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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.

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.

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.

The Cannon River SFA Chapter will hold their annual meeting at 3:30 p.m. following the Farm To School program. Electing officers and planning activities for 2011 are up for discussion.

This event is free to the public but please RSVP to kzeman@kmwb.net or (507) 664-9446 by Jan. 26.

My presentation at the Wedge’s annual meeting will focus on the larger opportunities for systematic changes that we can initiate through larger partnerships, the deployment of new cooperative enterprises and structured and deliberate steps that can be taken to transform the flow of healthy foods from farm to table at a larger scale. At the Rural Enterprise Center we work all of these within a larger systems development framework, as we pursue these objectives in the transformation of food and agriculture systems, we incorporate principles for social responsibility, fair trade and ecological sustainability in a way that is scalable to meet real market demands for healthy products.