Rural Enterprise Center

2008 will see a significant increase in activity in the following food and agriculture work areas at the Rural Enterprise Center:

- Poultry Operation: We will expand the growers network for our Southern Minnesota free range chicken brand “Pollo de Campo” (Free Range Chicken).
- The Northfield community garden will expand to 100 plots to include up to 75 families
- We will support the development of a community garden in Red Wing and the Morristown area west of Faribault.
- New market gardeners will be launched
- A regional new Latino farmers support system will be deployed to serve new areas where Latino/a leadership is found.

We look forward to engaging our existing partners and to finding new partners and networks of supporters to connect with.

The Rural Enterprise Center has been engaged in assembling the partnerships needed to launch an agripreneurs (agriculture entrepreneurs) training center with an eye on the Southern half of the state as a target region, with Dakota, Rice and Steele county as target areas for initial deployment.

We understand that food and agriculture have been and will always be key sectors of our economy. According to the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota “Food and agriculture, the largest U.S. economic sector, commands a trillion dollars of retail sales, with critical impacts on employment, environment, and public health.”

I can also add without hesitation that the food and agriculture industry has impacted our social fabric and the health of our communities. In Rural Minnesota, Latino families heavily depend on these industries for jobs, which in turn shape social patterns and define the economies of these families. It is well documented that this sector also drives down wages and benefits, contributing to Southern Minnesota’s downturn in wages over the last 20 years. An irony considering the influence of such sector and a curse for the Latino community which provides much needed labor but can’t capitalize on the benefits, at least not under current structures.

As we think of strategic paths to support Latino families in rural Minnesota we see food and agriculture as a key sector to target for new enterprise development that can turn expanding markets into a new economic opportunities for this population, not only as providers of labor for this industry but in ways where the economic benefits can be improved. In order to accomplish results in this area, we need to explore systems and processes that create competitive advantages for this new population, while contributing to the competitiveness of the region as a whole. This results won’t come as a result of doing business as usual.

In the last 6 months, we have assembled a model and the support infrastructure that will allow us to launch a system to reach, screen, train, launch, support and grow new Latino farmers on a regional basis. This process have involved dozens of meetings, conference calls and many other forms of networking, most importantly, it has been a process of undurstanding the reallities of Latino families in the region. From the job siuation to leadership roles, from skills to knowledge of farm management, from farming experiences to potential interest in launching agriculture enterprises.

We have now closed a cycle that has resulted in the assembling of a solid network of partners. These partners include the North Country Development Fund, the Farmers Legal Action Group, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture at the University of Minnesota, the Land Stewardship Project Farm Beginnings Program, the Dakota County Open Lands and Parks and many others. Each partner has a specific role to play in the process.

During 2008, many families participated in our food and agriculture efforts, although not fully deployed, the system resulted in 5 families growing range grown poultry, 30 families grew vegetables at our 48 plot community garden, 3 families became market gardeners, and we engaged families in Faribault, Owatonna and Red Wing in an exploratory process. We have now built a support infrastructure and structured the launch of a brand name for the poultry products with an eye on regional production and larger scale growth for 2009.

As the snow falls outside on the longest night of the year we are busy crunching numbers, working with farmers on their plans for the spring, researching winter farming options through season extension systems and cold frame techniques, organizing a cooperative of farmers, and so much more that I know spring will be here too soon for what we need to accomplish before it warms up again.

Stay in touch, stay warm, and enjoy the last days of the year.

Here is a video about winter farming, altough we are mostly collecting data this winter, we will be planting a 30×32 feet space in February 2009 with around 16 varieties of cold season greens that grow well in Minnesota’s limited winter light. Come fall 2009 though, we plan to be set-up to keep some families engaged for most of the winter months deliverying fresh vegetables.

Red Wing community leaders achieved a major milestone in the process of organizing a leadership network in the larger task of putting together a community-wide infrastructure to support families in moving farther into, and participating in the life of the larger Red Wing area community.

The process was organized by the Goodhue County Hispanic Outreach Program and led by Adriana Thuerauf. The Rural Enterprise Center provided background for the process, materials, training, and other support needed to structure and develop an emergency preparedness plan and community-wide engagement strategies that have been utilized in Northfield to accomplish similar goals.

Last night’s meeting attracted over 75 Latino individuals, many of them whole families with children. Within this group were individuals with clear leadership potential that we will continue to engage as we move from the basic community organizing process into the engagement of these key network in economic development and other community building infrastructure projects.

The organizing process brought together outside forces as well, up to 40 individuals and organizations in the area have signed up to serve as a larger area support network for Latino-led initiatives, this coalition of organizations plus the presence of key regional leaders made the meeting more meaningful not only for the future efforts that were ignited though this building block, but as a motivational component and true show of support for the Latino community leadership development from the larger community leadership.

We had the presence from the board of the Goodhue County Hispanic Outreach, that provided the organizational support for the effort, as well as Darrel Glander, Assistent Chief of Police, Stan Slessor, Superintendent for the Red Wing Independent School District 256, and Jeff Larson, of J.P. Larson & Associates L.L.C. an immigration law firm in Minneapolis providing pro-bono services for Latino families in the area.

Here is a slideshow of some of the scenes from the meeting.

I hope everyone who reads this blog had a great day of giving thanks, what a great American celebration. I mean it from the standpoint of producing turkeys and marketing them, of course one can be sarcastic and still truthful or viceversa on this issue. The truth is that I had a great time with my extended family in this country that I gained as a result of marriage, which also means that I have adopted (or have been adopted) into great culture and traditions. Although I keep my own, the more traditions and cultural experiencies, the merrier, specially if they involve such volumes of food.

Altough lately I have not written as regularly as I normally do, I hope to keep you engaged. We are busy working on many plans in preparation for the 2009 spring, it is a great therapeutic way to spend the winter and a wonderful time for planning, centering and re-energizing.

We are currently working on consolidating the great experiences from 2008 in the large community gardening that we put together in Northfield, surveying the families who participated and preparing to expand the garden to 100 plots for 2009. We will also be launching at leat three market gardeners in the extra 5 acres of land next to the gardens while we plan larger community gardening expansion.

We have also dedicated time to help community leaders in Red Wing organize a community-wide support system to start a process of reaching out and launching new Latino/a entrepreneurs in that area, for now we are working on the social and business environment in preparation for further engagement of the regional leadership in enterprise work.

In northfield we finished the first business planning and management training, graduated 10 individals and assisted a similar number in sustainaing the business or exploring their ideas.

We are also preparing for our second round of training, this time in Faribault, where we are engaging a large network of community leaders, partners, sponsors and individual entrepreneurs.

In Owatonna, a good number of potential farmers have surfaced and we are now preparing the curriculum to launch a farming start-up and planning training as well as helping others acquire land and assembling a marketing network to support them in selling their products once they get launched.

Back to Northfield, we also grew 4,000 meat chickens, produced over 17,000 lbs of meat and established a distribution partnership for the product to the Twin Cities and a 125 direct customer network that purchased over 1500 of the grown birds. We also managed to train 5 families on growing these birds and are ready to expand signifincantly for 2009.

We acquired equipment to process our own feed and distribute it to poultry growers and started sourcing larger volumes of grain directly from local farmers to supply the system. We are now also exploring new ways of processing our birds for next year so that we can expand production, processing and distribution.

Our partners network grew significanly and direct contacts with individuals and executives in the region soared. We have established over 1200 contacts since we started this process and this network has allowed us to support a significant number of new potential projects start-ups for 2009.

All in all, it has been a good year to be thankfull for and we foresee a start of 2009 in a much stronger position. Although we will be distributing a more detailed report of our activities towards the end of the year, I hope you enjoy this early installment.

Here is part of the response to this question from a world renoun leader in this field of food security, Vandana Shiva. At the Rural Enterprise Center, we take global, regional, national and local issues into account when designing strategies that work for our local minority population and those who may not be minorities but have been left far behind by the economic engine.

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.

We are very happy to be getting most needed rains, although a bit late for the season, we hope it won’t freeze solid too soon so this water can soak deep into the underground water tables. I just drove over the Cannon River in Northfield and despite recent rains, it stil does not look like the cannon we know, and in some parts where it is narrow it looks more like a creek.

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.

The Rural Enterprise Center/Main Street Project, is now a member of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, based out of Arlington, VA and comprised by small and emerging enterprise members nationwide. From all of the organizations that work for small and medium size businesses, the AEO is the one that we have found best represents our interest at the highest levels of policy making and national influence, and provides the national direction and strategies that allow us to make the most out of our local efforts in rural communities while keeping in touch with the national challenges and opportunities.

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.

A: More entrepreneurs!

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!