Leadership & Management Skills for Values-Driven Farm Businesses

From stewarding LA’s growing land to being a successful business owner, as farmers, you’re tasked with many roles. This session will explore what it means to be a farm business entrepreneur and how we can recognize ourselves as leaders. Whether you are a one-person operation, a budding business, or just starting to sow some seeds, this workshop will help you examine the nuances of ethical business operations with quadruple bottom-line priorities — Profit, Planet, People, and Purpose.

We’ll explore how these concepts relate to traditional land-based practices and community-centered farming models. You’ll also learn practical leadership and management approaches that help cultivate a farm culture rooted in reciprocity, collaboration, and resilience. Through storytelling, quiet reflection, breakout conversations, and hands-on exercises, we’ll help you identify or refine your farm’s core values—the soul of your operation—and align them with your everyday decisions in the field and beyond.

This session will be interactive, reflective, and rooted in shared learning and lived experience.

What you’ll learn:

• How to define and embrace your role as a leader in urban agriculture and amongst your team
• The principles of Servant Leadership and how they align with land stewardship.
• How to apply the quadruple bottom line framework to your farm or food business.
• Strategies to cultivate reciprocity and shared values in your operations.
• Practical exercises to define and refine your farm’s core values—and use them to guide decisions big and small.
• Ways to build an ethical, resilient farm business that reflects your personal and community values.

Speaker: Olivia Tincani | Food and Farm Business Educator & Advisor

Olivia Tincani provides business, financial, and strategic planning education and advising for small-scale independent farms, ranches, food businesses, and the organizations that serve them. An ambitious spirit infuses her teaching and coaching, inspired by her personal entrepreneurial endeavors. Her expertise includes program and curriculum design and curation, strategic planning, farm business training, facilitation and mediation, livestock operations, whole-animal supply chains, and community cultivation.