Rural Enterprise Center

Because animal factories are inhumane, unhealthy and unsustainable for the future of our food supply systems.

As a Latino living in Southern Minnesota, I am proud to be working on a new system that engages the talents, culture, traditions and knowledge of sustainable intensive agriculture that we bring to this region as new or recent immigrants. This is something concrete, new, innovative, and significant to this country’s food industry that we hope we can contribute.

When we start remembering the good taste of a free range chicken, the traditions associated with growing them as part of a community of farmers, we also come to realize that we have moved too far away from healthy sources of high quality wholesome tasting poultry (and other wholesome fruits and a diversity of foods as well). How did this happen?. There is proof and theories to point in many directions, even farmers who did not hold their ground and allowed corporations to ridicule them for their traditional time tested methods are to blame. But again and again, corporate greed has gotten in the middle, removing traditions out of well established farming system and ridiculing those interested in the "old" ways of doing things.

We have now come to realize that time-tested systems based on nature’s own R&D can be and will always be much more stable, efficient, sustainable, and trusted than any corporate scheme to grow our food more "efficiently". In a separate posting, I will relate a story that I have read and heard many times and that illustrates how we ended up with so few options for healthy foods with a direct impact in our environment, water, soil, air, our health and our current and future economy as we pass the cost of our current savaging of natural resources to future generations.

So what are we doing about this?

Those who buy our chickens do so because they are a whole different product as a result of the way we grow them. Our poultry is free range (this means that they are fed outdoors as soon as they are big enough to be outside, with no feeding inside the buildings from then on), they roam pastures, and are fed organic certified grains (no meat derivates or GMO’s). We have designed a unique system based on small family-owned operations but organized into networks to achieve a regional competitive advantage for this specific sector of the food industry.

This means no more poking around the edges, but growing large amounts of birds in a truly sustainable system. For winter production, we have designed a system that allows the chickens to roam and eat from summer harvests brought in with minimal processing but protected from the elements through solar powered season extension technology. Although not as elegant as summer innovations and in a lesser scale, our winter production once deployed will sustain us through the seasons while keeping the integrity of the system, the health of the birds and the key customers supplied.

Our system is designed to go regional in the coming years and national in the long-term. The larger system will be modeled after the current production unit in Northfield and deployed to respond to the region’s demands for healthy poultry as a market entry strategy. As far as we have been able to document, this sort of enterprise has not yet been achieved in the United States at a scale with potential to transform an industry (there are many projects from which we are learning, but not a new replicable system in place yet).

As Hispanic/Latino families continue to grow in our region, we have taken the lead position in developing this new way of growing chickens and we are hoping that the public, political forces and established companies and institutions will recognize that this is something good for the economy, the health of chicken consumers and for an industry that has become inflexible, a liability to the health and our economy, and unfriendly to family farms the only reliable source of locally grown healthy and safe foods.

We are launching a new poultry production system with our eyes in making a transformational contribution to this industry while creating a new economic option for Southern Minnesota farmers and ranchers in partnership with the newest immigrants. There are many Hispanic/Latino families and a diversity of established farmers in the region who are now involved in this process. If you are a farmer and this intrigues you, please send us an e-mail from the contact us form.

Although we have advanced significantly over the last year, we need much more public participation, specifically in the Northfield area. One thing that is important for our success is the expansion of a direct customer’s network town-by-town until we cover the region. More specifically we need these networks to grow in the Cannon Falls area where we are putting together the infrastructure for a new production unit, in Dodge City where another production unit is in process for 2010. The roll out will continue with Red Wing, Faribault, Owatonna, Austin, and beyond. If you know someone who may benefit from this information in these targeted areas, we will appreciate you referring us to them. First step would be to invite people interested in buying our chickens to our mailing list, to do so, please send them this link: http://lists.ruralec.com/mailman/listinfo/poultryclients where they can subscribe/un-subscribe directly.

To order from our distributor or to refer our products to a retail store please contact Thousand Hills Cattle Company.

A very positive and needed development just happened in the City of Minneapolis. This is good news for all of us working on regional food systems development, we can only hope that the many thousands of voices that made this possible would be sufficient to open up other regional institutional food centers to look into this example of leadership. Thank you IATP for putting first things first. Here is the whole release for your information.

Press Release

June 26, 2009

Contact: Ben Lilliston, 612-870-3416, ben@iatp.org

IATP Congratulates Mayor, City Council on Local Food Initiative

Action will help expand Minneapolis’ local food production

Minneapolis – The Minneapolis City Council approved a resolution today put forth by the Homegrown Minneapolis initiative to support the production, sale and consumption of local, sustainably produced foods in the city and surrounding region.

“We applaud the mayor’s leadership in launching this initiative and the council’s strong support today,” said the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s JoAnne Berkenkamp, who co-chaired one of the initiative’s subcommittees. “This is a major step forward in expanding the local food system in the region. We have only scratched the surface in exploring the city’s potential to produce its own food.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Pollo de Campo™ is a rural enterprise developed (hatched) at the Rural Enterprise Center. This enterprise is aimed at capitalizing on the knowledge and skills brought to our region by Hispanic/Latino immigrants with a farming background and able to engage in food production in Southern MN. The development of this enterprise involves established farmers, a large number of statewide agriculture and farming support organizations, scientists, businesses, and many other institutions and individuals that are part of the support infrastructure that has been developed to launch this farming enterprise.

Although we will be sharing much more information in the coming months as we start the formal deployment of our marketing and distribution partnership with Thousand Hills Cattle Company of Cannon Falls, we want to make it known to all of our partners and retail outlets interested in our free range grown chicken "Pollo de Campo™ " that we will be showing up at a store near you.

The production protocols for Pollo de Campo™ deliver a healthy, high quality bird with a consistent texture and taste. We accomplish this by providing our birds with a living environment that fundamentally delivers a high quality of life, we believe that as consumers get more educated about the origin of their food, they will want to eat more of the products that do not follow an unhealthy path in the cycle of production.

More importantly tough, Pollo de Campo™ has been launched to establish a regional network of small free range chicken farms (birds that are fed outside and have access to sources of greens in the form of grasses and other cover crops and pastures). The mission of the enterprise is to build the infrastructure, systems and programs needed to launch a whole new poultry product that can be clearly differentiated and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. This product is designed to set new standards in the production and supply of healthy meat options in a scale that makes economic sense not only for launching new farmers, creating new jobs and bringing large scale economic benefits to our region, but can also transform one sector of the food system.

Pollo de Campo™ is produced as part of a symbiotic system of relationships with other farming enterprises, at least 9 other derived farming operations are being planned in conjuncture with the chicken production. These operations include everything from perennial crops, vegetable production for value added processing (utilizing the high value compost from poultry manure), medicinal herb farms to supply supplements that will be utilized to improve the natural immune system of the birds, to soil farming units for composting and soil production. Research is now being conducted in partnership with key statewide organizations and scientists to evaluate naturally beneficial chemical compounds that can be naturally incorporated into feeding systems to produce a healthier chicken naturally.

To inquire about Pollo de Campo™ and the marketing and distribution plans, visit Thousand Hills Cattle Company.

Stay tuned, there will be more coming.

Spring 2009 hit us like a rock, I have been so busy it has been hard to set aside time to write about our recent progress, but here is a quick overview of areas where some significant developments have been achieved.

First, we were able to secure partnerships with organizations that will take our food and agriculture systems development to a whole new level. This partnerships include the Agriculture Research and Utilization Institute, the Cooperative Development Services, the North Country Development Fund, and a large contingent of allies and operational partners such as Agstar Financial Services, the Biobusiness Alliance of MN and many individual businesses, executives and especially farmers in our region who support the projects that make up the Rural Enterprise Center.

One area of development that is now completed is the training of a manager operator and the launching of a grain processing and distribution system. We now have completed securing equipment (some borrowed from farmers, some purchased used, and so on), trained an operator and stocked 250,000 lbs of different organic grains and supplements to ensure a reliable feed supply to grow into the next level of poultry production in the Northfield area economic cluster (32 acres of poultry production, 450 acres of grain production and fully supporting one poultry processing facility) under development.

We also added capacity to grow 2,000 more birds to existing infrastructure and installed the pilot test for a fully outdoors automatic watering and feeding system, making our first one acre production unit fully operational. Currently, we are working on setting up two new sites and have started the training process to ensure that once the sites are fully equipped that there will be two families ready to operate them, their involvement in setting up the system is a key part of their training as it is expected that they will mentor new farmers in the coming years.

Our current grain processing should be able to support up to four families producing poultry on 32 acres for a total between 105,000 to 150,000 birds and between 450 and 500 acres of small grain production. This cluster of farmers will also support up to 20 acres of vegetable production, in preparation for this related farming enterprises, we have started the training of a value added vegetable processing operation in partnership with a local school with a certified commercial kitchen. Although the goal of deploying this cluster will take a couple of years to achieve with recruitment and training of families as the bottleneck of the process, once this first cluster is fully deployed, our ability to train other families will also increases exponentially, especially if our plan to launch an Agripreneur Training Center materializes in the coming year. This training facility will handle 12 specialized farming enterprise opportunities, each targeting a specific market opportunity in the food and agriculture marketplace.

A huge step forward in building a scalable food and agriculture system under the  leadership of Latino families is that we have been able to establish key partnerships with established farmers, and have a large numbers of them on the partnership line-up seriously committed to taking land out of current production and shifting it to our system beginning this fall.

Another big sign of progress is that we were able to set-up 105 community garden plots which have served in the past as a screening mechanism to identify serious farmers within the Northfield community. Having identified community gardens as a strategic component of our system, we have started working with Red Wing’s community garden and helped organize a large contingent of Latino families in Dodge City to get another community garden launched there under local leadership. We were also blessed with the presence of Katie Blanchard, a student at Carleton College who is now the coordinator of the Northfield community garden.  This extra support has allowed us to tend to other communities and businesses farther away from our center of operations in Northfield who had requested our assistance in the past.

Aside from the “on the ground” work, we also trained restaurant owners on business management and participated in opening a new site for Plaza Morena Mexican Restaurants in Madelia, MN.

Here is a slide show with more pictures reflecting results from our business training program, business support area (supporting the process for new business to get started) and some photos from our poultry production system including our efforts to establish heritage breeds as a critical and competitive part of re-generating our regional food systems in a sustainable way.

Part of the process of re-engaging natural food systems includes growing conventional commercial breeds under new systems where birds roam freely and green pastures are available as a food supplement and to improve their health and their immunological resistance to deceases. Growing poultry outdoors is a very important step in growing high quality poultry meat which is fundamentally based on the quality and health of the birds themselves. This is something that CANNOT be achieved in confinement or factory livestock farming. Our Latino heritage, assets, traditions, culture and knowledge in poultry production that we bring from Latin America becomes one of the most precious assets for getting people out of poverty while building a sustainable food system that grows in diversity of production as more families become involved. Our end goal is to derive an attractive return on investment for asset rick Latino families who currently live in economic poverty and by doing so, engage them in a new way of thinking about their role in this country, their contributions to this economy and the future of their children which includes their education, civic engagement and gaining the respect that we deserve as net contributors to our rural communities.

A recent front page cover and long article about our client and business training participant Jose Herrera and his restaurant Plaza Morena in Owatonna has created quite a stir. Check it out yourself at http://35cbusiness.com/

I just presented at a local foods, faith and immigrants forum at Faith Mennonite Church in Minneapolis. Katherine Glover, a free lance journalist wrote an article on the forum. Tomorrow, April 4th, I will be presenting on our Food and Agriculture Development Model at a public presentation organized for the Sustainable Farming Association of MN, Hiawatha Valley-Cannon River Chapter. This will be from 11 am to 1 pm at the community room behind Just Foods Coop.

This is the title of an article at the Mankato Free Press about the March 13th Regional Southern MN Economic Development Summit. The Rural Enterprise Center’s agripreneurs development model was voted the second most important priority for the development of the Agriculture and Food Sector as it pertains to the incorporation and full utilization of skills, assets and visioning coming out from the Latino/Hispanic communities of the region.

We are currently developing the strategic plan for the large scale regional deployment of this model with a launch strategy focused in 8 SE MN counties, but including strategic outreach to other promising targeted Hispanic/Latino communities in the region.

Our economic development model is centered in capitalizing on Hispanic/Latino assets, including the work ethic, agrarian background, family values, and matching this to the regional economic opportunity found in the agriculture and food sectors and related manufacturing. The model includes a phased step-by-step approach to support families from their current economic situation, through a process designed to deliver consistent short, medium and long-term returns and competitive advantages for the region.

Our model seeks to effectively capitalize on key regional economic opportunities where Hispanic/Latinos have competitive advantages, while contributing regional product brands, an new economic development strategies that also address low wage issues through enterprise development, thus addressing poverty as a structural issue related to wealth migration patterns, not as a result of lack of resources in our communities.

Our model is designed to contribute to the reversing of the downward trend in wages that has characterized the food, agriculture and its related manufacturing sectors over the last two decades. This factor has caused our region to fall in competitiveness compared to the rest of the state and the nation. Trends like this, are the result of lack of innovation and creation of opportunities that have consequently cause a massive out-migration of young people who don’t see value in row crop agriculture, machinery and low-wage assembly line work that comes from this sector’s manufacturing processes. While this is true according to the findings of the Regional Competitiveness Project, it is also true that these sectors represent the second most important strength and future opportunities.

For us at the Rural Enterprise Center, this factors provide the raw material and the detailed analysis needed to develop our regional plans and strategies, with the big picture in mind, but with the improvement of the family unit as the end-goal. Our model does not have "job creation" as a strategy, but as an end result of a system’s thinking approach. We understand economic development to be the result of innovative enterprises that add a competitive advantage to our region in key sector of opportunities, through the use of our strengths and competitive advantages, especially in the new immigrant Hispanic/Latino sector.

We are keeping our attention in economic development strategies in the food and agriculture sector that contribute to the future trends and opportunities in sustainable designs, and can present a challenge for our youth to engage further in the natural sciences, technology, low-impact equipment, carbon sequestration, soil sciences, microbiological and an endless list of opportunities if we go beyond row crops and jobs oriented thinking in this sector.

The regional competitiveness process looked far and deep and generated a road map that if continuously improved will deliver the enterprises that will take advantage of the long-term economic competitiveness for the region. This process will be culminating on May 15th at the Southern Minnesota Strategy Summit.

I receive information just as many of you in the thousands of gigabytes a day, but every once in a while, something so powerful that it becomes irresistible to share comes along. Below is a link to one of those things worth sharing widely.

By the way, don’t think of this as judging people who do things that to others think to be wrong, none of us have the right to judge others, but we all have a fundamental responsibility to think about the consequences of our actions and the impact of our choices in our ability to preserve the natural environment that sustains life.

Think of what each of us are doing and how much we know about the consequences of our daily actions, are we aware or do we just assume others will fix what we destroy in the process of living our lives. Why is it that we still see so much indifference in relationship to the consequences of our way of thinking and acting about development, global trade, consumption, etc. We have come far enough into a path of self-destruction that we have to change our ways, there is something so fundamental and far reaching to the consequences of not doing so that we really need make a move, specially in the area of economic development.

Food and energy is something we cannot go without, and the farther these two come from where we use them, the less sustainable they are, this is a matter of logic and economic fact not a matter of opinion, or political leaning, or weather we agree or disagree on global trade.

The fact is that we don’t account for the full cost of our foods and have been living under the illusion that a banana is really only $0.75 cents a pound. It isn’t, what happens is that we are only paying for a small part of the full cost of producing it, bringing it from Brazil or Central America and delivering it to our stores and picking it up. The carbon emitted, the water, soil and air pollution in the production cycle, and many other costs are just being passed on for others to pay, either down the rivers and oceans, or down to the next generation.

I just ran into this Sixty Minutes episode with Alice Waters and thought everyone living in rural areas of the U.S. should watch, and if they work in economic development, help them recognize that their most important assett is not land waiting to be “developed” but land for food production as a strategic economic advantage that must be preserved and enhanced for the long-term survival of our rural communities.

Although Latino/Hispanic communities and entrepreneurs are still behind in understanding the value of organic agriculture from a health standpoint, at least we can start understanding it from the economic opportunities that this industry represents as told from the top.

Some of us have been on the organic sustainable agriculture wagon since before we immigrated to the United States, but so many still consume products that not only come from places where other Latino/Hispanics labor the fields exposed to highly toxic chemicals and un-humane laboring conditions. As consumers or laborers, we don’t only lose as part of the synthetic chemical dominated agriculture industry.

I just came back from an annual conference of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Services in La Crosse WI. The keynote speaker Vandana Shiva, is one of the most outspoken world leaders and pain causing thorns on the side of global chemical agriculture polluters and grain monopolies.

She provided a full review of what it takes to produce food in a healthy way, for the soil so that it can sustain production for centuries on its own energy and bio-systems, for the farmer so that he/she does not get poisoned with their family as they farm, and for eaters, so that they have an option to choose responsibly produced foods and exercise their role to complete a biological cycle that is as old as earth itself.

Deep inside, I think we could all agree that since our beginnings our evolution process designed us to depend on a symbiotic and highly complex infrastructure of interactions with the earth, our environment and every living thing around, even those that kill us have a purpose in our evolution.

This original design has advanced for billions of years and its yields in terms of making the earth productive and our bodies healthy, will never be matched by playing around at the end of the R&D chain that nature set forth well before there were scientists and corporations who paid them to find ways to interrupt such process by killing the soil’s trillions of organisms, and millions of species that make up our earth’s diversity.

Having met thousands of people who are no longer part of the destructive forces of our industrialization processes is so refreshing and hopeful, despite the fact that our biological systems are been destroyed much faster than we can rebuild them. I see a lot more understanding that preserving nature’s rich diversity and complexity is part of our own preservation and opportunity to continue to evolve and adapt to changing conditions on earth.

It was great to meet with farmers and responsible companies and re-connect with so many people in the hundreds, some of them with good quality tracks of land, some of which we have started negotiating as we are always looking for resources that can help us introduce new Latino families into sustainable, organic agriculture.