It is until very recently that people in the millions have started to fully understand the flaws of the way our economies are organized and how our food and other components of such economy have never really ammounted to much sustainable or intelligent designing. Maybe from a scientific or technical point of view many in academia and big corporations can say yes, but it only works for a very small portion of our population, that is not what can be called an intelligent system, even the very rich know they can’t live in a world where most people are poor or left to fetch for themselves at the blink of an eye of the economic superpowers.

We need new strategies, new ways and new models to measure what we do and how, the time to listen to the unheard voices of reason, that have been pushed aside for generations has come.

Here is a link to a great video by Vandana Shiva, a global leader who understand why it is important that we take the land and rural communities back and re-engage in long lost true food and energy production partnerships with our urban counterparts.

Overall we are in a D1 or Moderate Drought condition for our part of the state, although we have had some heavy storms and even flooding as many may remember from the Winona county floodings earlier this year. What we need to look at is the fact that floodings are usually the result of unbalance rain-fall pattern and do not necessarily contribute to moisture levels deep into the ground.

Because many of our farming projects depend on good moisture levels on the ground and we have had trouble maintaining it this year even with some access to water, this rain is a blessing from the sky. All of us need food and in order for the soil to grow it, it needs good levels of rain in the fall before it freezes, water works better if it is soaked into the ground than when it runs over frozen ground in the spring and washes the soil away.

At the Rural Enterprise Center, we work with our agripreneurs in understanding these cycles and have acquired knowledge and found mentors to help with farm management practices that incorporate nature’s cycles and our food production systems. As we prepared to let the soil rest for the winter we have planted cover crops that help keep the weed pressure down in the spring, hold the soil together and provide a shelter for the complex microsystems that live right under our feet.

As we look out in the horizon, we feel that this rain is a mixed blessing, as many fields are now bared and exposed after their crop is taken away and the soil plowed under. This so called “conventional” agriculture practices cause the washing away of much needed topsoil. We see it go down the ditches, into creeks, down river system and eventually down to the golf of Mexico’s dead zone. With the soil, goes all of the chemicals that were applied to the crops and were not used-up and are sitting ready to be carried away by the wind or rain water.

One example is our two acre black bean field from this last season, which is now planted with winter rye, doing really good with the current rains, but right accross the dith from us on steeper ground, there are over 100 acres that were planted with sweet corn which came out towards the end of August. Since then, this land has been sitting idle and exposed. The top of the hill lost a lot of soil this year judging from its color. I heard that it takes nature 3000 years to grow 6 inches of soil and that we owe our existence to 6 inches of it, that because of our human activity, we are causing the soil to be moved to where it cannot grow food anymore.

On the other side of our fields, is a farmer who poses a different picture, who grows corn and beans in over 700 acres last time I heard, and has done no-till farming for some years. His field looks quite different, and though it does not have green cover on it, it has the root structure from this year’s crop and mulch from the harvest. This land is also ready to absorve a lot of water while holding its top surface. By the way, BMP, means Best Management Practice and this field is under observation indicated by the sign.

Our garden plots from this year are also put to rest for the winter, while our next year’s garden site grows a healthy cover of oats and hairy vetch, that will extract some of the extra nitrogen that went in as we applied thousands of gallos of manure, and the hairy vetch, which is already fixing atmospheric nitrogen that will be incorporated into the ground in the spring. Let it rain, then, it will make a huge difference for growing food again once it warms up for the 2009 season.

The earth has a bounty of resources, but it cannot “bail” us at the speed that we are ripping it off for too long. Paying more serious attention to these issues it is no longer a matter of choice, it is a matter of survival and if you want to, it is also a matter of national security. If we think about our food systems carefully, it is not hard to realize that we have it backwords, we make ourselves believe that our homes are worth a lot more than they really are, and live under the illusion that food can be produced on the cheap, while all we are really doing is postponing the payments a bit more everyday.

The difference between home overvaluation and the cheap food illusion, is that in the later, we are dealing with nature, and the bail out has already happen. Nature has paid for our irresponsibility though soil run off, by taking our pollution and storing it, in the air, in underwater tables, in the soil, and in corners we have no idea even exist. The earth is so full of our waste, that it is starting to heat up as a result of it, but as nature has always done, it is trying to balance itself out, which will most likely mean some serious shaking and re-arranging. Nature’s new “world order” may mean an environment where we are not welcome. We better start thinking about it harder and doing better as managers of these resources, now that we can.

According to the AEO, ” in the United States, a microenterprise is usually defined as a business with five or fewer employees, small enough to require initial capital of $35,000 or less. AEO estimates there are more than 23 million microenterprises in the U.S. representing 18% of all private U.S. employment and 87% of all businesses.”

When we think of how we can provide Latino-owned busineses in rural communities with the best representation at the highest levels of policy and support infrastructure, AEO is not only a diverse organization in its views but also does represent the core businesses interest that matter to small business and that are the same for everyone no matter the ethnic background of the business owner.

We look forward to making our established local partnerships even stronger as a result of this solid linkage to AEO which represents some of the best thinkers in small scale economic development strategies.

Let’s talk about micro, small and medium entrepreneurs: the ones who don’t beg for bail outs, the ones who make responsible decisions because their own checkbooks will end up paying the consequences of poor decisions and failures. They are some of the bright spots in our economy, the ones who deserve tax cuts, who provide the most return on any investment of taxpayer money, and the ones who contribute to the most job creation at the lowest cost to the nation’s taxpayers.

Last Saturday, October 18th, a group of new entrepreneurs graduated from the Rural Enterprise Center’s first business planning and management series here in Northfield, Minnesota. Though the group is small, and the challenges they face are huge, they represent energy and the hope that our rural communities will thrive despite many challenges.

According to the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund, who produced the CORE FOUR^® curriculum guide used for the training, “The success of the customers of the Northeast Entrepreneur Fund is measured by an 80% business startup survival rate – compared to a national 80% business startup failure rate.”

Knowing what works and the doing what works is our priority here at the Rural Enterprise Center. Although we constantly experiment and work to find new, more effective and efficient ways of getting entrepreneurs off the ground, making sure that we start on the right foot is of the highest priority as we grow our program.

Hard work is ahead, but completion of the four-week training course means that these new business owners are better prepared in terms of speed, professionalism and level of understanding of the planning and management process. The training will allow them to independently make better decisions, and when they feel they lack something, they now have the tools and knowledge to find solutions.

As for the Rural Enterprise Center, we will continue to build the support systems and infrastructure so that these new entrepreneurs can have the best tools and resources available to minimize their risks, maximize their potential for success, and contribute to our local economies.

In these times of economic uncertainty and discouragement, I invite you to think about some of the people who represent hope for better times – individuals whose hard work will help revitalize the economies of rural communities. Small and medium-sized enterprises represent the backbone of this country’s economic system. They deserve our support.

Here is a slideshow of the training course and the graduation ceremony where we were honored with the presence of Tim Penny, president of our sponsor, the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation. Local sponsors include Northfield Community Action Center, First National Bank and Community Resource Bank.

In case you’re wondering what the two men and the little boy are doing in one of the photos: Cristofer, the only four-year-old in the class, tried to get through an opening in the chair and ended up getting stuck. It took some planning to get him out!

NORTHFIELD, Minn., October 16, 2008 – Ten Latino entrepreneurs will graduate from the Rural Enterprise Center’s business training program this Saturday, Oct 18. The training program, the CORE FOUR^® Business Planning Course, was offered in Spanish for the first time in this area. Sponsored by the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation in partnership with the Northfield Area Community Action Center, First National Bank, Community Resource Bank and Wells Fargo Bank, the training is part of a larger regional strategy to build technical, management and planning skills with Latino entrepreneurs in rural Minnesota.

A graduation ceremony will be held at Community Resource Bank Community Room (basement, 1605 Heritage Dr Northfield, MN 55057), this Saturday at 4:00pm. Representatives from each sponsoring bank will be present as the President of SMIF, Tim Penny, presents the certificates of completion to the graduating class. This will be a good opportunity for folks to come and interact with the entrepreneurs.

According to trainers, Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, director of the Rural Enterprise Center, and José Pacas, also with the Center, graduates will understand the basic components of business planning, such as cash flow planning, operations planning and marketing. As part of the program, most participants worked on plans for new businesses, while others improved plans for businesses already in operation.

“What’s unique about this kind of program,” said Marroquin, “ is that we’ll continue to work with these entrepreneurs throughout the development of their business plans and provide assistance once businesses have been launched. We’re focused on their success – not just on providing the training.”

The Rural Enterprise Center, a program of Main Street Project, plans to offer additional business training sessions in Spanish next year.

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The Rural Enterprise Center (formerly Latino Enterprise Center) is a program of Main Street Project. The Rural Enterprise Center’s mission is to strengthen communities by organizing programs, resources and the support infrastructure needed to maximize the success potential of rural Latin@ entrepreneurs. Visit our blog at ruralec.com.

Main Street Project is a grassroots cultural organizing, media justice and economic development initiative working to help rural communities face today’s realities with hope. Visit us at MainStreetProject.org.

In Latin America, local resources are often developed in such as way as to make services and products unaffordable to local folks, and sometimes in direct violation of national constitutions and laws. The target market is people who live far away, in much better economic conditions than the local population. The local population is considered valuable only as labor and local governments useful only as instruments to avoid environmental, labor and other important laws that may exist and originally enacted for the local community’s health.

As much as some would like to point out that resource development by non-local power structures brings job opportunities, what it does, in fact, is render local initiatives and resources to the service of outside interests, creating cycles of poverty that have only exacerbated the migration of people across the continent. As many immigrants find that they are not welcome elsewhere, they return to their original home communities with limited or nonexistent economic opportunities or power.

Economic development in rural Latin America is one of the best strategies for fighting undocumented immigration into the U.S. People across the continent have shown that they have the know-how to developing local opportunities, but the problem is that those opportunities are too often drained by those in power, by people who control the structures that control the local resources, by people who maintain power through political maneuverings and corrupt administrations.

The story below profiles one of these situations. I am posting it here because we work with rural Minnesota communities to develop enterprises with the purpose of linking them to those resources back in their communities of origin. We’re helping people explore opportunities so that they can reclaim some of those resources and have choices about where to raise their families – instead of being forced from their villages by hunger, poverty and lack of opportunities to live in new places where their moral, ethical, and hardworking principles are depreciated to the lowest common denominator. These are the real stories of Latin American immigrants in the U.S.

5 police held in deadly clash at Mexican ruins

The article does a really good job at describing the project, so I would like to point readers directly to it instead of saying too much more about the project here. Here is the direct link to last week’s article. And here is a link to a previous article written by Suzanne Rook about the same project when we first announced the project initiation phase.

Their new venture was started with a couple of jobs in 2007 and became more established in the summer of 2008, they cover the cities in the area such as Farmington, Dundas, Northfield, Faribault and would go as far as Cannon Falls and Owatonna.

To contact them call Adalinda at: 507 301 56967

Here is a photo movie of two of their most recent and current jobs.

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.