Community Excellence Award
Recognizing the pathways community leaders are making for agriculture and rural America.
Are you working to bridge the gap for underserved areas of agriculture in your community?
Across our six states, there are emerging and aspiring farmers who are creating pathways for the next generation of agriculture. We want to acknowledge, support, and highlight the community leaders, farmers, agricultural professionals and volunteers of community-based agricultural organizations whose hard work and determination positively affect the lives of people within their community through the Community Excellence award. The Community Excellence award is a self-nominated award designed to recognize and showcase the spirit of how producers, farmers and community leaders are actively solving and meeting the agricultural needs of their community members. Applicants for this award will be judged on their community involvement, leadership experience, and how they implement solutions to build up agriculture within their community.
The Community Excellence award recipients will receive $2,500 and the opportunity to be recognized at one of our Know to Grow® conferences the following year.
Application Opens: May 18, 2025
Deadline to Apply: June 29, 2025
Eligibility
- An applicant can be an individual or an official entity.
- Applicants must have attended a Know to Grow® or Know to Thrive conference (level 2 conference), or have attended a Mastering Your Capital workshop. Applicants also can be recommended by a Farm Credit Mid-America team member.
- Applicants must not be a Farm Credit Mid-America team member or immediately related to one.
- Applicant must be willing to do an in-person and/or virtual interview.
- Along with the completion of the online application, applicant must provide a sponsor letter/letter of support, contribution or testimony from a group, individual, or community organization that has positively benefited from your impactful service. The letter of support should be in the form of a Word or PDF document. Please include the primary phone number, email address and street address of the group, individual or community organization for verification.
Read the Official Rules
Applications for the 2025 Community Excellence Award will open on May 18. Please check back then to apply.
Questions? Email [email protected]
Growing Forward® and Know to Grow® are registered trademarks of Farm Credit Mid-America.
You May Be Interested In
Know to Grow®
Think bigger at our Growing Forward® financial workshop.
Growing Forward®
Preparing agriculture’s next generation of young & beginning farmers.
Customer Stories
Our customers are at the heart of everything we do.
The Power of a Cooperative
A customer-owned lender is a locally-owned lender.
