Posted By Peter Glassman, NYSAMP Statewide Director, Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Kacey Ellsworth, the Executive Director of ACCORD, the Community Dispute Resolution Center that serves Broome and Tioga Counties, recently took a tour of a local dairy farm. ACCORD has been successful in mediating accounts receivable/credit cases involving agricultural producers in her region. These types of cases are funded under the NYS Agricultural Mediation Program. Maybe this kind of outreach can generate more referrals from dairy farms...

Here is Kacey’s report with a photo!

We learned a lot and now have several contacts that we can follow up on. We gathered information about all of the potential people dairy farmers may owe money to, who may owe money to the dairy farmer, running a small family farm, chores, processes, of course cows and strategies on how to build trust with dairy farmers. It was interesting because they kept saying that running a small family farm was like being on an island; people may come and go but you are really just by yourself and kind of cut off from the rest of the world. They talked about the meetings that were held periodically but said that they only go to the one that gives the forecast of what milk prices will be for the year and that they don’t have time to go to the others.