Happy Thanksgiving

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on December 1, 2008

I hope everyone who reads this blog had a great day of giving thanks, what a great American celebration. I mean it from the standpoint of producing turkeys and marketing them, of course one can be sarcastic and still truthful or viceversa on this issue. The truth is that I had a great time with my extended family in this country that I gained as a result of marriage, which also means that I have adopted (or have been adopted) into great culture and traditions. Although I keep my own, the more traditions and cultural experiencies, the merrier, specially if they involve such volumes of food.

Altough lately I have not written as regularly as I normally do, I hope to keep you engaged. We are busy working on many plans in preparation for the 2009 spring, it is a great therapeutic way to spend the winter and a wonderful time for planning, centering and re-energizing.

We are currently working on consolidating the great experiences from 2008 in the large community gardening that we put together in Northfield, surveying the families who participated and preparing to expand the garden to 100 plots for 2009. We will also be launching at leat three market gardeners in the extra 5 acres of land next to the gardens while we plan larger community gardening expansion.

We have also dedicated time to help community leaders in Red Wing organize a community-wide support system to start a process of reaching out and launching new Latino/a entrepreneurs in that area, for now we are working on the social and business environment in preparation for further engagement of the regional leadership in enterprise work.

In northfield we finished the first business planning and management training, graduated 10 individals and assisted a similar number in sustainaing the business or exploring their ideas.

We are also preparing for our second round of training, this time in Faribault, where we are engaging a large network of community leaders, partners, sponsors and individual entrepreneurs.

In Owatonna, a good number of potential farmers have surfaced and we are now preparing the curriculum to launch a farming start-up and planning training as well as helping others acquire land and assembling a marketing network to support them in selling their products once they get launched.

Back to Northfield, we also grew 4,000 meat chickens, produced over 17,000 lbs of meat and established a distribution partnership for the product to the Twin Cities and a 125 direct customer network that purchased over 1500 of the grown birds. We also managed to train 5 families on growing these birds and are ready to expand signifincantly for 2009.

We acquired equipment to process our own feed and distribute it to poultry growers and started sourcing larger volumes of grain directly from local farmers to supply the system. We are now also exploring new ways of processing our birds for next year so that we can expand production, processing and distribution.

Our partners network grew significanly and direct contacts with individuals and executives in the region soared. We have established over 1200 contacts since we started this process and this network has allowed us to support a significant number of new potential projects start-ups for 2009.

All in all, it has been a good year to be thankfull for and we foresee a start of 2009 in a much stronger position. Although we will be distributing a more detailed report of our activities towards the end of the year, I hope you enjoy this early installment.