SOUTH CENTRAL HUB

Purpose

  • Deliver education, outreach, and field demonstrations of relevant agricultural practices that improve soil health, water quality, and the overall economic and health well-being for producers* and communities in the Hastings region.

  • This will be accomplished this by working with many partners along with the community

*Producers include commodity crop, specialty crop, livestock, grazing, urban ag

Community Hub Approach

Involve Producers (crop and livestock) and the community in which they live and operate.

Initially South Central Nebraska (Hastings).

Learn from this, leverage that knowledge, and scale up with an additional 5 more hubs to cover NE.

Hub Components

These three groups inform and support one another through engagement, education, and empowerment.

Producer to Producer Learning Community

With a producer-to-producer community, you will share experiences and management information to enhance the adoption of practices that focus on building soil health, economics, and natural resource conservation. Mentoring will be a key part of this group.

Leverage the literature and projects others have already done concerning production techniques and economics, that promote sustainable and regenerative agriculture principles, and long-term economic and community success for the region.

Information will be augmented, when necessary, by data derived from local on farm research/demonstration plots.

Stakeholder Visioning Group

The purpose of the SVG is to determine local producer and non-producer needs and concerns, while also considering economic benefit to the producer and the value stream. They will advocate for the awareness of the interconnectivity of the health of the soil, plants, animals, people, environment, and ultimately the planet.

The SVG will not only be concerned with the well being of individual family farms, but the community as a whole. They will facilitate an atmosphere that makes it easier for producers to transition.

Multifaceted Membership

Could include producers, livestock operations, landowners, financial lenders, water providers, health care, urban and rural consumers, policy-makers, ag business, economic development, community foundation, education (K-21), NRSC/NRD.

NSHC will provide support by:

  1. Providing economic risk analysis and ROI opportunities relevant to producers in the local area.

  2. Demystifying and filtering the wide array of potential incentives to provide producers with more clear and relevant choices for their context specific operation.

  3. Helping the community to understand and overcome their context specific social and behavioral components that slow adoption.

  4. Helping to enable the community to tell their stories internally and externally.

  5. Providing funds to cover gaps not satisfied by existing programs.

  6. Providing funds for the adoption of emerging technical tools in grazing and precision ag, to accelerate adoption of Regenerative Ag principles.