Natividad Lopez, his wife, their two kids and his three friends and their families joined together to grow 2 acres of black turtle beans and harvested 2,000 pounds this year. Maybe this sort of information is not news by itself, especially since black turtle beans are grown in large amounts by industrial farms
in Michigan primarily, where an acre can produce upwards of 3000 lbs of conventionally grown improved varieties. The newsworthy part of this story won’t come out of the production data, here is the real scoop.
Natividad is from El Salvador, and as his friends, grew up in traditional rural Latin America. Black turtle beans is a staple food from Southern Mexico to the Southern tip of the continent. They are consumed with corn tortillas, fried eggs, squash, potatoes and other simple to grow and easy to process and store foods. For many rural Latin American communities, these foods represent the full diet for a family.
Though we don’t expect this small production to be a simbol of a new industry for rural Minnesota right away, the experience does have the potential to become an alternative source of income for rural Latino farmers. Most importantly though, this source of fresh product, and the process of joining forcers to produce something of common value goes beyond the conventional understanding of the business “bottom line”. It takes a family from feeling hopeless, into the opening of possibilities that come as a result of tackling a major destination of their income, their daily food needs. Now that they have done this for a season, the possibilities of an enterprise utilizing their already acquired talents becomes more reallistic proposition.
Growing your own food is something one would normally do in rural El Salvador, Guatemala and other Latin American countries. When these families migrate to the U.S., this connection to the land is lost together with the hope of regaining it. With the lack of access to land goes the traditional diet, the lifestyle associated with this simple way of living, and the sense of pride and self-sufficiency, further deteriorating the sense of hope and opportunity. Socially, the family also losses the place where they take the kids after school and where they are thought values, the ethic of hard work, are kept from trouble in the streets, etc.
At first sight, this project does not look like much, but if looked in depth and at its net worth, it is a milestone for these families. As an economic development program we are here to build the infrastructure so that these families awake to the many resources around them and use them to build their new enterprises. At the center of these new enterprises is the mission of improving each family’s economy based on their own existing assets (cultural, economic, traditions, etc.)
These strategy has proven to be an effective way to giving value to the contributions of these folks to small rural communities, to building a support infrastructure to bring diverse opportunities to these areas, and an strategic way to capitalize on these folks assets to maximize results, minimize risk and leght of time that it takes to get things done, consequently, lowering the cost of these proceses alltogether.
If poverty has a direct connection with earnings, then avoiding the bleeding of the little earnings in the family must be part of the solution. Having produced a large amount of their own food supply, means that more of the earnings stay in the family. Growing the food close to home means that it won’t be shipped accross the country with the subsequent polution and cost associated with transportion in our current food distribution system. For a family of 4 or 5 with one employed adult earning $10 or less an hour, having access to a food production plot is a gold mine.
We work in economic development, we target the entrepreneurs in rural communities, but our aim is at the folks with the least opportunities, those who have real use for a program of our nature, so at the end, we are here to address the needs of the poor through the enterprise protential among them. In the fight against poverty, obesity, diabetes, poor quality food in the conventional system, high food 
transportation costs, and other economic factors that push poor families further into cycles of poverty, the possibilities that this model of engagement represents could be one of the most important real answers to how we win this fight in rural communities where food production can be achieved in large scale with a small scale approach.
As we add this scenario to the over 40 families in our community garden, the three market gardening operations, and the many “agripreneurs” emerging from our different projects, the agregated value is
starting to show real results at a larger scale. We have also structured this process to be replicable in other rural communities, through a process of adaptation to the local needs, interest, and resources available.
