Building a Local Poultry Industry, One Farm at the Time

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on October 14, 2009

I just came back from a fascinating conference in Des Moines, IA where we were honored with the visit and speech by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and his vision for a new agriculture system that incorporates the ecological sustainability, community based solutions to food production, and other important aspects of our food and agriculture system that are in bad need of repair.

One thing that I learned is that “local food systems” are not a small idea anymore, specifically in the poultry industry, one of the easiest livestock options to adopt to local small scale systems in a way that is more efficient from the standpoint of energy and resources that go into it, as compared with the outputs.

In looking at the operations we have designed and are launching both in Northfield and Cannon Falls, but also thinking of the plan to spread our systems to the whole Southern MN region as a way of creating a competitive advantage for our community food systems, I am constantly looking for well done research to facilitate our own strategic planning as well as the development of strategic partnerships that will ensure that what we do becomes part of the main stream way of doing things in a large scale solution to our current food crisis.

I would like to share a video I found on small scale poultry processing and what it means to communities. I also want to point out that in our systems development process, poultry is one of the livestock options that we are targeting for now, but others are being planned for introduction later once the first option has reached scalability and maturity. Behind livestock comes vegetables, fruits and nuts production and other derived opportunities, and in front of the livestock comes the engagement of farmers interested in switching from commodities to small grains and other healthier and more complete feed supplies.

What we have designed is an integrated system that keeps costs low, reduces pollution by eliminating most of the transportation and heavy machinery used in conventional agriculture, protects and builds the soil in quantity and fertility, and at the end, produce food that can be consumed in the communities where the farmers live as well as in close-by areas where there is no such production or scalable production cannot be achieved. All in all, what we do, has been done for centuries, and is the only kind of approach and process that can be done for centuries to come. Contrary to conventional agriculture, we are seeking to produce what people eat from vegetables, roots, meats, fruits, honey, etc., all coming from a symbiotic web of relationships between farming enterprises, rather than from vertically integrated mono-cultures that put us all at risk of large scale catastrophic failures, while delivering low quality, expensive, un-healthy food options.

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