participate in projects when it is a question that we are interested in,” said Meg, recalling the positive experience she had collaborating with Dr. Heins following the listening session.
Dr. Mary Hendrickson agreed that being in community with farmers is key to successful research. From her perspective, a lot of the early research work in the 1990’s around grazing dairy and grazing herds in Missouri can be traced back to two researchers who attended “grazing clusters”, monthly peer-to-peer meetups of farmers who met at each other’s farms. Attending the farmers’ conversations allowed the researchers to find researchable questions and resulted in what Dr. Hendrickson called “extremely successful collaborating between grazing, forage researchers (and) beef producers.”
“Every good research idea I’ve ever had has come from being in community and working with farmers…so it [good research] is not my idea really. It really behooves researchers to be out with farmers.” -Dr. Mary Hendrickson
Even if researchers do not have a lot of opportunities to listen directly to farmers, Meg pointed out that they can get a sense of what research farmers are interested in by searching the SARE database, OFRF’s grant database, or state-level programs for on-farm research in their area. “I would be thrilled if someone called me and said, ‘I read about your paper and want to collaborate,’” Meg explained.
Farmer Involvement in Organic Research
While networking can ensure farmers can help generate ideas for new research, involving farmers in research projects can be a whole other challenge.
Even after a good research idea has been identified, researchers may have to wait months for funders’ Request for Applications (RFA’s) to be released before they know the specifics for proposals and timelines. These can have very regimented procedures that researchers have to stick to throughout the project period (several years). And it can take months to write a proposal and then several more months before researchers find out if they got the funding.
To ensure farmer involvement in a given project, knowing several farmers within the industry can help. “Sometimes you end up doing on-farm research with a different farmer than the one that helped generate the idea,” Dr. Clark explained.
For collaboration to work, it is important for researchers to understand that farmers have different priorities. “The farm will always come first,” explained Mary, and Liz agreed. Clear agreements can lead to better outcomes. Meg suggested that more in-person involvement on the farm throughout the project period may help. “Researchers cannot expect farmers to be technicians,” she said. More in-person involvement from the research team, especially at data collection, can help uphold the integrity of the research.
Even with the best of planning, “Sometimes it just doesn’t work out,” Dr. Clark cautions. She recounted one grazing experiment where the cows kept getting out despite the farmer’s best efforts, and that the research on that farm was ruined for that year. “Don’t feel bad,” Clark advises, “keep trying.”
Compensation for Farmers
While everyone on the panel agreed that farmers’ time is valuable and should be compensated for, amounts are not standardized and can vary greatly from project to project depending on the level of involvement and on what was originally written into a grant. Farmer involvement can even be a requirement in some RFA’s but specifics on those amounts are rarely, if ever, provided.
Even if a research project is only utilizing land on a working farm, and not requiring a farmer to do any work or data collection, a stipend is expected. But panelists reported offering very different amounts ranging from a few hundred dollars to $2,000. While the researchers on the panel compared the different amounts they’d offered to farmers for their projects, one attendee of the session chimed in the chat to remind everyone that if farmers had been involved at the beginning of those projects, they could have helped set those payment amounts.
For any use of a farmer’s time, it was recommended that they be treated as professional consultants or specialized contractors, and given a comparable rate.
