January 2016 — NC Growing Together and project partner Supply Chain Resource Cooperative at NC State University’s Poole College of Management are sponsoring MBA students to investigate supply chain issues across the local-to-mainstream food supply chain.
Last fall, a team of four students – Jazmine Davis, James Hollifield, Kaitlyn Sutton, and 2016 NCGT Supply Chain Fellow Graham Givens – was tasked with two separate projects to assist farmers considering a transition into on-farm pasteurization. The first task was to create a financial tool to assist dairy farmers in organizing their current costs and projecting their costs and sales over the course of five years after their transition. In addition to this tool, the team also created an instructional video and written instructions to assist farmers in operating the tool.
The second task was using this tool and market research completed by the team to provide Asheville-area Austin Dairy Family Farm with the financial outlook of a transition to on-farm production of whole, non-homogenized milk. “We were determined to make a difference — we had synergy going for us and passion for working with the family,” said Sutton.
The team’s poster won first place in the SCRC’s Annual Meeting Poster Competition. Read the Executive Summary for Best Practices and Metrics for Dairy Farms Transitioning from Conventional Dairy Operations to On-Farm Value-Added Production here.
More information about the NCGT/SCRC MBA Teams can be found on the Research Page of NCGT’s website.
Photo above L-R: James Hollifield (NC State), Kaitlyn Sutton (NC State), Graham Givens (NCGT Supply Chain Scholar), Jazmine Davis (NC State), Cherith Autrey Austin (Austin Family Farm), and Andrew Austin (Austin Family Farm).
This article originally appeared in the January 2016 NC Growing Together Newsletter.