We see possibilities.
Friday, May 18, 2012
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on April 28, 2012
I recently participated at a panel organized by Slate Magazine and the New America Foundation with other key partners. The videos are now organized according to the panels and here is the one to the one I participated in.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on April 12, 2012
Just finished participating as a panelist at the New America Foundation’s Future Tense event. A fascinating, practical, high paced one day conversation on food and agriculture systems as we enter the era of solutions to the well known challenges that global climate change is bringing upon our current food and agriculture systems ability to adapt to this new ecological reality and the need to re-engineer, re-design, re-invent and re-structure our way out in the coming decades.
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.
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.
Along with me, Ly Vang of the Association for the Advancement of Hmong Women in Minnesota, and Susan Stokes of the Farmers Legal Action Group (FLAG) in St. Paul also testified on behalf of this bill.
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.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on May 11, 2011
I will be tackling this issue this coming Saturday at the former Resource Center of the Americas from the perspective of the work that we do at the Rural Enterprise Center. If you come, be prepared to think of your neighborhood’s profile and if you would be willing to volunteer to be a drop-site coordinator for Hillside Farmers Cooperative.
We are embarking in a large scale effort to build a grassroots network of direct buyers of products from Latino farmers as we prepare to launch them in free range poultry, garlic, onions and black edible beans production.
About sustainable systems: We see a sustainable system as one that produces energy as a net result. Energy is the common denominator or currency for determining the ecological sustainability of a food, agriculture and natural resources management system. A farm has energy on both ends, it comes in the form of nitrogen and other chemical compounds normally found in nature as well as energy from the sun, wind, people’s and animal labor, equipment etc. The farm is the place where specific processes convert this energy into usable energy or into raw materials that contain the energy to be made usable through value added processing or other means which also need energy to run. On the other end of the farm is energy again, this time organized and re-arranged so that we can use it. What comes in the form of BTU’s, horse power, nutrient units, etc. on one end of the farm, comes out the other end in the form of calories and other forms arranged in a way that we can use them to live on.
A sustainable food, agriculture and natural resources management system will be the one that produces a yield sufficient to supply the needs of the society. Now, are we there yet? What are the strategies that are winning in achieving this mission?
When we looked at how food is produced and decided to get into the systems design and development, we knew that in order to launch a sustainable system we had to start where it matters most. So far as we have documented, the role that minorities and people in poverty play in the food and agriculture system is the highest most important element of un-sustainability as well as appropriate systems to remove cheap labor from the conventional system, support diversity in systems ideas and other critical paths of least resistance and high returns on mission driven steps. These are the critical steps that we took and some of which I will be addressing at the presentation as I seek to engage YOU in building a new system that is sustainable. In other writings we will address this issues further, but if you want an advance on it, come Saturday to the Resource Center of the Americas and I will get you started and excited about the possibilities in front of us.
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...
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