Meat to Market is a partnership between the Intertribal Agriculture Council and the Southwest Grassfed Livestock Alliance. Meat to Market is an extensive online business training for livestock producers all across Indian Country, encouraging them to embrace the possibility of direct marketing their meat and providing skills to do so.
Meat to Market will offer over 30 distinct courses as both individual trainings and modules of learning. Courses launched at the 2022 IAC Annual Conference and will continue as a webinar series through early 2024. Webinars are recorded live and uploaded to the IAC Mighty Networks e-learning platform as a free resource.
UPCOMING COURSES
Financing Readiness 1: Borrowing money from traditional lenders + the FSA
June 19 | 12 PM (MT)
This course is designed to build off of our “Understanding Debt + Equity” and help you take the next step towards debt readiness. We talk to the experts at the Center for Farm Financial Management, and the Administrator of the FSA himself to help you chart a course through perceived complications, hurdles, and surprising opportunities from these traditional outfits. We will visit with producers who have gone through the debt process themselves and learn from their experiences.
Educators
Pauline Van Nurden, Center for Farm Financial Mgmt, University of Minnesota
Kevin Klair, Center for Farm Financial Mgmt, University of Minnesota
Zach Ducheneaux, Administrator of the FSA
Guest Producer
Leilani Whittle, Whittle Farms
FINANCING READINESS 2: Alternative Solutions for Financing your Business: CDFIs, Patient Capital & Beyond
JULY 11 | 12 PM (MT)
COURSE DESIGN
The project’s design is grounded in a thorough needs assessment conducted in 2020-2021 in which we surveyed producers across the country to better understand challenges, missing capacity and skills, in order to discover positive pathways for deeper learning.
The curriculum will be centered around a series of webinars and accompanying tools & templates taught by a diverse set of educators, guest speakers, and producers from across all nations.
Our goal is to invite both existing and emerging producers to lean into the beauty and potential of their entrepreneurial endeavors despite what scale they produce at. Our style will emphasize storytelling, case studies, and anecdotal information from producers themselves alongside materials and methodologies from trusted experts across multiple sectors of livestock business operations.