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Pei-Yee Woo is the Associate Director at Kitchen Table Advisors, a non-profit organization helping organic farmers access the tools they need to build viable businesses. She elaborates on the resources KTA offers beginning farmers and how seasoned farmers can get involved.
OPN Connect: You connect uniquely talented people to a network of farms to build healthier food systems. What drives the mission at Kitchen Table Advisors?
Kitchen Table Advisors builds the economic viability of sustainable small farms and ranches through trusted relationships and in-depth support and coaching.
Farming is hard work and many beginning farms fail in their first five years. We believe that the current food system doesn’t work for everybody. Many farmers and ranchers don’t have equitable access to the resources needed to build strong businesses. Small, independent organic producers are creating positive change in the world, and we want to invest in these change-makers.
We work closely with our clients to not only provide them with knowledge and tools to build thriving farm business, but also access to resources and networks that can support their long-term success.
OPN Connect: How do you serve organic and sustainable farmers? What services do you offer?
Kitchen Table Advisors’ core program is providing in-depth one-on-one business coaching. When our clients join the program, they commit to a three-year engagement where they partner with one of our skilled Business Advisors to support their farm’s viability. Our Advisors meet regularly with each farmer or rancher, and personalize the support to serve their long-term professional and personal goals.
Each Advisor begins by understanding what their goals are, and asks lots of questions. We help them understand why it’s important to have a budget, cash flow projections, and more. We teach them how to use tools to capture relevant data and make the most informed decisions to achieve their goals.
OPN Connect: What kind of farmers do you work with and where do you serve?
Kitchen Table Advisors is very intentional about how we build our cohorts in order to increase equitable access to our support. Eighty percent of our clients are women, people of color and/or immigrants who are actively involved in organic and sustainable farming.
Currently, our geographic focus is Northern California. We serve clients who are farming in these counties: Alameda, Madera, Marin, Monterey, San Benito, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sonoma, Stanislaus, and Yolo.
OPN Connect: Kitchen Table Advisors is five years old this year. What are some of your milestones and impacts you have achieved?
As we head into our fifth year, one of the most exciting milestones is that we just welcomed our 50th client business to the program.
We are preparing to graduate the next cohort of alumni clients and onboard our largest cohort yet in 2018, which means that by the end of this year we will have 50 active farm and ranch businesses in our program, as well as 25 alumni. One of the statistics we grappled with early on was that one in four new farms fail in their first five years. So the fact that 80 percent of our alumni are still actively running their business feels like we are making some headway in changing that statistic.
And as I mentioned before, Kitchen Table Advisors is very intentional about our vision for an equitable food system, and the types of clients we want to support in order to help advance inclusivity in the industry. So we are really proud to serve a diversity of clients-- diverse in their backgrounds, experience, farming techniques and in what they produce-- and are constantly thinking about ways we can continue to grow in this area.
OPN Connect: How can seasoned organic farmers get involved with your programs?
We would love to partner with seasoned organic farmers! Many of our clients are “advanced beginners”-- often in their third to tenth year of operations, and we know they can glean so much wisdom from organic farmers who have been running their operations for decades. Among the ways we’ve partnered are farm visits where our clients can meet with a seasoned farmer, walk the fields together and learn firsthand about how she or he is running the farm and the thinking and planning that has gone into their decisions - both in the field, and in the office.
