Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on March 13, 2012
The Grow a Farmer Fund campaign, a partnership between Main Street Project, Just Food Cooperative and Renewing the Countryside this campaign is getting going with local attention growing. The Northfield news just posted an article I thought described it best. To contribute to the fund one does not have to be a gardener just go to the on-line giving site. It does not matter where in the world one is these days, you can contribute to this local effort anytime, anywhere. Our hope is that everyone out there will realize that we don’t just need naturally grown healthy foods, we need change in the food and agriculture systems and infrastructure as well. By change we mean ownership and control of infrastructure and resources, and this change needs to include paths for minorities to participate fully and equally. Financing is the tallest barrier to overcome and to solve this we need everybody to pitch in with a small contribution to this fund so we can start this structural changes that are so badly needed.
“I’ve always wanted to have my own business and be more independent,” says recent training graduate and new business incubator participant Victor Torres in today’s Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) story, ‘Strengthening rural Latino start-ups.’
MPR is running a series about entrepreneurship in Minnesota and reconnected with the Rural Enterprise Center’s training program. The article cites Kauffman Foundation research that in 2010, Latinos accounted for just under a quarter of all new entrepreneurs. That statistic doesn’t surprise us one bit. It’s why we’re so excited to begin supporting new farmers through a business incubator process this spring. And it’s why organizations like the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation (SMIF) and W.K. Kellogg Foundation are providing incubator support, as well.
As Tim Penny, President of SMIF says in the article, “I see this as an opportunity to build your own success.”
If you’ve visited Just Food Co-op in Northfield in the last several weeks, you’ve seen a new display of ‘Grow a Farmer’ seed packets. The packets are filled with organic squash, corn and bean seeds (the ‘three sisters’), but what happens when you buy them is something completely different.
The seed packets are part of an innovative campaign to raise awareness and contributions to the new Grow a Farmer fund — a low-interest micro-loan fund for graduates of the Rural Enterprise Center’s Agripreneur Training program for aspiring Latino farmers. When you buy a seed pack for $5, 10, or $25, that entire amount will be deposited in the Grow a Farmer Fund.
Melanie Reid, Just Food Co-op general manager and Regi Haslett-Marroquin, Rural Enterprise Center program director
Our friends at the non-profit Renewing the Countryside came up with the creative idea for the campaign — and Just Food Co-op was excited to test out the approach, devoting the front page of their last newsletter to the effort. Here’s what Just Food Co-op General Manager Melanie Reid said about it: “Our collaboration in the Grow a Farmer campaign provides our owners and community members a direct avenue for changing the way our food system functions. Let’s grow some farmers this spring!”
The fact is that most new farmers in our training and new incubator programs have very low family incomes — $20,000 or less a year. So conventional loans that require collateral just aren’t an option. But new farmers need between $4,000 and $7,000 to purchase chicks and feed for their first free-range flocks. A loan from the Grow a Farmer fund helps them get started. After they sell their flock to customers, they’ll be able to repay the loan. And as the fund grows, so do the number of new farmers who can tap into the resource.
Jan Joanides, executive director of Renewing the Countryside sees more potential in connecting food co-op owners and new farmers through creative financing and fundraising. “Local, healthy food is a priority for people invested in food co-ops. The opportunity to grow the number and diversity of local farmers lines up with those values.”
Q & A Days at Just Food Co-op
Staff from the Rural Enterprise Center will be answering questions in the store on Tuesday, Feb. 28 from 5 – 6 p.m. and on Saturday, Mar. 3 from 10 -11 a.m.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on February 20, 2012
Last February 14th, Senator Julie A. Rosen of Senate District 24 introduced S.F. No. 1713 -Immigrant and Minority Microloan program to the Agriculture and Rural Economics committee. I was invited to testify on behalf of this bill and I am happy to report that it passed the committee unanimously.
This bill is part of the work that the Minnesota Department of Agriculture has been doing to respond to the increasing demand for services, especially financial services to bridge the gap between aspiring immigrant and minority farmers who can’t access conventional lending to get started on their farming dreams.
Although our organization is working hard to build infrastructure that can deliver financing to the farmers we work with, the challenge is really overwhelming when we look at the larger landscape of opportunity to bring alternative economic development opportunities to our rural communities. This bill is a very important step in a process of building a culture of support, tolerance, and diversity. It is especially a step towards removing structural barriers that keep promising agriculture entrepreneurs from contributing their full potential to our rural and urban food and agriculture landscape.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on June 29, 2011
We often talk about support infrastructure as a key component of success in a systems change approach, no matter the target, the support infrastructure is critical. Last week we had a tremendous opportunity to take a huge step in building this support infrastructure. We were visited by a large number (over 60) of program officers and representatives of foundations from across the country at our humble experimental farm in Northfield, Minnesota as part of the annual meeting of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Funders.
We hosted two bus loads of visitors on two separate tours looking at meat production and landscape impact and management as it pertains to the deployment of scalable sustainable food and agriculture systems. This was an opportunity to do many things, but most importantly, with our limited resources, meeting all of these folks at our own place rather than trying to schedule meetings and travel to meet them one-by-one across the country I would say is worth the largest contribution we could have received this year. Not only would it take a lot of cash resources but couple of years to accomplish such goal.
Needless to say, I am thankful in an immense way to be honored with such an opportunity where our team was able to interact with all of these folks. We understand some of the visitors do not invest in work in Minnesota, but the nature of our systems development thinking and of the prototype farms we are putting together have the scalability component embedded in the design, especially in the processes so that they can be adapted to local ecologies in a variety of places. Folks from outside our region can take what we are doing to a whole new level anywhere in the country and we look forward to working with them as our systems get launched and grow, opportunities arise and the business environment opens up the larger potential for innovation in food and agriculture systems re-engineering.
When we talk about systems change, we are not thinking micro or sub-systems, but the whole food and agriculture landscape, the fact that our visitors understand the larger picture and the challenges associated with this approach allowed us to have a leveled discussion about how we move forward and align our strategic thinking so that we can generate the highest returns on investment for our communities.
The Rural Enterprise Center is a program of Main Street Project that focuses on enterprise development. Our mission is to strengthen communities by bringing together the support infrastructure, systems, resources and programs that rural entrepreneurs need to succeed. More...
