How to Write an Agriculture or Farming Proposal - (2024)

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In this video we're going to illustrate how to create a farming or agriculture related proposal with Proposal Kit. Now this could be anything from agriculture products, services, grants, RFP submissions and so on. So we're going to illustrate this with our Agriculture #4 design theme.

The Proposal Packs and the Wizard software have a number of things related to agriculture and farming. It's going to be everything from the visual design themes to examples and layouts and templates are all kind of bundled together. So if you're on our website we have an article in the articles section on specifically how to write a farming or agriculture business proposal.

This will just kind of go into some high level details, give some examples and if you keep scrolling down you'll see a list of links to samples on the website. There are truncated samples, just the first few pages, but in the Proposal Kit Pro and any of the Proposal Packs the full versions of all these samples are included and you can create your own editable version of any of these samples in whatever design theme that you purchased. If you keep scrolling down you'll see a number of the design themes that are commonly used for agriculture related proposals.

Now the Proposal Pack for Any Business, this is the plain design. There's no extra added graphics or colors to start with. It's designed for you to either brand yourself with your own logo, color scheme, fonts and so on.

Or it's also the good for grant rfp submissions, government RFPs where you typically don't put a lot of color and design into the proposals. Now for more like business to business, business to consumer and so on you might want to use a visual design theme. You can either build your own design theme using our professional package or we have a number of agriculture related design themes.

You can just scroll through what we have Agriculture #1, #2, #3. They are just different logos and color schemes applied to the pages. If you scroll down you can either click a small blow up of what the pages will look like or scroll down a little further and you'll see larger versions of what the actual Word documents will look like in each package.

What the front cover design will look like and what the body pages will look like and so on. These are just screenshots of the Word documents. We're going to illustrate this first proposal using our Agriculture #4 design.

This is a photo based design so you can see this might be good for something like industrial agriculture, wheat, crops something to do like that or anything to do with that where this visual design theme with this color scheme and logo kind of fits your personal style. You can customize these as well. You could import your own graphics your own logo and so on.

We have the Agriculture #4 design theme selected. Whatever design theme you purchase is going to be selected as your current style and you can always purchase more than one design theme as well if you want to be able to switch between designs. The first thing you're going to do when you create any kind of proposal or business plan or document using the Wizard software in your Proposal Pack is you'll click this button #2 Document Projects.

I'm going to turn off Excel dynamic linking just for purposes of the demo to speed it up but this is an advanced feature that lets you link cells in Excel spreadsheets like costs and schedules into the Word documents so that way you can do your financial calculations in an Excel spreadsheet and have it auto update into the Word documents. The Novice edition of the Wizard doesn't include this feature, you just type in prices and so on into the cost pages. We'll click the Pick Documents button and this is where you're going to select the chapters for your document.

You've got thousands of templates available and you can see the 40 most common ones are already on this first page. You see most people will use a Cover Letter, Title Page, Back Page maybe an Executive Summary or Introduction. Depending on whether it's a products sales or service sales or a project pitch or an RFP response then you're going to decide what body pages go into it.

We can click this drop–down where we now have access to the thousands of individual templates and we can scroll down for our particular situation. You can come down to the Farming/ Agriculture/Ranching category and you'll see a number of chapters we could select to go into the proposal like a specific Agriculture, Farming, Ranching, if you're doing Organic products you might want to add that. If if you want to talk about the Care and Feeding of your livestock or anything else that's related.

Depending on the type of document you're creating whether you're selling a product or a service pitching a project doing a report or a study whether it's a non–profit or so on you're going to have lots of different topics to pick from. Say if you're doing something related to the transportation, logistics or supply chain of transporting agricultural products you might come down into this category. If you need to talk about your company you can scroll down and select from the About Your Company chapters.

You can talk about your Background, Company History, your Capabilities and so on so. Whatever chapters you need to build into your agriculture or farming related proposal you'll select them here. Now to get started a little faster you can come over to this Quick Start tab and there are hundreds of pre–made lists that we've come up with for various kinds of projects.

We could just do a search on the word agriculture or farming or we can select both and do an or and this will pick up any pre–made lists that are tagged with the words agriculture or farming and I found 11. We could pick any of these as our starting list of chapters. I'll just pick the Agriculture Grant Funding Proposal and you can see this is a list of 14 specific chapters and we'll click the Import Topics from List button.

This saves us the time of going through all those screens of check boxes to find a specific set. For a specific situation we can just load them up in one shot. Now you can see our project has been loaded with 14 chapters.

We can now adjust this list of chapters if we don't need a particular chapter we can remove it. If we want to go and add additional chapters from the library we can add additional chapters from these other tabs. We'll just stick to the stock list of 14 for this one.

And when we're done selecting our chapters we just click that OK, Use Selected Templates button. We're back on our project screen and now we can fill in the Company Data and Client Data screens. Whatever we type in here is going to get merged into the document.

Company Data, this will be your job title, name, address, website, phone number, etc. And then Client Data, this will be whatever name and address you want for your client or the person you're writing the proposal to. I'll just select a default record here.

Now we'll just give it a title. Now that we're done selecting templates and adding in the data we'll just click this OK, Save Project and this is where the Wizard is going to build us the Word document. So just sit back and wait for this to build.

Okay, this document has been generated and we can open it up and take a look at it. This Agriculture Grant Proposal actually had sample content in it as well, pre–written sample content. So we've imported that as well in place of the stock boilerplate text.

You can pick whatever graphic you want here. Instead of Business Plan you can use Proposal or Project or whatever you want. Because this had sample content we pulled in with the layout it was actually written as an agriculture grant funding business plan.

You can see the Table of Contents, the templates selected and the list of chapters that were built into the proposal. Now that Expert feature I was talking about where you can link cells in a spreadsheet you could actually link these cells to a Return on Investment spreadsheet. That's part of the Proposal Kit Professional.

Do your calculations in the spreadsheet and have it auto update into the Word document. In this Novice Edition we're showing and without that feature turned on these are just standard Word tables. You'll just do your calculations separately and type in the details.

We'll illustrate a second example using a different design theme. Now we're going to show the Agriculture #5 design and we'll create a different kind of agriculture farming related proposal. Like before we'll go to the Pick Document screen.

On the Quick Start tab we'll do the search on agriculture again and we'll pick the Organic Farming Product Sales Sample. This has another set of chapters, 14 again but it's a different set of chapters. This one also has sample content we're going to load in.

Now you can see a different set of 14 chapters selected for this kind of proposal and again we can customize this list. Remove chapters, add new chapters and so on. We'll just use the list as is and like before you'd go into the Company Data screen and then the Client Data screen.

When we're done setting up the project we click the OK, Save Project button and build the document. Okay, now this example has been created and if we scroll down we see the sample content has been pulled in and this is a design theme that's better suited for organic product sales. You see the list of chapters and so on.

So we'll illustrate a third proposal. We'll just use a line art design Agriculture #1 and we're going to illustrate a federal RFP response. A federal RFP response will be much more complicated.

We have some examples in the Proposal Kit already. If you come over instead of the Quick Start, you will find it in the Quick Start, but if you go to the View Samples i'm going to scroll down and there's a USDA Federal Government Grant Proposal. Let's import the content from that and this is a longer list of chapters.

This was used by someone who was responding to a federal RFP and used a specific set of chapters and filled them in for that project. So again once we've selected a design theme, we have documents selected, data entered. We save the project and build the document.

All right, this document has been generated we'll take a look at it. You can see this is pulling in the actual sample content which has federal forms that were used by the person who created the sample. These forms themselves aren't included in the Proposal Kit.

They're just part of the sample, they got pulled in but you can see the Agriculture #1 design theme here being used and the list of chapters. This is how a more complex longer proposal can be created. So that's basically how you use Proposal Kit and any one of our design themes to create any type of agriculture or farming related proposal.