Extension Business Management Information for Fruit and Vegetable Farms in Eastern New York

News : Research You Can Use : Tool of the Week : Funding Opportunities : Upcoming Programs

In this issue: SBA opens disaster loan outreach centers in Orange and Ontario Counties. Stop & Shop will be closing some stores in the Northeast focusing on reducing costs and prices to consumers. Consumers currently prefer fresh produce with longer shelf-lives and cabbage is having its moment! Learn about rice and honeyberry production - two new emerging crops for the region. Food safety investments tend to pay-off, especially if you have third party audits. Use NYS Business Express to identify what you need to start or expand a new venture and upcoming programs.

SBA Opens Disaster Loan Outreach Centers in New York

SBA is opening 2 disaster loan outreach centers to assist New York businesses and residents with losses due to the severe storms and flash flooding that occurred on July 9-10, 2023. The declaration covers businesses and residents of Ontario and Orange Counties and the adjacent counties of Dutchess, Livingston, Monroe, Putnam, Rockland, Seneca, Steuben, Sullivan, Ulster, Wayne, Westchester, and Yates in New York; Passaic and Sussex in New Jersey; and Pike in Pennsylvania. The deadline for applications for physical property damage is July 15, 2024, and the deadline for EIDL is February 18, 2025.

Customer Service Representatives at SBA’s Disaster Loan Outreach Centers will assist businesses and residents complete their disaster loan application, accept documents, and provide updates on an application’s status. Walk-ins are accepted, but you can schedule an in-person appointment at an SBA Disaster Recovery Center in advance. The Centers will operate as indicated below.  

Orange County: The Village of Highland Falls Senior Center, 15 Drew Ave., Highland Falls, NY 10928. Hours: Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. (except open until at 4 p.m. on June 1). Permanently closes: Thursday, June 12 at 4 p.m.

Ontario County: Ontario County Safety Training Center, 2914 County Road 48, Canandaigua, NY 14424. Hours: Monday - Friday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.  Permanently closes: Thursday, June 13 at 4 p.m.

Interest rates are as low as 4% for businesses, 2.375% for nonprofit organizations, and 2.5% for homeowners and renters, with terms up to 30 years. Farms are not generally eligible for SBA disaster loans (because USDA also offers disaster assistance), but other types of businesses and homeowners are eligible.

Businesses and private nonprofit organizations may borrow up to $2 million to repair or replace disaster-damaged or destroyed real estate, machinery and equipment, inventory, and other business assets.  For small businesses, small agricultural cooperatives, small businesses engaged in aquaculture and most private nonprofit organizations, the SBA also offers Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDLs) to help meet working capital needs caused by the disaster. EIDL assistance is available regardless of whether the business suffered any physical property damage.

Loans up to $500,000 are available to homeowners to repair or replace damaged or destroyed real estate. Homeowners and renters are eligible for loans up to $100,000 to repair or replace damaged or destroyed personal property.  

Market News: Stop & Shop to close underperforming stores 

In an investor presentation at the end of May, Dutch-based retailer Ahold Delhaize said it plans to close an undisclosed number of its Stop & Shop U.S. store locations due to underperformance. Stop & Shop has stores in New York (100), New Jersey (57), Massachusetts (125), Connecticut (88) and Rhode Island (27).

The company has organized its strategy for revitalizing Stop & Shop around three core initiatives: improving the chain’s cost structure, optimizing its store fleet and bringing down costs for shoppers. 

Ahold Delhaize owns more than 7,000 food stores in the U.S. and Europe, including the Giant Company, Giant Food, Food Lion, and Hannaford. It did not share any plans to realign or close any of these chains' locations.  

Market Trends in Produce

According to a consumer trends article in Supermarket News “How to Position produce for a growth spurt” (May 17, 2024) waste-conscious shoppers are seeking items with longer shelf lives. They are purchasing fewer value-added selections that have shorter lifespans following preparation, including sliced apples and mushrooms; cut watermelon and pineapple; and diced onions. 

In a related article in The Packer, cabbage (a vegetable with a good shelf-life) purchases are up. 37% of consumers reported cabbage purchases in the past 12 months compared to 34% in a 2022 survey. "With almost 7 in 10 consumers saying they buy a larger variety of fresh produce today than they did 20 years ago, 24.5% named cabbage as an item they now purchase after not having done so previously, according to Fresh Trends 2024."

Two schools in June to learn about new crops 

Looking for a new crop for your farm? What about honeyberries or rice? There are two statewide schools sponsored by Cornell University for these crops at the end of June.

Rice in the Northeast Farm School will be held on June 27-28 at Boundbrook Farm in Vergennes, VT. Learn how to start a rice farm with rice varieties and technology adapted to the Northeastern U.S climate, growing conditions, and farming landscape. Learn about field preparation, duck-rice systems, drip-irrigation biomulching, crop varieties, harvesting, processing, and marketing.   

NYS Honeyberry Conference will be on Saturday, June 29th from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. in Mexico, NY. Honeyberries (also known as Haskaps) ripen from the middle of June through early July, which allows the fruit to sit comfortably between the strawberry and blueberry season. When fully mature, they can produce 6 to 10 lbs. of berries that can be eaten as a fresh fruit or made into value-added products. Recently, improved cultivars have allowed a niche industry to form, and there is much interest in establishing this fruit as a specialty crop. The conference will cover the history of the fruit, best growing practices, processing, value-added production, and marketing. Guest speakers will include growers and researchers from the US and Canada, including Dr. Bob Bors, a leading honeyberry breeder from the University of Saskatchewan. Attendees can also network and attend an optional farm tour immediately after the conference. 

Assessing the costs and returns of on-farm food safety improvements: A survey of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) training participants. 

The cost of implementation is often cited as a primary barrier to implementing food safety practices in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) on the farm. Costs include infrastructure and equipment upgrades and time and labor to implement new practices and maintain recordkeeping systems. The benefits of compliance with FSMA include maintaining and expanding existing market channel sales, accessing new markets and buyers, and strengthening of their farm brand to prospective buyers due to their food safety improvements. 

Studies using grower surveys or case studies have consistently found that smaller farms have higher average costs per acre in food safety investments relative to larger farms. Models incorporating foodborne illness outbreaks that simulate long-term market effects have also demonstrated large growers will benefit more from FSMA relative to small growers. The results of these studies have caused concern regarding the continued financial feasibility of smaller farms given the relatively larger cost burden they face in meeting increasing food safety regulatory requirements. However, potential sales benefits from improving food safety practices on farms have been ignored, as has the ratio of benefits received from food safety to their costs. 

This Cornell Dyson School study used a unique data set from GAPs training participants in New York State (NYS) that counted the additional food safety investments made by producers because of the GAPs training received as well as the costs and benefits to producers from those investments. Using this data, the authors explicitly accounted for changes in food safety costs relative to changes in food safety benefits. 

They found that food safety improvement costs averaged $312 per acre across the entire sample of farms. The average costs per acre across farm sizes supported the hypothesis that costs for food safety improvements increase with farm size, but less than proportionally. Average costs per acre drop drastically from the smallest farm category (less than or equal to 15 acres at $908 per acre) to the largest (> 500 acres at $43 per acre) farm category. 

Across all farms, food safety improvements resulted in average sales per acre benefits of $1,441, ranging from a low of $905 for the largest farm size category to a high of $1,860 for farms ranging in size from 15 to 99 acres. But there was no statistical difference in benefit based on farm size. Third party audits of the farm’s food safety plan and practices seemed to increase the positive sales effect. Of the farms reporting a positive sales effect, 70% had a third-party audit. Only 6% of the farms with no sales effect after food safety improvements had a third-party audit. 

Most importantly the food safety benefit cost ratio for all farm size categories was above 1, indicating that, on average, the benefits of food safety improvements exceeded the costs, regardless of farm size. The average across all farms was 4.61 implying that the benefits received were 4.61 times that of their annual cost. There was a big difference between the benefit cost ratio for farms with a third-party audit (13.33) and without a third-party audit (1.57). 



The results presented here should be welcomed by growers, demonstrating that food safety efforts are worth the investment and by educators as they encourage participation by all scales of producers in GAPs training. 

Source 

Schmit TM, Wall GL, Newbold EJ, Bihn EA (2020) Assessing the costs and returns of on-farm food safety improvements: A survey of Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) training participants. PLoS ONE 15(7): e0235507. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0235507 

Guide to Starting a Business in NYS: NY Business Express

One question that I get frequently is "what do I need to do to legally start my farm as a business?" While this can be a complex question, there is a pretty good resource at the state level to help guide you through a lot of the forms, licenses, and permits you need to operate a business of any type in New York. It is called NY Business Express. The website is https://www.businessexpress.ny.gov/.

Start with the Starter Guide. It will take you through a discussion about picking a name, choosing a legal structure, hiring employees, licensing and permitting, taxes and insurance. While the information is not necessarily specific to farms, it is (for the most part) the information needed to get started as a business in New York.

You will likely be referred to the Business Wizard. Here are some tips for success in using it for information for a vegetable or fruit farm. The first question will be what kind of a business do you want to start? For primary business there is no option "farm". Farm related options are:

• Adult Use Cannabis Cultivator
• Greenhouse
• Nursery (retail or wholesale)
• Tree Farm
• Christmas Tree Farm

If you say that you don't see your business type here and look under the agriculture options, you for ag production these are what you will see (there are other options for markets and dealers but let's focus on production first). If you are just starting a normal farm and you are not growing nursery plants or growing in a greenhouse and you are not growing cannabis, choose tree farm (yes, I know this is crazy since there business like "starting a video rental business" "floor covering store" and "fishing guide" are listed but "farm" is not. I actually emailed the contact person about this years ago and you can see what a difference it made).

If you follow the wizard through to the end, it does a pretty good job of linking you to the correct NYS websites and forms for the permits and information you need to get started in New York. I do recommend, if you are planning to do both farming and processing or farming and food service or any other type of business that is not production agriculture as part of your farm business that you choose both the primary business and add the secondary business because there may be additional permits or licenses required, differences in taxes and differences in labor laws and regulations.

Strengths: If you are starting a business that has a specific license or permit requirement for New York State this is a good resource to start with because it is easy to miss some. For example, you need a license to sell nursery plants in NYS.

Weaknesses: It does not cover federal requirements and federal programs consistently. It also is focused on business formation so does not cover land use regs like zoning or environmental permitting and compliance that are important to consider when planning a new venture.

NYS Department of Labor Workforce Development Training Program, Employee Retention and Advancement Training: Due Date August 2, 2024 (funding is first come first served) 

The purpose of this Employee Retention and Advancement Training is to provide occupational skills training, commensurate with regional priorities, to year-round, full time, incumbent workers who are currently in low and middle-skills occupations, leading to job advancement and retention. ERAT awards may not exceed $100,000 for Applicants with 2-50 employees; $200,000 for Applicants with 51-100 employees; or $300,000 for Applicants with 101 or more employees. 



1. Allowable costs under the ERAT Program include the following:  

• The costs of outside vendors or in-house trainers to provide on-site or off-site classroom training.  
• Textbooks or training materials directly associated with the training.  
• Distance learning fees (i.e., the fee for the training slot and software required to deliver the training program); and  
• Credentialing exam fees.  

There is a match requirement (10% for < 51 employees, 25% for 51-100 employees and 50% for 101 or more employees) but employee salary while training can be used towards this match.  For more information: Funding Opportunities | Department of Labor (ny.gov) 

Two online courses are being offered for the Agricultural Supervisory Leadership Online Series this summer. Both courses will launch materials on June 19 and Zoom sessions begin June 25. The last session is July 30. The cost of each course is $275 for those working and living in New York State, and $325 for those working outside of New York State.

ASL102-SP: Liderar para obtener resultados de calidad – en español (Organizing Work for High-Quality Results – in Spanish). Tuesdays at 12 PM, June 25- July 30, 2024

Learn to create an efficient and high-performing workplace. Develop clear expectations and standard operating procedures. Delegate effectively. Diagnose and correct performance problems. (Course is taught in Spanish)

ASL 105: Employee Development and Training (offered in English) Tuesdays at 3 PM, June 25 – July 30, 2024

You will learn best practices to plan and conduct training that engages employees, supports retention, and helps ensure high-quality work.

Ag Energy NY: Farmer Energy Efficiencies: Wednesday, June 12, 6:00pm-7:30pm (webinar)  

Explore the best energy efficient options for your farm operation. To register click here. Topics include: 

• statewide programs that assist in identifying how to save energy 
• energy audits and how they help identify improvements for energy efficiencies 
• overview of energy efficiency technologies within agricultural production 
• grant and financing opportunities for upgrading equipment or renewable projects 

Bookkeeping Basics for Small Business Owners. June 13, 2024, 9:00-10:30 (online) 

Not having a handle on your business' books, taxes and financial records could spell disaster. Kristina Hind, CPA, will share her tips for understanding bookkeeping best practices, basic tax tips, as well as helping you make sense of your financial reports. To register click here 

Business Formation, June 18, 2024, 10:00am-11:00am (webinar) 

In this Business Formation webinar, take a deeper dive into your plan & master your financial projections. This session will cover: Choosing your legal entity, the basics of financing, understanding your financial statements, developing cash flow projections. To register click here 

Regional Agritourism Networking Session. Thursday, June 20, 2024, 10:00 AM - 1:00 PM. Hurds Family Farm, 2187 State Route 32, Modena, NY 12548 

Agritourism farmers are invited to a special event designed to foster connections, share experiences, and inspire collaboration in Hudson Valley region. Come and hear firsthand from a successful local agritourism farms about their journey, the challenges they've faced, and the valuable lessons they've learned along the way. This event is also a fantastic opportunity to meet and network with local tourism professionals, brainstorm opportunities to grow and support the agritourism industry in our region and network with other agritourism operations. The event is being organized by educators from CCE Ulster, CCE Orange, and CCE Sullivan, with support from Cornell Agritourism PWT. The fee is $15. Register Here. 

Plan Your Farm: Free tutorials to get started in planning a small farm business.

This free self-paced course from the Cornell Small Farm Program guides you through videos, readings, and planning activities to help you take the first step toward developing your farm plans.  The target audience is people exploring the social, emotional, financial, and ecological aspects of operating a farm business. Register Here

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