New Study Profiles the Rural Enterprise Center’s achievements in Food and Agriculture as a Rural Development Opportunity

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on January 19, 2010

The Center for Rural Entrepreneurship just released a report on our efforts to incorporate Latino families into the Southern Minnesota economy. The system is based on engaging existing farmers, local resources, and national and regional support networks. The system aims to provide families with a path out of poverty through a replicable and scalable system that follows a step-by-step approach. This approach is designed to build capacity, long-term engagement, is compatible with the rural economic landscape and the realities of struggling small farms, and on the engagement immigrant Latino families as net contributors to strong partnerships for broad-based community success. To read the whole report, click here.

Superior Grown Food Summit, regional support network continues to grow

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on November 6, 2009

I will be a speaker at the Superior Grown Food Summit on Saturday November 14th. This opportunity emerged as a result of networking with folks from that region during the recent From Commodity to Community food security conference in Des Moines, Iowa. In IA, where I was also a speaker during one of the plenary sessions I had a chance to expose our work to a network of over 400 community food coalition members and business leaders. It helped to have Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack speak right before. Many more opportunities for networking and building support for our system deployment have come as a result of these conference.

At the Superior Grown Food Summit my concentration will be on engaging bio-regions as we further study the ability of large scale engagement and reproduction of our systems, specifically the integrated agriculture infrastructure to produce short-term gains through poultry production without compromising the engagement of the larger biological regions or ecological corridors.

Meet Your Local Farmer, a Great Video about Open Hands Farm

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on November 4, 2009

Just saw this link at Dayna Burtness’ facebook page, Dayna is conducting research on farming practices by suppliers of Bon Appétit: Farm to Fork program. Great opportunity to learn more from our neighbor farmers Ben and Erin at Open Hands Farm.

A Sobering Report on Food Production and the Current Food Crisis

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on October 26, 2009

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago, I referred to the world report on agriculture, endorsed by 55 countries and growing. The report titled “Agriculture at a Crossroads” is an International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD). I have been reading bits and pieces so far, but was fortunate to hear the summary presented at the recent national community food security coalition meeting in Des Moines, IA by one of its editors and authors Hans R. Herren, of the Millennium Institute.

Once one gets a deeper understanding of the the state of our current food crisis and what it can turn into if not addressed, and as we look at the most affected, the majority among the children in the U.S. especially those among minorities, it is hard to understand how we continue to support a food system that has already failed. We continue to watch the human pain and economic cost associated with the consequences of unhealthy food choices that have turned obesity, diabetes and cancer from exposure to synthetic chemicals into a national epidemic.

Not only are we currently failing our children in terms of designing systems that work, but we are compromising their health and their ability to deal with the challenges they will face, especially those more vulnerable living in poverty but who today represent a large majority and the brains of the future. While we deliver a deteriorated system and a systemic crisis, we are also interfering with the full development physically, mentally and intellectually, which will inhibit their ability to deal with the problems we are passing on. That is an equation for more trouble.

A radical systems based change is needed, one based on different social and economic paradigms that result in the engagement of grassroots available talent, idling agriculture resources, and tapping into one of the greatest opportunities to generate massive, large scale, societal changes. Through a circular way of thinking in terms of engaging talent and resources rather than the traditional linear way of thinking, we can ignite the launching of a new food system based on principles that generate a higher social, economical and environmental return on investment.

These opportunities can be tapped for permanent solutions to poverty, by building competitive advantages through the engagement of disadvantaged families themselves. In fact these families currently provide the bulk of the labor and skills to our food system anyway, while unable to afford the food they produce, how in the world will a system that perpetuates this discrepancies ever deliver competitive results in a world economy. By launching community-based, local, regional and national support infrastructure, systems, and programs that generate enterprises designed to deliver on a triple bottom line (people, profits and the planet), we can generate engagement and productivity at levels that no current vertically integrated corporate structure can. As bad as we have it now, the opportunities and the best times are ahead, unless we leave things the way they are.

Although this food crisis and the issues associated with its origins are complex, some folks have found easier ways to explain it, such as in this report from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

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.

"From Commodity to Community"

Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on October 2, 2009

This is the title of the Community Food Security Coalition’s conference in Des Moines, IA from October 10th to the 13th. According to the update from the Sustainable Farming Association of MN, this is “the largest gathering of community food systems producers and advocates in the US.”. I am honored to be a presenter for the morning plenary session on Tuesday October 13th.

If you are going, look me up and I look forward to having a good and engaging conversation about the state of our food systems and the important work going on in our Southern MN region to restore some of the most valuable infrastructure and ethical links in the food system that we lost to corporate farming and conglomerates.