Mercedez Farming Story in the Northfield News

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on June 7, 2010

What if every Latino/a family in Southern MN were given the opportunity to contribute their real skills, knowledge, entrepreneurship spirit, hard working ethic, and all the many other great assets to the regional food and agriculture sector? We could actually build a new system that is fair to workers, profitable for the small companies (farming enterprises or small farms), creates wealth for the region by keeping the resources multiplying and growing locally, improve our production efficiency (through richer, more stable, protected and improved soils, waterways and reduction of inputs), and build a regional ecology capable of turning around the way we think about farming, food, economic development, the role of new immigrants, and the ecology.

As long as we keep thinking just about job creation, instead of investing in competitive advantages as a strategy for economic development, we will continue to think of people like Mercedez as cheap labor for farm fields and meat processors and other factories, while missing the real potential these folks represent for the region. When we mismanage the people’s potential, we miss the larger potential to turn our regional food and agriculture into something we can sustain for the long haul. We have to keep in mind that conventional agriculture does not create competitive advantages, but keeps talent and opportunity from emerging through the forces that it generates in terms policies, subsidies for unsustainable systems, the flow of resources from the public to fields and factories and then out of the communities, eroding our natural and material resources while further creating economic and intellectual poverty and with it, the incapacity of building systems outside the of track of dead ideas.

Mercedez story is part of a series of articles, this is the second and many more are on their way, stay tuned. Click here to see the story published by the Northfield News.

Here are some photos of Mercedez’ operation. In a chronological account, we first we take the open fields and place free range poultry units in  quarter of an acre plots, these birds are fed and live outdoors, they include a combination of meat birds and heritage breeds, most of the heritage breeds are picked live at the farms by families who like to butcher their own birds, as they like to use every part of the bird, the rest are taken to inspected processors for market distribution. From the fields, we remove excess composted manure and cure it to turn it into clean finished soil.

Then vegetable production can start, as these field composted manure is rich in all of the nutrients needed to grow vegetables. In the future there will be a story about this as well as further explanations are in line as to how we manage the micro and macro ecology that includes flora and fauna, organic matter, sun, water, etc, to its maximum potential for net energy yields in the form of food.

Mercedez has operated his poultry at the Rural Enterprise Center’s experimental farm in Northfield and grows his vegetables at his newly secured land in partnership with Greg Carlson on the South side of Northfield. He is now starting to think about strategies for land ownership. One step at the time, from the aspiring dreamy farmer living in poverty, to introduction to MN’s farming conditions, specialized training, to systems development, to land ownership, to the full launch as a new farmer working under a new ecology of food, that is Mercedez story, one that will still take many more years to finish telling, and his is only one of many we will be telling as we build a regional competitive advantage by building the systems, support infrastructure and programs needed to make Southern MN a hub of a new way of doing agriculture at a large scale without compromising the efficiency of the small scale farming systems and the contributions of new immigrants to this new ecology of food.