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.

Rural Enterprise Center is eager to invite you to join the conversation at a FREE event co- sponsored with Just Food Co-op and the Northfield Arts Guild.

The event is Friday, May 13 at 7 p.m. at the Northfield Arts Guild Theater
(311 W. Third Street, Northfield).

Look Who’s Knockin’, is a new one-act play from Land Stewardship Project, coming to Northfield for one night only. The 45-minute play focuses on a retiring farm couple’s dilemma as they wrestle with the future of their farm.

After the play we’ll have a panel and community discussion moderated by Ken Meter, economist and president of Crossroads Resource Center, with a panel including Melanie Reid, Just Food Co-op general manager and Reginaldo (Regi) Haslett-Marroquin, Rural Enterprise Center director.

Refreshments will provided from Just Food Co-op.

Call (507) 650-0106 or stop by Just Food Co-op to reserve your FREE ticket. Or email us, and we’ll reserve a seat for you!

This is sure to be a wonderful, enlightening evening. Invite friends & neighbors! We look forward to seeing you there!

We used to spend from Monday through Friday in the fields as the walk back and forth from home was too much on top of working 10 hours a day. One of us would go back mid-week to fetch provisions — mostly corn tortillas to supplement beans and other farm products we would cook at the farm. Once in a while my mother would send a plastic bucket with fried eggs and potatoes and we would have a feast for dinner.

On the way home on Saturday afternoons after a long week we learned to make sure that the loads for the horses and the loads that we carried on our backs where properly packaged and loaded so that we could carry them all of the way. Too heavy and we could not make it. Too light and we would waste our energy. Since we would start out cold, we would stop shortly after beginning to let our muscles relax. We took advantage of these breaks to check the loads of corn, pineapples, coffee, squash, avocados, firewood, and other products as they would settle and the ropes loosen. This was especially important with the horses as a loose rope or an unbalanced load could scare or overburden them. We had to take care of the whole “team” – ourselves, the horses, and younger brothers who were slower.

Thirty years later, how are these lessons critical to running the Rural Enterprise Center?

If you are really following my story, you will see processes, organization, task management, mission planning, execution, corrective measures to ensure proper direction, and estimating loads and distance to ensure successful delivery. What we do today has everything to do with those processes down to the last detail. It is just a different country, environment, and culture. The loads are just as heavy, and the path we are putting families on is also one out of poverty as best as we can design it in this new land of abundance and discrepancy between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’

At the Rural Enterprise Center, we are entering a very important phase of development:

• Since January this year, we have hired Katie Blanchard as Agripreneur Training Manager, Bob Kell as Training Farm Manager, and Maria Sosa as Outreach Coordinator.
• Christine Sartor, a Northfield resident and local food systems enthusiast is working with Hillside Farmers Co-op to build-out their direct sales strategy.
• Also part of the Co-op, Todd Prink of Cannon Falls has become the anchor farmer for the poultry division, Scott Johnson is the grain processing and distribution manager, and Victor Torres and several others are moving forward with poultry production. Many are producing vegetables for their families and market.
• A recently developed partnership with Just Food Cooperative in Northfield has been built as a community entry point for volunteers interested in helping at the Agripreneur Training Farm, where training will begin this growing season.
• Another partnership with Saint Olaf College’s Center for Experiential Learning is helping us connect with valuable student talent. Currently six students are working on a community-wide business environmental scan and another student is managing Faith Community Gardens.

The families we work with need a path out of poverty. As we create a path we see their traditions, background, experience, aspirations and dreams as some of the most valuable assets that define their determination to succeed and to do what it takes. But what we know too well, is that success in this sector will only come when we design paths that redefine their role in sustainable agriculture, food and natural resources management systems. Just preparing people to “get jobs” in a system will not do it not will it work if all we do it is help them with their life loads a couple of steps and drop them back into the existing structures and systems which are not designed for the poor to succeed to say the least. In creating this path, we are also defining our own institutional role in this new system. We started cold on this journey in 2007; this is our first stop to let our muscles relax, check our loads, re-estimate the path in front of us, and make sure it aligns with the paths of the families we work with.

The path is very long and I hope you will consider joining us. If we work as communities to make more of our food local and sustainable, there is no limit to how many generations can continue to do the same, but we must be systematic in the design of processes, relentless in observing, learning and adapting, and competitive in the launch of new sustainable systems that align with family farm values and can be scaled to deliver for the whole marketplace.

Organized by the student group Oles to Action, the students have been tabling outside the cafeteria for a “Sponsor A Chicken” program, including chicken coloring book pages and trivia about Latino Agripreneurs.

This weekend, the students are sponsoring a charity rave dance for REC (I proposed we figure out some Latin-dance classes and fiestas with the Apripreneurs in the future).

Oles to Action is a student-led organization that seeks to inform the St. Olaf student body of current social issues in the global community, facilitating a bridge of support between Oles and organizations which are working with these issues. Coordinators Thando and Alyssa told me they became involved with service at St. Olaf through  Haiti relief efforts last year. After attending a film screening about the Invisible Children of Uganda at St. Olaf this fall, they decided to form an organization to  keep on spreading student awareness and support to other efforts, international and at their backdoor. We’re thrilled they chose to work with Rural Enterprise Center this term.

Oles to Action represents one of the great resources Northfield has in its colleges. As a recent Carleton grad, I resonate with the desire of many students to get out of the  respective campus “bubbles” and participate in the local and international community. There are challenges to this, of course, as students are most often temporary residents here and do not always get to dig in very deeply, or commit sufficient time towards understanding and dismantling the structural issues that perpetuate injustice, inequality, and myriad other issues in our communities. But the opportunities for real student engagement with Northfield community issues just continue to deepen, expand, and grow.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to stick around Northfield and dive into this work I could only barely dip my toes into as an overloaded Carleton student. I am overjoyed to work with enthusiastic students like these, who want to put action in education and serve this community that helps make our colleges so great.

The 2011 season cost for a 25 by 25 foot garden plot is $25. That includes water, mulch and maintenance costs. Gardeners may apply for more than one plot, and scholarships are available. The gardens are located just north of Northfield on Highway 3, behind Benjamin Bus Company.

“With food prices projected to rise, and more people plugged into the value of local foods, we expect the garden plots to go quickly, ” said Jim Blaha, executive director of the Community Action Center. “Last year, more than 30 families and groups worked in the gardens, getting to know each other and growing great, healthy food.”

Plot applications and garden scholarships are available at the Community Action Center of Northfield at 1651 Jefferson Parkway. If you have questions, contact Katie Blanchard here at the REC Office,  (507) 786-9900.

Although today we had individuals from as far as Saint Cloud, the goal is to concentrate our efforts in the Southern half of the state with an even more dedicated effort targeting five counties between interstate 35W and the Wisconsin border.

Informational meetings have been scheduled for every first Saturday of the month at 10 am at the REC offices, 105 E fourth street Northfield, and every first Monday of the month at 6 pm at the same location. Presentations are also being scheduled in partnership with organizations in the region as we identify new partnerships. This effort will significantly improve the public education about our work and our partners and the ability of families to fully participate in community life, establish permanent roots and participate and contribute to our rural communities in a meaningful way.

This outreach work started on the first week of February and will continue as long as families keep coming and responding to our calls or until our programs are fully populated. The goal for this year is to reach 300 families through informational sessions. From this larger group, a selected number of families will participate in one day intensive home ownership and financial management training. An even smaller group will qualify to participate REC’s poverty reduction and assets and wealth creation strategy through sustainable agriculture farming enterprise development.

The families that will enter the Agripreneurship Training Program at the REC are being trained to play a key role in the sustainable food and agriculture system that we are deploying regionally. This new system is part of a much larger and robust process to redefine the role of minority families in the sustainable food and agriculture system. We seek to significantly influence this role from one of primarily providing cheap labor, to one of defining, owning and benefiting from this emerging industry in the country.

During this last part of January and February we will be finishing the mobile poultry processing facility design, applying for a building permit for the fixed infrastructure to conduct biological treatment of effluent from poultry processing and preparing the plan for the building of these infrastructure. Other parallel tracks are also moving forward like the overall business planning for the Hillside Farmers Cooperative, the hiring of an outreach coordinator for our region, hiring of an agripreneur training program and community farm manager, putting together the financial package for the launch of farming operations to support the launch of the cooperative, etc.

As we move forward in all of these fronts, we are thankful for the many partners, volunteers, and funders that make this work possible. Stay tuned for future postings where we will be profiling these partnerships and the key roles they play in launching a new food and agriculture system in our region.

We have started the launch process for the very first farmers cooperative led by new immigrant families in partnership with established but struggling small farmers in SE Minnesota. This process has resulted in a solid plan to launch the cooperative under an economic clustering strategy that allows us to incorporate up to 14 symbiotically related farm and food enterprises, both economically and ecologically while incraesing the efficiencies of small enterprises and the value of the family farm.

This and much more is at the center of our strategic approach to building a new ecology of food from table to farmer in a way that makes sense, can be sustained from an energy and ecological perspective and that delivers a new system of relationships, networks, support infrastructure, and overall a new agriculture and food system that is competitive, resilient, accessible for people living in poverty while delivering high levels of benefits for all involved.

These are some of the examples of the work we do and the reason we would like to think that you want to make a contribution, one that keeps giving back to our own communities.