The Strolling of the Heifers Farm/Food Giving Fund

While Strolling of the Heifers is best known as a weekend of family-oriented, entertaining activities — the parade, the Live Green Expo, the Tour de Heifer, the Gallery Walk Street Festival and more — our mission leads us to a set of year-round activities that are more serious in nature.

That mission is: "To support family farms by connecting people with healthy local food and with the farmers and food producers who bring it to them."

To carry out that mission, we raise money to support various endeavors. Our Farm/Food Giving Fund is the umbrella fund that allows us to support farms, and connect people with them, in a variety of ways.

Currently, our most important effort is directed at our annual Farm/Food Business Plan Competition, which we conducted for the first time in the spring of 2011, in partnership with the Brattleboro Development Credit Corporation (BDCC). BDCC had held a general business plan competition for a number of years and continues to do so; the Stroll added a Farm/Food division to it so that farmers and food producers would not have to compete with manufacturers, technology companies and the like for prize money.

We believe that farmers and food producers in our region have much better odds of  surviving and prospering if they can diversify, create new products, find new customers and markets, and constantly strive to improve all of their business practices — in other words, they must operate as entrepreneurs; they must innovate. This is exactly what the Farm Food Busines Plan Competition seeks to encourage.

The Farm/Food Business Plan Competition in 2011 awarded $30,000 in prizes for business plans in new (startup) and existing business categories, and we plan to do the same in 2012.

In addition, the Giving Fund has provisions for helping farmers directly in other ways not related to business innovation: for example, when they suffer a disaster such as a roof collapse or fire.

Funding for the Giving fund comes from several sources:

The annual Strolling of the Heifers Weekend is a major part of carrying out our mission: the parade and festival honor our farmers, raise awareness of local foods, an connects people with farmers and food producers. The Weekend has many expenses — putting on a parade and festival is not cheap! — but with good weather and good attendance, it does contribute a small surplus to the Farm/Food Giving Fund.

Other events raise money for the Fund as well: The Tour de Heifer family cycling events; our annual Farm Relief Concert; and occasional special events.

In addition, we conduct an Annual Appeal each fall, and people can contribute at any time via our secure online donation page, or donations may be mailed to Strolling of the Heifers, 105 Partridge Road, E. Dummerston VT 05346.