Southeast Dairy Business Innovation Initiative

American Rescue Plan Dairy 2022_26 Abstract A collaboration with partners at the University of TN and NC State is proposed that will build on regional work supporting business growth and development for small dairies in the Mid-South U.S.. This 4 year project will develop and deliver Extension training and technical assistance to dairy producers across the region. A collaboration between UK Ag Economists and Food Scientists will be developed with the goal of shared project support with larger project team members regionally and led by the University of Tennessee. Our KY proposal will specifically emphasize the following: 1. Cheese quality and technical assistance capacity building for the UK FSIC (Morgan) 2. Expanded KY support for the Dairy Gauge and Beef on Dairy Extension programming (Burdine) 3. Expanded market research around dairy agritourism and small farms/sustainability (Zhao) 4. Adding more of this market research into advanced topics and training related to Dairy MarketReady (Woods)