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Local Market Expansion: Programs Offer Support and Mentoring for Rural Entrepreneurs | |
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Three Initiatives
From networking to distribution to food safety, these initiatives bring producers vital business resources.
That does it take to market a new food product successfully? If the business is located in rural Alberta, the entrepreneur who is behind it will likely face a variety of challenges.
One possible issue is finding peers to learn from and exchange ideas with. Another relates to the economics of moving food products to larger centres that could be hundreds of kilometres away. Finally, the rural entrepreneur must contend with a range of technical issues around food production, such as establishing protocols for food safety.
“These producers have local markets they can and do serve,” says Karen Goad, Farm Direct Marketing Specialist with Alberta Agriculture and Rural Development in Grande Prairie. “In some cases, however, these local markets alone aren’t enough to support such an enterprise. So producers naturally look to larger markets.”
Today, a new generation of programs is making it easier to bring value-added products to market. In this section of Renewal Now, we look inside three initiatives funded through the Agricultural Policy Framework, a federal-provincial-territorial initiative, that are having a real impact on the fortunes of rural agri-food entrepreneurs. |  |
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For more information about the content of this document, contact Wendy McCormick.
This document is maintained by Jackie Majic.
This information published to the web on December 15, 2008.
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