Rebuilding communities through pork, parsley and pottery

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Two sets of entrepreneurs that sometimes struggle to make their businesses economically viable are teaming up.Community-supported agricultural operations (CSAs) already have an organized logistics chain to deliver those delicious farm fresh goods to your door. At least two CSAs are leveraging that asset by teaming with CSP (community-supported pottery) artists to deliver their goods as well, helping small local artists enhance their marketing reach.Put in other words, Minnesota CSAs—whereby consumers contract in advance for a certain amount of produce or meats with farmers—are diversifying with a value added service.“It’s like an informal cooperative,” explains Jack McCann, who with his wife Betsy operate True Cost Farm, an organic and CSA pastured meats and eggs farm at Montrose that works with other small, sustainable and organic farms in the Twin Cities metro area.Through their state-licensed butcher shop, they also supply customers with pasture-raised, organic beef, pork, chicken, duck, lamb and egg products from animals they’ve raised or secured from other farmers who practice agriculture in the same way.In addition, the McCanns acquire fresh herbs from Sleepy Root Farm at nearby Howard Lake, on which Brandon Wiarda is a CSA supplier of fresh herbs and vegetables to customers. The McCanns then use Wiarda’s herbs for seasoning the sausage they make on their farm.Expanding the circle of producers and consumers, Sleepy Root Farm in turn offers its customers a “pottery link” on its website that encourages customers to contract for ceramic dishware and related products from a group of aligned artisans.When it makes delivery of contracted boxes of fresh herbs and vegetables to homes or to urban drop off points, Sleepy Root will also deliver boxes of contracted cups, mugs, plates and other pottery products the customers have ordered.“We think this is the first pottery share arrangement in Minnesota. There might be more, but it’s a pretty new concept,” said Eric Mullins, a St. Paul artist who supplies pottery products through the Sleepy Root Farm web site in addition to galleries and sites in the Twin Cities.A variation of this system is operated through Springboard for the Arts, a site and program of MNartists.org, an organization started with grants and support from the Walker Art Center and McKnight Foundation. Continue Reading

Minnesotans work their way into poverty

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The unemployment rate in Minnesota has dropped to 5.8 percent, more Minnesotans are finding jobs; yet, more Minnesota children—and their parents—are slipping into poverty.This is the bizarre state of Minnesota’s economic outlook. Each week, month and quarter produces fresh statistical studies on economic data that tend conflict with one another, often concealing trends that should be catching everyone’s attention.The most recent case in point comes from the Children’s Defense Fund-Minnesota. It found shockingly higher numbers of Minnesota children living in poverty.These findings were based on 2010 U.S. Census data so they don’t reflect Minnesota job growth during the past 18 months, said Kara Arzamendia, the fund’s research director. However, contrasting 2010 with 2000 data shows a decade of little progress. The federal government pegs the poverty line at $23,000 in annual income for a family of four. Continue Reading

Strip malls and Main Streets’ common bond

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Minnesota lawmakers spent a lot of time this session on whether to give the grand old State Capitol building major surgical repair or simply get out the needle for a temporary botox job.The Capitol is the greatest public building in need of major repairs, bipartisan leaders agree. But it is far from the only one in Minnesota that could use a facelift or hip replacement. Some bonding bill projects typify a state infrastructure in need of upgrades.In the private sector, thousands of unknown storefronts face the same fate, from outdated suburban strip malls to forgotten rural Main Street buildings. All this suggests the construction industries and thousands of workers might find jobs in the next few years regardless what Minnesota lawmakers decide to do about a publicly supported Vikings stadium.A helpful start of building and rebuilding a new Minnesota just might come from better information, such as inventorying what properties are available for use and redevelopment now, reaching beyond state and local programs encouraging new construction on subsidized land.For instance, the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota can identify every nationally recognized historic building in the state, said Will O’Keefe. However, it can’t tell a prospective entrepreneur looking for a business site in Minnesota what the vacancy rate or status of the building might be.“It would be helpful if there was a site we could point to that would be easy for local economic development people to constantly update,” he said.The Alliance, or PAM, wants to spare great old buildings from the wrecking ball. Not coincidentally, it is hosting its May 18 annual fundraising and social event, the (Anti) Wrecking Ball, in the St. Continue Reading

OPINION | Renters need an 86-hour work week

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Working a “second shift” is taking on new meaning for lower income Minnesota families trying to house kit and kin in a modest, two-bedroom apartment. For many, that second job is a must just to afford the basic necessities.  There are several reasons why. First, we experienced the mortgage markets’ titanic collapse. This also caused the economic downturn that led to private sector layoffs beginning in 2008. Federal efforts in 2009 to stimulate an economic rebound were undermined when state, local and even the federal government balked at fair fiscal policy to balance budgets and cut public jobs and private sector investment. Continue Reading

Gaining ground in the ‘race to the bottom’

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Minnesota may not be winning the so-called “race to the bottom” against other states, but we’re closing in on the heels of the frontrunners.True, federal and state jobs data show Minnesota has restored most of the lost jobs from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. Over the long haul, that is just a sprint, or a relay leg, in what critics of federal and state economic policies call the “race to the bottom.”Statistics show we haven’t recovered the great job losses of the earlier 2001-2002 recession or slowed the steady decline in economic well being over the entire past decade.“We were a leading state, well above average in the 1990s,” said Kevin Ristau of the Jobs Now Coalition nonpartisan research group. “That all changed in the last decade.”Jobs Now has taken a longer view of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and made these four troubling findings:During the 1990s, Minnesota median household income rose 49 percent. Nationwide, it increased by 15 percent.During the 2000s, Minnesota median household income dropped 24 percent. Nationwide, it declined by only 7 percent.From 2007 to 2010, Minnesota median household income dropped 14 percent. Continue Reading

OPINION | Hope for spring crops: Grain, oil, currency

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Minnesota farmers are back in their fields preparing land and planting new crops, spurred on by extremely warm and dry winter weather leaving April fields inviting for heavy farm tractors and equipment.Rarely have prospects for the new growing season and for the rural Minnesota economy looked this bright. But history proves that prospects don’t always produce results; anyone with a long-term view of the complexities of the farm economy should approach this year with great caution.In 1972 word leaked out that the then Soviet Union was making unprecedented purchases of American grain. That news sent commodity markets and grain prices on an explosive three-year climb.Editors for a newspaper chain (Ridder Publications) assigned this writer to watch international trade and commodity markets. What transpired changed the Minnesota, national and global economies forever.Consider where we are today: The Minnesota’s rural economy looks solid. The University of Minnesota and the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system released data last week showing 2,400 commercial farms enrolled in farm financial programs had 2011 median farm income of $123,000.This median income was for well-educated, good-size farm operators and may not be representative of a median for all Minnesota farms. It does show, however, that 2011 was a record year for most major sectors of agriculture.In another important report released, USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) said farmers across the nation indicate they will plant 4 percent more acres in corn this year, the largest acreage in corn since 1937.The Minnesota office of NASS said Minnesota farmers intend to plant a record 8.7 million acres in corn, up 7 percent from a year ago, while cutting back soybean plantings by 3 percent and our Northern grown Hard Red Spring Wheat crop by 10 percent.Most of these decisions are based on prospective price signals from commodity markets. Continue Reading

Building on trust

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Back in his native Afghanistan, Ghafar Lakanwal had a front row seat to how heavy-handed authority undermined trust in institutions and held people back from entrepreneurship and progress.Back before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Lakanwal was the Afghan minister of Agriculture and was building local cooperatives in the countryside. The Soviets put Lakanwal under house arrest in Kabul and turned the co-ops into “cells” for taking over the economy and for keeping track of people.So much for his “ground up” economic development plans. Lakanwal was using models he had studied while earning a Ph.D. at the University of Hohenheim at Stuttgart and later working with the German International Development Agency.There are lessons for Minnesotans from Lakanwal’s experiences because refugees and immigrants are pumping new life into communities and starting hundreds of new businesses around the state. How fast and how far this burst of economic activity will go will partly depend on how well new Minnesotans can access programs and work with public and private organizations.It is really a matter of trust, Lakanwal said.What’s more, this isn’t a new problem, said Al Paulson, a St. Paul business executive and a business consultant to Native American tribes throughout the country.Paulson is also an enrolled member of an Ojibwe tribe in northern Minnesota. Continue Reading

OPINION | The ‘Farm Bill’ and the ’99 percent’

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The 2010 Census showed there are 313.2 million Americans and 5,344,861 Minnesotans. Except for those among us who will go hungry today, all are involved in “the farm program.”It was Wendell Berry, the Kentucky author, essayist, poet, sometimes farmer and English professor, who reminded his agrarian fans, “Eating is an agricultural act.”That point was revisited a week ago with a mostly urban audience at The Theater of Public Policy in Minneapolis. The improv group hosted, and sometimes roasted, this writer in a discussion and performance on what is called “the farm bill” and why we should all care.That performance won’t be revisited here although you can see portions of it in the accompanying video. Rather, some points relevant to Minnesota are summarized here.Congress is again writing a “farm bill.” The current federal farm program is set to expire on Sept. 30. Continue Reading

Recovery: A new Minneapolis takes shape

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A former North Dakota farmer and state commissioner of agriculture (1974-1981) thinks the city of Minneapolis has a bright future.“It sure does look like an (economic) recovery is underway,” said Myron Just, who is a resident these days in downtown St. Paul. But a new Minneapolis is taking shape, not just restoring what was in place prior to the housing and financial collapses that began in 2006 and 2007 and continued on into 2009, he said.For Just and other long-time observers of rural America, what is happening now in select urban communities is familiar to the recovery that came 25 years ago to a deflated rural and agricultural economy.Data gathered by Minneapolis Community Planning and Economic Development researchers support Just’s observations. In its fourth quarter Minneapolis Trends report prepared for city officials last week, the researchers found city economic indicators continuing to build on what had been a strong third quarter.The labor force in the city increased in the fourth quarter, the number of residents employed continued to grow for the past two quarters, residential and non-residential building conversions and remodels both increased in the past quarter, the rental vacancy rate and the central business district office vacancy rate both fell, and the city’s unemployment rate fell from 7 percent, in the third quarter, to 5.5 percent to close out the year and in line with the seven-country metro area’s 5.3 percent.In general, the economic indicators show a rapidly improving core city, said Cecilia Bolognesi, principal planner for the CPED department. “I think we are especially pleased to see the construction activity,” she said. Continue Reading