The Victorian Government has released new grants for ‘small scale and craft’ agricultural businesses. (These are the latest version of the ‘Artisanal Agriculture’ grants.) We know how flat out you are, so we’re summarising the key information here for you .. as well as outlining some ways we might be able to help you 🙂

The grant guidelines outline eligible expenditure as:

• New equipment or small-scale infrastructure 
• Product diversification 
• Developing specialised skills 
• Expansion into new markets, including market development strategies. Social media posts and advertising are excluded.

You might find that some of our services can help!

If you want to use the grant to get selling online, and to make all of your digital systems talk to each other (e.g. your accounting platform, email list, and online sales platform) then we can help! Some farmers used the first round of grants last year to have us get them online and integrated, which saves them from backend admin, freeing up time to spend on farming and other parts of their business (and on getting some leisure time back!) If you’ve always wanted to get set up on the Open Food Network, or even have someone else run an online store on the platform for you, we can also help with that! Drop us a line if you’d like to chat more about any of these options. 

The Government has identified some key actions from its Artisanal Sector Roadmap that projects should aim for, including: “Support sector-led development of collaboration, community education, and coordinated leadership and advocacy for Victoria’s artisan producers”. Example eligible projects under that action include:

• Community-based initiatives such as food co-operatives or food hubs that will benefit multiple producers and food businesses 
• Initiatives to engage the community in the sector, local food systems or local food production, such as: 

– On-farm education programs for school groups 

– On-farm agricultural skills, training or employment initiatives

We have experience in regional food system activation, food hub design and pilots which we can apply to help guide projects. We also support a whole host of food hubs to run their backend systems, create more streamlined digital systems, or set up new online food hubs. If you’d like to chat about whether we might be able to help with a project you’re imagining, please get in touch.

If you want to use the grant to create a better plan for new products, or to launch new products and evaluate them, we can help! Through a Lean Product consultancy package we can guide you through product development and evaluation. We’ll help you set metrics, run lean experiments to test your assumptions, and iterate so that your enterprise is thriving. We’ve helped enterprises from single farmers right up to food hubs (including CERES Fair Food) with these skills. With these new skills and guidance, anything you launch will be built on a solid foundation that will ensure you get the absolute most out of every bit of effort and money you put into your new product. If you’d like to chat to us about including a budget line for this sort of work, get in touch.

We are also supporting a number of enterprises with their grant applications. If you’re applying to spend the grant on our services, we’re happy to help write the application. If you’re applying to spend the grant on something else, we charge an hourly rate for our grant-writing service.

Not sure if we can help with what you’re imagining? Feel free to drop us a line and we can have a chat about what’s possible.