Published Feb 15, 2011

Member Survey Results

By Patrick Burke

Back in December, PFI started a major effort to learn more about the nearly 700 individuals, families, farms, and organizations that comprise our membership. While we had done member surveys before, this time was different — We were putting the survey online to A) get more responses, B) get results faster, and C) reduce the amount of time we spent entering data from paper surveys.

The results were amazing! Two days after sending our first email, we had received more responses than we did in total for the previous year’s survey. After getting as many responses as possible online, we mailed paper surveys to the members we hadn’t heard from yet, and collected more at the annual conference in January. Surveys have continued to come in the mail every day since then. At last count, we had received 484 responses — nearly 73% of our membership.

Here are some highlights from the results:

  • Including family members, PFI reaches an estimated 1500 individuals
  • 41% of our members have been farming more than 10 years
  • 31% have been farming less than 10 years or want to farm
  • 53% of PFI Farmers say PFI has helped improve their farm’s profitability
  • 65% say PFI has helped improve their overall efficiency
  • 63% say PFI has helped improve their stewardship & conservation ability
  • 121 of our farmer members would be willing to conduct on-farm research & demonstration

In addition to satisfying our curiosity, this data will help PFI determine our priorities for the upcoming year, as well as allowing us to connect members with similar interests.  We are still collecting surveys and trying to reach our goal of 80% — If you are a PFI member and have not submitted your survey yet, please mail it in or contact us if you need another copy.

We’ve just started digging in to this data — More results to come!