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The final report of your OFRF-funded research or education project provides a record of your study and its results. Your report will serve as a resource for others: copies of OFRF project reports are available to the public upon request. Additionally, the core components and results of your project will be presented in OFRF’s newsletter, the Information Bulletin, and they may be posted on our website.

Farmers are our primary constituency. Write your report so that it is accessible to this audience.

Reports rarely need to exceed 20 pages, and most projects can be well documented within 10 pages including charts and figures. One paper copy of your report is required on or before the deadline date stated in your grant award letter. In addition, we request that you submit an electronic copy in a word processing format via email to info@ofrf.org or on CD.

OFRF retains the right to freely reproduce and distribute all materials submitted by grant recipients in any format; to edit and abstract submitted reports; and to subject reports to peer review. Every effort will be made to present the author’s information as clearly and completely as possible.

You may use the following guidelines as a checklist for organizing your results and preparing your final project report.

1. Project Summary
Provide a brief summary of your project—its purpose, what you were hoping to find out, and a short description of your main findings.

2. Introduction to Topic
Provide an introduction to the problem being studied and what led to the development of this project. This may be a re-statement of the problem as defined in your original project proposal.

3. Objectives Statement
State your original objectives as outlined in your project proposal. Include any supplemental objectives that OFRF requested during our review of your project. Were there any changes in your objectives as the project unfolded? Please describe any differences from the original proposal and why these changes were made. This is valuable information for others who are studying the same topic and essential for our evaluation of the project.

4. Materials and Methods
Describe your project methodologies and materials used. How were treatments applied? What data were collected and how? Maps or drawings of the site and/or any special apparatus used are very helpful (hand drawings are fine). Provide as much detail as possible in this section.

5. Project Results
Present your project results. Quantitative results (numerical and/or statistical data) and qualitative results (descriptions of how well or poorly something worked) are both important. Tables, graphs and other figures representing your data are excellent ways to summarize data and present them in an accessible way.

6. Conclusions and Discussion
Discuss the results of the project and what you found out. What do the results lead you to believe did, or did not, happen? In the end, how useful was this project to you and the farm operation? How useful do you feel the study and results will be to other organic farms? Did you encounter any problems during the project? What would you do differently if you did this project again? Based on what you’ve learned, what do you think should be studied next?

7. Outreach
Describe very briefly the type of outreach that you did, or expect to do, including any publications, tours, or other presentations of your project to the public.

8. References
Provide a list of references you used to help develop your project and/or that you referred to in the body of your report.

9. Addenda
We strongly encourage the submission of photos of your project site, of the results of different treatments, and/or of project cooperators and field demonstrations. Additional materials, such as articles about the project, academic publications, theses or related research reports, are welcome and appreciated.