Rural Enterprise Center

I had a chance to spend time with the organizers and the judges from America in Bloom (AIB) who were in Northfield yesterday judging some of Northfield’s projects that were entered into the national contest.

Our Community Garden was one of the projects profiled and I was invited to have lunch with the judges, the Northfield area organizers, and the Jesse James Gang at their camp by the Cannon River right in the middle of town but secluded enough that one of the gang members dressed in full attire (from the time of the bank robbers), had to show everyone the small path through the woods down to the river.

At the river, a chuck wagon was set-up and a delicious lunch cooked in an open fire, all while there were plenty of “Corona” beer for the judges with the hope their eyesight and clarity of mind could be turned into our favor for a positive profile of the projects they were about to visit.

We were also delighted with some acapella music from an impromptu performance by a well known local group that includes David Legbold, a neighbor farmer who also runs the Cannon River Watershed Partnership. All in all, it was a great break from the office work and an amazing opportunity to enjoy the Cannon river in a very different setting that took us back to an old style of outdoors living.

Here is a book reference that I just received from Juan Marinez at the University of Michigan.  He sends a lot of stuff our way, but this specific one touches on such a massive issue that we are living through, one in which we are directly involved through the enterprises we sponsor, and one that needs to be fixed globally very fast.

A bad habit they can’t give up

Jul 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition

The End of Food
By Paul Roberts
Houghton Mifflin; 416 pages; $26.00. Bloomsbury; £12.99
Buy it at
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk

IT IS hard to get a grip on food. The UN’s World Health Organization worries about diminishing supplies and increased prices in poor countries; recent riots and near-riots in Haiti, Bangladesh and Egypt were sparked by the growing cost of wheat and rice. But, as Paul Roberts observes in “The End of Food”, the developed world has lived through “a near miraculous period during which the things we ate seemed to grow only more plentiful, more secure, more nutritious, and simply better.” In the second half of the 20th century, world output of corn, wheat and cereal crops more than tripled. Yet there is not enough to feed the rich, the aspirational and the poor in the world. A golden age has been transformed quite suddenly into a global crisis.

Mr Roberts insists that modern agribusiness is unsustainable and becoming more so. “Precisely at the moment in history when we need to shift our system of food production into overdrive, our agricultural engine is breaking down,” he says. The industry has taken cheap oil for granted. Oil fuels transportation and farm machinery, and natural gas is the basis of synthetic nitrogen production (prices have tripled since 2002). Agriculture accounts for three-quarters of freshwater use, and water is becoming an increasingly scarce and expensive resource. Climate change makes some old assumptions about farming redundant. A combination of these factors, he says, will ultimately force a complete rethinking of the way we make food.

For years government subsidies held down grain prices, making food cheaper. Water was also plentiful—it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce a ton of grain—and an ingenious process known as Haber-Bosch makes synthetic nitrogen fertilizer easily available to grain farmers. Ruthless price-cutting at supermarkets means consumers have grown accustomed to eating too much. (In the late 19th century, Europeans already thought Americans ate three or four times more than was necessary.) The most damaging consequence is that by 2000 31% of American adults were obese, with another 16% defined as overweight. American airlines spend $275m a year more on fuel simply to lift the heavier passengers. Mr Roberts claims that every year obesity causes 400,000 premature deaths in America. Food has become as deadly as tobacco.

A fruitful start would be to halve the size of portions in all American restaurants, but most consumers are reluctant rethinkers. Eating organic produce could be a partial solution, although one study suggests that the cost of avoiding intensive farm chemicals would mean a 31% increase in food prices. Government scientists believe that genetically modified crops might be the only way out of the crisis, but a majority of consumers are reluctant to listen.

Is there a model for the future? Fashionably, Mr Roberts believes that a local system based on easily obtainable seasonal foods that do not need to be transported huge distances would form part of a solution. The economics and greenery of this are far from proven. Mr Roberts can find only one country that has made “serious efforts” in this direction: Cuba, hardly a comforting example. The coming food crisis, warns the author, is as intractable as global warming, and no less urgent.

The End of Food.
By Paul Roberts.
Houghton Mifflin; 416 pages; $26.00.
Bloomsbury; £12.99

Story telling is a tradition in our family in Guatemala and I have tried to keep it alive privately. Today I want to see if I can tell you a story with modern tools. In the following paragraphs, I will tell you the story of the Latino Enterprise Center (LEC) and our work in Northfield, Minnesota. I will be mixing pictures, slide shows, and live links to web sites with background information, but with a format to keep with the flow of our traditional story telling (which isn’t much more than passing on an experience or knowledge).

Coming to Northfield

When I came with my family to Northfield in the fall of 2006 we were looking for a piece of farm land, with space for sheep, goats, a cow, maybe a horse, and plenty of space for vegetables, trees and of course hazelnut bushes. After much searching, we did find a place we could afford, almost two acres, enough space for our gardening, but not much for everything else, still, we panted 200 hazelnuts in the back 1 acre and tilled half the front lawn into a garden.

After getting established in town and understanding the community, I realized that working with the Latino communities in the region presented a great opportunity and a challenge to keep utilizing my previous experiences and education. As an entrepreneur and having a background in business development, I figured I better concentrate in this area.

The Program Design and Building Blocks

In December of 2006, there were various immigration raids targeting people of Latino/a background across Midwest states. I monitored their impact in our local community as a way to gather materials for strategically thinking how to do my work and manage the risks associated with such massive and expensive disruptions to regular life in our rural towns. As a result of the devastating effect that these raids had in my home community in Northfield, I led a series of gatherings that culminated in building a large support network and resource pool for the support of a larger initiative (the LEC). This process also allowed me to reach out to over 200 individual Latino families and overall handed out over 1200 “know your constitutional rights” information packages, and organized 4 community gatherings with total participation in excess of 500 individuals and a network of 55 community volunteers.

This process provided enough critical strategic planning information and data (on potential entrepreneurs) to develop a plan for launching the Latino Enterprise Center. The Center’s focus was to target entrepreneurs as a way to build the community’s capacity to make its presence more visible and simultaneously deal with issues of poverty by creating literally “home grown” new economic opportunities. This development however, needs to happen within the context of sustainable systems, such as a deep understanding for energy use, environmental impacts, economic and social implications locally, and understanding of the conditions that had kept folks unable to take initiative and leadership in the past.

Managing and Financing the Start-Up and Launch

Main Street Project in Minneapolis adopted the Latino Enterprise Center as one of its programs right from the start and put its fundraising resources to work for this new program while providing the start-up investment needed. The Northfield Enterprise Center provided the LEC with needed office space, and the Northfield CAC with extra needed funding to start doing local work.

Since then, we have supported many entrepreneurs get started, grow their business, change their strategy, close their existing failing enterprises and get back on their feet, and walked alongside hardworking folks who need a lot more intense support to transition from their current two jobs into their own business that can be transformed into the second job and eventually (if successful) their only job.

Thinking Strategically for Maximum Results

We established two main work tracks, In-town Enterprises and Agripreneurs, or farming operations. We then went on to build a statewide, regional and local support infrastructure that would allow the local enterprises to reduce the risks of doing business, get started or grow. For the LEC, establishing these infrastructure required strong regional and statewide leadership, which in turn shaped our programs and established our position statewide in terms of new, more entrepreneurial, and simpler ways of thinking and organizing processes for rural Latino community integration and development strategies.

Building community and the ability of our entrepreneurs to also develop as leaders is a priority for our long-term success as Latinos in rural settings. In our process of encouraging grassroots community building, we have developed a community garden, one of the most effective ways of bringing people together in a natural, relaxed and structured way, but without pressures or specific agendas, except to meet and produce food. Though the project took a long time to put together, plan, secure resources, etc. we now have 48 plots being used and 5 1/2 more acres to expand into in the coming years.

As a way to position a group of new entrepreneurs in a growing food sector, the LEC organized a poultry production operation in the fall of 2007 and launched it in the spring of 2008. Much of what has been done has been documented and this story has been told piece by piece in our weblog, and our local newspaper and organizations.

We have also supported building and remodeling initiatives and as wide and varied enterprises as catering and a Latino Religious Music Band. We are not good at everything, but we are good at aligning the resources so that entrepreneurs find a place to start, turn-around, or to grow their businesses when they find us.

Our program design and community involvement strategy has allowed us to run a lean, and effective operation. Our approach has also been designed to fit existing economic development systems in rural communities across Minnesota, so we have now started to work with folks in many other areas. Since what we do is not superficial, our process involves building strong community foundations and establishing of leaders in different sectors of a town’s economy, while maintaining a constant watch of critical issues that affect the community’s life and consequently our ability to do our job effectively. In short, our approach requires well thought out, strong and well developed support infrastructure which we have mapped out and organized at three strategic levels.

Building a Support Infrastructure

We have established a strong network of supporters who donate resources in the form office space, furniture, land, seeds, farm products that we distribute in the community, mentoring, training, interns to help us get the job done, and financial donations that cover our operations. Among our key supporters we count the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, the Northfield Area Foundation, the Northfield Area Community Action Center, the Northfield Area United Way, CROP Walk, local banks, over 75 individuals, St. Dominic Church, and regional and national foundations that support our general operations.

We can now say that we have a fully functional program, we are part of a large (over 32 and growing) network of Latino/a leaders statewide working to re-design the Minnesota Collaborative for Strong Latino Communities so that we establish an organization capable of delivering strategic support, at the right time and place, and that our rural regions are included. We have established a large network of partners with whom we coordinate outreach and program implementation. Both of these networks fall into our main two tracks, agriculture and general enterprises.

Our approach fully engages the established economic systems in communities were we have a presence, but works within them as a way to maximize the use of existing resources, while not being complacent and forgetting our individual traditions and culture, in fact, it is through sharing and adding value to who we are in relationship to our new communities, that we plan to preserve, enhance and grow our traditions and culture. Working in partnership with existing business support systems allows us to add value and markets to these organizations, while ensuring that we effectively bring a sustained string of well established resources to emerging and growing Latino/a entrepreneurs in rural communities.

If we are still missing key support systems after existing resources have been tapped, it is time to roll up our sleeves and come together to create what is missing, but in an environment where we are an intrinsic part of our new home communities, not an isolated group of people of a different background and skin color. This won’t happen overnight and it is easier said than done as many of you reading may be already thinking, but I assure you that it is being done and it is possible. This approach works because it follows logic, the history of immigrants into this country, is based on common sense and an sense of entrepreneurship, it is also the fastest, less expensive, and more sustainable way to achieve healthier rural communities where the Latino population has been growing.

In Conclusion

This approach and way of thinking is not only needed to re-vitalize our communities, but also in order to bring more investment into healthier economic survival for our rural communities, integrating the growing Latino sector is key for this to happen in the long term, and the scarce resources now available must be invested for the maximum return possible. Our story is one of building success for Latino families by building the infrastructure that allows folks to achieve their dream with the least amount of resources, and then multiply them so that they can build assets and capacity in the economic, intellectual and social aspects of their lives.

Seriously, I had a visit today by Debra K. Walchuk, State Outreach Coordinator for the US Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service. She is based out of Bemidji and took time her regional schedule to stop by.

With Debra, came Jeffery L. Koster, RC&D coordinator for the Hiawatha Valley region also of the same agency. We reviewed basic components of the Latinos in Agriculture Program that we have been working with, what it will take to put together a training center for new farmers in our region, and how to convert our current experiences into a regional opportunity for promoting the outreach for their agency to Latino farmers.

Jeffery has a wealth of networks with resources for Latino farmers, among those resources are pasture raised pork and other livestock, opportunities to work with him on specific issues such as documentation of our current experimentation with medicinal plants to improve our poultry’s immune system and how it may translate into better quality meat, etc.

I see possibilities working with the USDA, given their size and scope though, I know that we must concentrate our relationship on one project that we can start and complete effectively. Building an enterprise training center based on sustainable farming systems on the Manor’s farm by 35W and Hwy 1 in Dundas (next to Northfield), seems like the project that may put us in a path to a partnership. To this partnership we have brought a larger network of organizations working with small and emerging farmers in the state. This visit goes a long way in continuing to build the support infrastructure to successfully launch Latino/a farmers in the state.

I believe that Jeff and Debra’s outreach program and conservation can directly participate in our plan to engage Paula Manor and her Husband and their 35 acre farm that they have offered to us. To meet our and their (farm owners’) goals, we are designing a farming center that would reflect a diversity of people, cultures, and diversified and sustainable farming systems. We are now coming together with a solid proposal if we combine all of the experiences that we are accumulating in our region plus the support that this agency may be able to provide through the statewide office and through Jeff in our region.

As usual, I will keep you all posted on what gets accomplished as things happen.