Helping Farm Families Succeed in Business is a comprehensive project designed to assist farm families in making sound business decisions while protecting family relationships. It provides a menu of research-based risk management tools to assist farm families in their day-to-day decisions and interactions with each other. This project is in its fourth year of funding through the USDA Risk Management Agency (RMA). Project partners include the Kansas Rural Family Helpline, the Kansas State University Research and Extension, and the Kansas Rural Center in Whiting, KS. Also contributing to the success of the project are numerous rural organizations and associations, state agencies, and other rural projects.

This project is based on the premise that farm families operate within three different types of systems:

• The family system is oriented toward security and nurturance.
• The business system demands productivity.
• The ownership system seeks a return on investment.

Family farms also must adapt to a changing food and fiber system. Because of these realities, this project integrates various disciplines to provide a holistic business planning approach to help farm families and farm family advisors address issues of communication, management, production, marketing, and business succession.

As farm families adapt to a changing industry, farmers’ markets provide a business incubation environment for transitions into specialty crops, alternative marketing strategies, and value-added products. Thus, this project has adapted its tools for the facilitation of business planning with farmers’ markets since they can serve as a venue to transfer risk management education to the family farm.