Sandy Martini, a member of the Cherokee Nation, is a trained agricultural economist and serves as Native Agriculture Financial Services (NAFS) VP/COO. She has spent most of her career educating farmers and ranchers on risk management including recordkeeping, financial management, and business planning. Before working for NAFS, Sandy served as associate CEO for the Native American Agriculture Fund (NAAF), the largest philanthropic private charitable trust dedicated to Native farmers and ranchers. While there she focused on the Native CDFI grants portfolio, feeding programs, and Native veterans in agriculture and co-authored published two reports “Reimagining Hunger Responses in Times of Crisis, Insights from Case Examples and a Survey of Native Communities Food Access During COVID 19” (2021), and “Cultivating Opportunities for Native Veterans Through Reimagining Native Food Economies” (2023). Prior to working for NAAF, she was the program administrator for the Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative (IFAI) where she was responsible for program and budget management for projects totaling $8 million.
Sandy began her career serving farmers and ranchers as the grants program coordinator for the Southern Extension Risk Management Education Center at the University of Arkansas, where she managed over 112 grant projects totaling $4.5 million across the southern region. While there, she coordinated and conducted six BarCamp colloquia for 132 under resourced agricultural producers which was used in agriculture programming at the highest level.
Her first role as an agricultural economist consisted of research on the success rates of the Farm Service Agency Direct and Guaranteed Loan Program for farmers and ranchers. She co-authored a published report that received one of the most prestigious awards in her field. From 2004 through 2009, she also assisted with a Risk Management Agency-funded project, where she researched the economics of exporting poultry litter from the Illinois watershed area to the Arkansas Delta Region as a fertilizer.
She received her master’s degree in agricultural economics in 2002. Her thesis focused on the impact of food safety recalls for ready-to-eat meat sales during the rollout of the Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point (HACCP). Prior to that time, Sandy spent 10 years in western wear retail sales, managing 11 regional locations.
She and her family operate a 150-acre farm in Arkansas, where they produce beef and
rehabilitate former racehorses.
