We see possibilities.
Sunday, February 5, 2012
Posted by admin on September 19, 2011
Join the conversation on “Food Justice — Not Just for Foodies” on Tuesday, Sept. 20, 5:30 p.m. at Minneapolis’ Riverview Cafe and Wine Bar.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on April 22, 2011
As a child growing up back in Guatemala, I worked in the fields with my father,
uncles and my brothers. Our land, is still in the family under the care of my youngest brother Elias. It is located about 1.5 hours walk from where my family lives in the Barrio Ixobel in the municipality of Poptún in the Northern rainforest province of Petén.
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:
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.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on February 17, 2011
I posted Kate Taylor’s “goodbye Minnesota” note as she finished her work with the Rural Enterprise Center. The final product of her work includes three video recordings intended as complementary material for community leaders in other communities where we foresee developing new agripreneurs. I have added this material to the page with the full description of this approach, if you follow our work, this is a very important update.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on December 9, 2010
All That We Share, by Jay Walljasper is a book about the things we share/own/control in common in our society in the U.S. and around the world. Jay also wrote another piece in the fall for Yes Magazine, called 51 Ways to Spark a Commons Revolution. We are on page 105 and 105 of All That We Share.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on November 13, 2010
Last night, I attended a Transition Northfield presentation by Richard Heinberg, senior Fellow-in-Residence at the Post Carbon Institute in California. Although he did not addressed the long-term solutions to the problem, he effectively addressed the challenge we face in our near 100% fossil fuel dependent society. The work we do at the Rural Enterprise Center fits within this overall picture as a new generation looks at scalable and sustainable solutions to our local economies, food and living systems in a way that we can re-design the way we produce and use energy, food, living spaces, communities, etc. I also checked their website and found this quick 5 minute slide show quite informative, check it out below.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on October 15, 2010
Although we have produced many thousands of meat broilers over the last couple of years as part of our systems design, both at our one acre experimental farm in Northfield and at the 80 acres Cannon Falls prototype farm, we have only scratched the surface of growing heritage breeds under a scalable system, that is about to change.
The first thing is to get to know the birds from a practical standpoint. Heritage breeds need a very different environment, they roam long distances, they eat a lot more bugs, scratch the soil and dig up warms and minerals to supplement their diets in ways that meat broilers can only think of doing.
Managing the environment around animals is the key to raising them in a healthy way, space is only important to the extent that they are not so crowded that they destroy the health of the environment around them. Density then is measured on different factors, outside density (for ecological management purposes), and indoor density (to shelter and protect them). The square footage inside buildings then is only relevant for nighttime shelter as during the day, only a few stay. On the other hand, during winter months, the tighter the space in between them, the better. In fact they get very close to each other on their own to keep themselves warm. Larger buildings are not only counterproductive in free range systems, but also an unnecessary expense. When poultry is raised in confinement, most of the manure is also deposited inside the building, ventilation becomes a need and dust and light control become real problems. In our free range systems, winter facilities have an insulated night shelter, and daytime roaming area under a solarium where an environment is created to replicate spring-like conditions during the coldest months of the winter. On warm winter days, they go outside anyway.
Our heritage breed growing system has just gone through another year of development and we are almost ready to embark in a formal experiment with a new farm in Cannon Falls to scale this up. So far, the best scenario to create the appropriate environment (large ranging areas, lots of bugs, pasture, etc.) for egg and meat (dual purpose) birds is in combination with a cattle operation, so we are taking what we have learned in our experimental space and will scale it to a regular operation and test it in the coming years.
This new stage, will provide us with the data needed to establish the benchmarks to define the relationship between cattle pastures/paddocks, design of buildings for flocks of birds large enough to manage the paddocks, and the mechanization of chores, such as feeding and watering year round, and most importantly, the collection and management of eggs. The environment for the animals is the key to their quality of life, how we do the rest will be up to the systems we can dream up, after all there are engineers, architects and systems experts willing to help with the mechanical aspects of making work on the farms easier, without compromising the principles and energy flows that make them efficient and sustainable in the long run from the stand point of sustaining the family farms and the ecology around them.
Below is a slideshow of the current ranging area where we raised White Rock heritage birds. The paddocks represent a very diverse eco-system and the management of these system is where the keys to healthy birds are (among other things you observe mulched areas from left-over sweet corn stalks for worm production and carbon:nitrogen balance, fruit trees and hazelnuts for shade and protection as well as soil conditioning and micro and macro biological management, and grassy areas for access to bugs, greens and sprouted small grains).
Birds raised this way eat very little regular feed inside their barn and they seem to take long naps during the sunny or warmer parts of the day. But they are hardly inside early and late in the day and during cloudy days, unless laying eggs (notice that the paddocks are also managed so there is no incentive for them to lay eggs somewhere else but their boxes).
We hope this gives you a glimpsed into the principles that define these new farming systems that we are developing, through them we seek to maximize the vocation of farmers, create wealth in rural communities while adding to regional economic competitive advantages, and the maximization of the production capacity of the ecology. Everything we come up with is designed to be scalable so that they can compete effectively in the large scale context of replacing unhealthy food products in the marketplace.
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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