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 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 November 19, 2010
2010 farming season has finished as far as being out in the fields is concerned, but planning, building infrastructure and preparing for 2011 is just started. In the coming months, there will be a lot of activity at the Rural Enterprise Center. First, we will be hiring 2 new staff to run the community farm/training program out of the Carlson property in Northfield. Second, we will finish the design and build a poultry processing facility, unless the feasibility analysis shows that this is a business we shouldn’t get into, but as we progress in the process we are finding more reasons for a project implementation. Third, we will formally start the organizational process to launch a network of drop-sites in the whole metro area, including the 7 counties with a focus on 4 of them where we have identified the largest market potential for poultry.
Launching the processor and organizing a large network of drop-sites is the starting point for the scalability of production and reaching out to wholesale accounts to build volumes and launch the first cluster of 8 poultry farms and at least 10 other enterprise operations from related enterprises. These and other activities are in front of us as we prepare to establish a strong presence in our regional markets and get the first cooperative launch, we look forward to engaging even more of our established partners and starting new relationships, specially in the market and distribution area of our business infrastructure.
From now on, I will link all of the postings as each article comes up. This you will have all of the stories related to The New Ecology of Food and our strategies and planning to develop processes and systems to scale up what works in sustainable agriculture so we can meet market demands, expand the economic frontier for sustainable agriculture products and create an identity for sustainability, one beyond individual claims and labels.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on July 10, 2010
I am writing this blog to create a record of some great things that happened at our demonstration site in the last two days. Although, barely one acre total, this place is becoming a magnet for activity, people come here to figure things out, to plan, to share ideas, to ponder and to celebrate and finish hard working days on their own farming operations.
Starting on Thursday, we had a group of Saint Olaf College students led by Kris Estenson from the Center for Experiential Learning (CEL), their purpose was to look close up the issues of social responsibility and how change can come about by dealing with structural and systematic failures, especially in the food and agriculture sector. We studied the issues of vulnerable children, learning delays and other disadvantages directly originated by the lack of access to food or access to too much junk food. The discussion was lively and the farm tour full of great questions.
Friday afternoon, we had the new Arts and Agriculture bilingual camp. A nice group of 1st through 5th grade kids signed up. Led by Miguel Perez, Lucy Celis and Amy Haslett-Marroquin this camp brings kids together to be exposed to a different culture on a setting where they are free to share, learn, play and explore food production, healthy living, and cooking from scratch at its best (actually starting by harvesting the products they will cook, giving the idea a whole new meaning).
Two of these kids were itching to do some “farm work”, especially taking care of the little chickens. So they got their wish, Garrett and Jose washed the automatic watering fountains in the ranging fields and then spread barley that would sit overnight and soften for the birds to eat the next morning. The mix also included camelina (Camelina sativa) and comm on flax (Linum usitatissimum L.) seeds, both rich in omega 3 fatty acids. Not that the the young ones knew this or wanted to know for now, but the time will come when with properly nourished curiosity they will ask the right questions. For now, it is just about their curiosity for food and farming not going unattended.
Towards the end of the day, Maria Sosa and her black bean farm crew came over from their operation in Cannon Falls, I had marinated a bunch of our own free range chicken, Amy (my wife), had cooked a pot of black turtle beans, we harvested and cooked onions and other garden herbs, threw in a pot of rice and had a great dinner. Even the kids agreed this was a good evening although the soccer game they had picked, seem more important. After dinner, someone picked up a guitar, we made a bonfire and had some good conversation about life and mundane things that need to be ruminated to complete a full day’s worth of hard work and celebration.
As all of these went on, on a different corner of the farm, another crew under the leadership of Federico Vargas, put together an arrangement of equipment, a trailer, and a home-made shelter so that they can offer poultry processing on the farm for the many small flock growers in our region that are left on a limb when it comes time to process their family’s poultry flock. The purpose of the group is to go out to farmers who have raised chickens and need processing, bring the equipment, and help the farmers do the job.
Many farmers we are in touch with raise small flocks, sometimes under 50 birds, but then have to load them on the back of trucks and drive 50 or 100 miles to a meat packing plant, pay high prices to get their birds processed and then have to go pick them again and bring them home. This is not fair for the farmers who just want healthy foods on their farm, nor for the animals who suffer unnecessarily while the meat quality deteriorates. This group will take all of the pain away from the processing of these small flocks and do it right on the farm. Farmers who don’t have time or resources to put together an efficient system of their own, won’t have to do it, at least if they get in touch with Federico.
As perennial crops (fruit trees and hazelnuts) get established in this small demonstration site we run, we also get ready for many more gatherings like this, planned or unplanned, it doesn’t matter. For the younger folks, some “un-planning” makes the place more attractive, as long as we structure it well, young people will always get a fulfilling experience. Some fun unplanned stuff like bonfires can happen whenever there is grilling, a guitar handy and friends. The chickens always need care, the chores are always there and everything is prepared for anyone to do them so the kids interested in this jumped right in with some short instructions.
Many of us have learned that we shouldn’t plan kids out of their childhood, but we can surely plan a lot around their childhood, so when they are ready to be helpful they don’t feel left out of the adult structures and when they grow up they won’t go around thinking that food comes from the store and farmers are of a lesser social class. Animals and farms seem to generate kid’s desire to do things naturally (as long as the chore is not obligatory). For kids living on farms, the thrill comes from being able to show off their skills like my daughter and her friend who know how to milk goats by hand. For Hipanic/Latino farmers, it is the place where they have wisdom to pass on and an command respect, a concept slipping away in new generation immigrants who see their parents as obsolete and backwards. The demonstration site is planned to be just the way young people like things, unplanned (at least as far as they can see), fun and meaningful, but also “on their own terms.” If that is what it takes to get young people into sustainable agriculture, healthy lifestyles and healthy eating, then be it, as long as it works and the systems we develop don’t structurally and systematically leave vulnerable children living in poverty behind. We are happy to put our minds into designing and planning systems that are ready to do this, we hope you will join us in celebrating and supporting this kind of culture that brings about true “agri-culture” we so much need to make our rural communities healthier.
Posted by Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin on May 29, 2009
Spring 2009 hit us like a rock, I have been so busy it has been hard to set aside time to write about our recent progress, but here is a quick overview of areas where some significant developments have been achieved.
One area of development that is now completed is the training of a manager operator and the launching of a grain processing and distribution system. We now have completed securing equipment (some borrowed from farmers, some purchased used, and so on), trained an operator and stocked 250,000 lbs of different organic grains and supplements to ensure a reliable feed supply to grow into the next level of poultry production in the Northfield area economic cluster (32 acres of poultry production, 450 acres of grain production and fully supporting one poultry processing facility) under development.
We also added capacity to grow 2,000 more birds to existing infrastructure and installed the pilot test for a fully outdoors automatic watering and feeding system, making our first one acre production unit fully operational. Currently, we are working on setting up two new sites and have started the training process to ensure that once the sites are fully equipped that there will be two families ready to operate them, their involvement in setting up the system is a key part of their training as it is expected that they will mentor new farmers in the coming years.
Our current grain processing should be able to support up to four families producing poultry on 32 acres for a total between 105,000 to 150,000 birds and between 450 and 500 acres of small grain production. This cluster of farmers will also support up to 20 acres of vegetable production, in preparation for this related farming enterprises, we have started the training of a value added vegetable processing operation in partnership with a local school with a certified commercial kitchen. Although the goal of deploying this cluster will take a couple of years to achieve with recruitment and training of families as the bottleneck of the process, once this first cluster is fully deployed, our ability to train other families will also increases exponentially, especially if our plan to launch an Agripreneur Training Center materializes in the coming year. This training facility will handle 12 specialized farming enterprise opportunities, each targeting a specific market opportunity in the food and agriculture marketplace.
A huge step forward in building a scalable food and agriculture system under the leadership of Latino families is that we have been able to establish key partnerships with established farmers, and have a large numbers of them on the partnership line-up seriously committed to taking land out of current production and shifting it to our system beginning this fall.
Another big sign of progress is that we were able to set-up 105 community garden plots which have served in the past as a screening mechanism to identify serious farmers within the Northfield community. Having identified community gardens as a strategic component of our system, we have started working with Red Wing’s community garden and helped organize a large contingent of Latino families in Dodge City to get another community garden launched there under local leadership. We were also blessed with the presence of Katie Blanchard, a student at Carleton College who is now the coordinator of the Northfield community garden. This extra support has allowed us to tend to other communities and businesses farther away from our center of operations in Northfield who had requested our assistance in the past.
Aside from the “on the ground” work, we also trained restaurant owners on business management and participated in opening a new site for Plaza Morena Mexican Restaurants in Madelia, MN.
Here is a slide show with more pictures reflecting results from our business training program, business support area (supporting the process for new business to get started) and some photos from our poultry production system including our efforts to establish heritage breeds as a critical and competitive part of re-generating our regional food systems in a sustainable way.
Part of the process of re-engaging natural food systems includes growing conventional commercial breeds under new systems where birds roam freely and green pastures are available as a food supplement and to improve their health and their immunological resistance to deceases. Growing poultry outdoors is a very important step in growing high quality poultry meat which is fundamentally based on the quality and health of the birds themselves. This is something that CANNOT be achieved in confinement or factory livestock farming. Our Latino heritage, assets, traditions, culture and knowledge in poultry production that we bring from Latin America becomes one of the most precious assets for getting people out of poverty while building a sustainable food system that grows in diversity of production as more families become involved. Our end goal is to derive an attractive return on investment for asset rick Latino families who currently live in economic poverty and by doing so, engage them in a new way of thinking about their role in this country, their contributions to this economy and the future of their children which includes their education, civic engagement and gaining the respect that we deserve as net contributors to our rural 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...
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.
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.
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.
