planning committee ask senator clover char was a senator from minnesota to speak at our conference this year and she was on able to because of other things but she sent a video  they presented a video and it is addressing our conference and i would like to show that video now hello to all my friends taking part in this year's immigrant and minority farmers conference i know you have interpreters there and so i will try to speak a little slower than i usually do i seem to talk faster than most minnesotans so you have a chance to translate i think you know i would much rather be there with you in person but there's a few things going on around the state right now and so i'm honored to join you via video i know you have a fantastic group of farmers and agriculture leaders there today and i want to begin by thanking you for everything you do to keep minnesota's food and farm sector strong no matter where i go in our state i'm reminded of the critical role that agriculture plays in our economy this is minnesota's leading export accounting for seventy five billion dollars in economic activity every year and supporting more than three hundred thousand jobs so whether it's growing the crops or raising the livestock or powering our home grown energy you are doing some of the most important work out there work that feed their families and keep our economy moving forward just as importantly you are part of a long tradition of immigrants playing a key role in our state's industry minnesota is home to one of the most vibrant and dynamic immigrant communities in the nation and i'm proud to represent a state with for instance the largest somali population in the u s the second largest community of among immigrants a very strong latino community just all across our state as you know the president recently came out in support of comprehensive immigration reform i support comprehensive immigration reform i always have and i'm currently working in the senate to update and improve our immigration laws i'm working on the judiciary committee and i already have a bipartisan bill that would increase the number of green cards in a twenty work visas available but there's obviously more we do more we need to do and i'm looking so forward to working with the immigrant community and getting the strongest immigration reform we can re cargoes of where our immigrants come from minnesota is making in minnesota you're making significant contribution to our culture and our economy in the twin cities alone eleven percent of small businesses are now owned by immigrants and we know no need to look any further than your conference today to see the incredible impact that immigrants and minorities are having in minnesota agriculture i know that half of your audience is made up of women farmers so i specially want to highlight the trends we're seeing for women in this industry women are now the largest minority group in farming and the fastest growing in fact the most recent data from the u s department of agriculture shows that the number of women farm operators jumped thirty percent between two thousand and two and two thousand and seven i've always believed that the strength of our state is anchored in the diversity of our people and minnesota's agriculture sector is no exception but in order to keep our farm economy strong we need clear and consistent policies that give our farmers the certainty and stability that you need to move forward as a member of the senate agriculture committee i work to make sure the senate passed a strong two thousand and twelve farm bill that strengthens the crop insurance program eliminates direct payments tended to much more go to the large farmers and i think that's been very important and also  come with that twenty three billion dollars in cuts that we made the decision and how to do them in the agriculture committee i'd also add that it includes of strong energy title the senate passed farm bill included legislation i'd introduce to help more beginning farmers and ranchers get off the ground there are real opportunities for people to get a start in farming these days especially in growing areas like organic farming and renewable energy but as you know beginning farmers also faced some significant obstacles not least of all highland prices and limited access to critical resources like credit and technical assistance unfortunately despite the leadership and strong work of collin peterson and tim walz and others the house failed to act and passed the two thousand and twelve farm bill and while the fiscal cliff deal extended certain provisions of the two thousand and eight farm bill through september thirtieth including commodity programs and crop insurance it is a stopgap solution that cannot replace the value of a five year farm bill by q i was frustrated and disappointed that the extension failed to fund a number of core provisions including the entire energy title it also fails to incorporate many of the important changes we made in the senate like assistance for organic producers and my amendment to help beginning farmers and ranchers so there is still more to do but i am committed to working with you and the rest of minnesota's agriculture community to make sure we pass a strong five year farm bill in twenty thirteen my priorities will include strengthening the farm safety net investing in the production and development of renewable energy production and making it possible for the next generation of farmers and ranchers to get a start in agriculture when we look at the economic turmoil of the last few years we know that america can no longer afford to be a country that just turns money around on wall street but we need to be now as a country that thinks ben invents that makes things that exports to the world this is the kind of work you do every day work with real and measurable benefits for our country and our economy work that means something thank you again for everything you do to keep minnesota's agriculture sector strong have a great time today and keep up the good work thank you we are very honored to have maria merit here today she came all the way from massachusetts along with a group of her former colleagues yeah there you are you guys in your and i'm go maria introduce a little bit about herself but i will say briefly that she is a farmer a dairy farmer she has worked with the extension services she has some of you may have received notice about serving on a county f s a committee we get these notices and we share with farmers who can serve on a county f s a committee maria has done it for nine years about that she has worked with and r c s on their equip program for who palaces and i correct and she is she's she's very adept at connecting programs and assisting farmers and she operates flat's mentor farm i met her a number of years ago i think initially through nifty the national immigrant farming initiative we both served on the board of directors there so without further ado maria well come and this is really an honor for me to be here when glyn first contacted me and i said are you sure you want me to do this so it's really an honor  to be a keynote speaker today i am just amazed i know i mean good company when i have seeds in my packet this is a real farmer conference when and when i have well i understand yesterday that some of you shared your stories and i am so sorry i couldn't be here to share to actually see you share in the stories  and i am going to prove to show your presentation today that probably doesn't touch on a few things that i have that i have been working on over the fire advocacy because i know how it feels to not speak be able to speak english i know exactly how it feels i lost half of the teeth of my bad back my mouth because my parents couldn't speak english so i know exactly how it feels   a picture just explains everything and so i'd like to give you a little bit of my background i came to the united states forty six years ago i came as a very young girl i was twelve then we come from agrarian backgrounds small subsistence farmers and also every rationale so you can really see when you love me you can make a lot of excuses you know to keep on farming so  i made cheese for over twenty years and i've been sharing my land with among the african farmers for over thirty years we own one hundred forty acres and we ran college so but i did continue to make cheese and we also sold that in two thousand and six and i decided to turn the other leaf which was to really drew see  what true farmer advocacy is and i had the opportunity to do it and so i'm going to explain to you what i do and i know you guys can do a better i really do know you guys can do a better before i that was a little bit of my background before i start can all of the farmers here in this room stand up i just want to see how many farmers are in this room all farmers wow farmers wow great what about immigrants all the immigrants stand up now i know i am in the right place why tell you about me because if i can do something and i haven't done anything special but i know you can do a  better back when i was starting you know i thought i'd better be in a dairy farm i was really having a hard time financially a really hard time and i couldn't see the way what was i going to do to to stay fireman quit finding it was not an option i had already made too many other decisions including having four children in making sure that i had made a decision my husband and i that we were going to be farmers nobody told me was going to be this hard  out what we did and basically what i did every day i actually looked around and said ok how can i make this work how can i make this work it's got to work so  i went through a my own self assessment and i want to share that self assessment with you it's something i thought about over time and i thought about how how can i mean me finding work for me and so i and i say do i have a purpose yes i did i had a purpose mine was to raise our four kids on the farm that was a purpose ok and then i look down in and i think you guys everybody can do that you know in say ok what do i already have to you know you have something special i know sometimes it's very hard to find but we all have something special within us that we can do in my case i have lots and lots of milk that nobody will spain me the cost even the cost of production and if anyone knows about dairy farming it's extremely difficult in a lot of the farmers i'm getting paid the cost of production so i developed a value added product which was cheese ok and a lot of people said why did you do that how did you come up with that idea of wow what's a wonderful idea in what i said was when you have four children and you have made a decision to stay finding it was in the sesame it wasn't some wonderful but it was just plain old necessity and here's what i did what can i make with milk to add income to my family operation ok and i know i looked around basically and i also i was already making their cheese my grandmother made it my mother made it at home and we loved it so i said well if we like to eat it my friends like to eat it maybe someone will last soul like to eat it and i can make some money from it and that's how i literally the start of the cheese business i also took several steps into evaluating the opportunities ok in and in so i decided to make the cheese and these are the steps that anyone can anyone can take a look at these steps no matter how small or how large you are if you go through these steps in your head i know that there's a lot of trainings on business planning in putting things down on paper and i sometimes i've done a little bit of the putting down on paper but sometimes the paper is not too strong and i lose it but the thing is that you definitely have to have it inside you you have to have thought about it and thought about it a lot ok you evaluate how much that how much the cost to produce whatever it is that you're doing in people want to buy it in this is what you called market evaluation that's just a few name for  it but that's all it is you also you look at the market and you say in my case i had to look and say ok is this cheese already being produced in the market and that was some someone was already producing this same type of cheese they were selling it but what i thought was i can do a better i know i can introduce my special cheese to the same market and i know i can do a better i in i did i  literally went into the market mine looked was a little bit bigger but mine was a lot more expensive and it's sold with a lot of work so you so the thing is that you will you find out who wants to buy what you're producing if it is vegetables if it's me and my case was cheese but i've also you know towards the end of this presentation i'll show you what i've been working with the monk for almost thirty years and i've now working with african farmers and in assisting we also developing a cooperative marketing i love to do marketing and but it's very very important that you assess where you're going to sell your vegetables who is going to buy it who's going to buy what you produce in how you present those things that you buy into that you're going to sell ok so the difference between what it costs to produce when you evaluated the difference between your costs to produce in what the customer will pay that's what you take home that your profit and then you have to say wow is it worth it is it worth  pain for me for my time to produce whatever it is that i'm producing you can put a fancy you can put all of this information in a very very fancy piece of paper or you can take a plain piece of paper at home in actually do the figures yourself and actually feel it you have to know because you're the one that's going to go out there you're the you're the one that that is planting that is there is weeding that is watering that is harvesting it's very very hard so it's been marketing marketing marketing ok in my cooking means you produce a product that you have looked in the market to see if somebody i'll buy it and you produce the best quality product that you can and this is the cheese that i was talking to talking with you about i developed it this is this is how it out how it went on the on the package in the box i developed everything from the late from the cheese from the packaging the label i even designed the the styrofoam box that it went into packaging is very very very important you need to work with the estate in your egg in regulatory agencies to make sure that it conforms to all of the state regulations i'm going to give you a quick a quick story about the way it's half it's had its half have in this happened because when i went to the label maker they wanted to charge me three cents per label and i couldn't afford that so i said you don't charge me for extra ink let me see if i make it half of a circle i get two labels for one and thus i get half of the circle it was all to save money and i and i saw in it was a one point five pennies per label instead of three that's so people say wow you came up with that design again design was an assessor also the packaging pay close attention to aesthetics play called pay close attention to the way it looks because people buy with their eyes you know that you know the product is really good and you made it really really good but people buy with their eyes it needs to be clean and needs to look beautiful it's beautiful as you can and also it can say you know it's ok for it to say something about you about your culture or celebrate who you are celebrated because it ok the transportation also you have you have to be careful how you're going to get the product to the market if it's a perishable product you have to put it on the reproduce relation so there with strace fresh all right so this is believe it or not let me see if i can can you see the mouse and you can good all right this was me a long time ago telling my story then so it's very very important for for all of you with if you have a product if you're trying to market your product you know tell tell the newspapers that you that you're taking new products later i again this was in a newspaper and also be very very careful on when you actually talk to newspapers because their picture  was there because i said to to the boston globe i said you know i really don't like my my face in the paper could you you can do it you can take the cheese but you can't take my face  but you know we had a whole a whole article on it's a four page it was good it was good i was just you know this was part of they did the whole the whole story again this guy that this was ten years later this got us into a lot of different other markets because my main market was the portuguese market and this got me into the american market or the mainstream market it was very very good for our business ok and i also did promotion again marketing marketing marketing marketing in store promotions  with with the store managers and you put your presenting your product tastings and all of that wonderful stuff all right there was a little bit of what i've done  now as my other had to mentor farmer why there was a need i had the capacity to help it gave me a sense of satisfaction giving feels a lot better than receiving all right so this was back in  actually this was in i think was eighty six do any of you know guys schumacher you know there's a  few gus was commissioner of agriculture way back when and i was making cheese and this is this is me when i started the cheese business a long time ago but back for anybody to know that we were there so no one knew we were there you know the farmers would come every year they do their plots they would pay to have a deck put put compost on the land and they'd go in we we you know i was dairy farming in making cheese and they were grown vegetables one of the things that i had identified many many times was the need for marketing i'll never forget i learned one year there was a a friend who did who's now passed came to me and he said they kicked me out of the flea market because i looked the way i do and i knew i knew that that that was happening i just could not do anything about it at that time i couldn't do it there was numerous other other happenings things that were happening that i thought i heard through that time and i couldn't do anything about it but i never forgot it because half of my mouth was missing the teeth and i knew what had happened to me to because of the beginning farmer it was a different farm bill and now they were recognizing beginning farmers ok so the u s d a recognized us as a model for our beginning established ourselves as part of a hat for a project in two thousand and five that's when we first got our support to really organize in the farmers organized in mainly so the next part of this presentation is going to be a lot more pictures and a lot less talking so glenn how much time do i have this is spider plant this is ivana holding spider plant and this is janie lore harvesting for her markets the this is our first scoop of african farmers this is fabiola holding your c we're harvesting for the markets this is james look food and this is at the very beginning of the year when when the farmers applauding out their own plots they literally plot out their own because there's too many there's too many parts we have over thirty five acres and so there's a lot of the larger farmers have their land plotted out the they rent five from five to one acres but the smaller smaller farmers we have to plot those out every year and there's always there's not that there are always people new people coming at the flats mentor farmer we do not do any outreach so  year we don't go out and say oh we have land we have this we don't have we have that we don't have because most of the time we don't have any consistent funding to run any programs but what we do is we do not turn anybody away that wants to farm if somebody says i want to farm i want can i have a piece of land we say yes now how much more than that we have depends on the year so these are the african farmers this is a group of monks farmers on a brand new tractor and again farmers on the you know trying to plot out the land tunnel project in the first year out in the hmong farmers had eight of the seventeen high tunnels they went into massachusetts so the monk farmers had eight and so we actually this is part of the training on how to construct one we had them all constructed from a professional and he was telling you how you know he came down did a presentation but this was all professionally constructed and right now it's because i don't have a lot of pictures you know on the effects of this but farmers are getting into the markets at least two weeks earlier in this state and beyond three weeks after in also they're doing these seedlings it's really made a remarkable difference for for the farmers at the at the plants supportive of all of our farmers and what we do so unlike any other parts of the country we have we have nothing but good things to say about how they have been helpful  in for us to acquire nine high tunnels so far we have nine type tunnels at the flats twelve we also have drip irrigation and up overhead immigration and one of the real fast because i don't think i have enough time so most of you most of you recognize what this is some of these vegetables amaranth of all kinds a lot of hard work a lot of hard work to keep these oh and by the way we do not use any herbicides everything is by hand no herbicides and and so if you see no weeds because somebody was out there with  him and we also have done a lot of yes this was this is actually two thousand and four will and i used to do exchange on i used to do the marketing and he used to come and do the the burma composting at our farm so we did it we exchanged trainings also we do hands on everything that we do we do all hands on our farm are really first of all we don't have the capacity to do any type of curriculum in the classroom curriculum so everything is hands on at the farm and fire mirrors get to learn by doing so this was a the trying to to see to evaluate if the monk farmers would like to grow under plastic because we had talked about it and they said oh no we don't like it so we we came in did it with the machine and all of a sudden everybody liked it in what we did is so we laid it and and each farmer had three rows to plant anything that they'd want to in try on that those three rows and it was it was a great success very actually but now that now with the monks farmers are doing some of it there they're doing it by hand the plastic the laying the plastic playing i just wanted to make sure that we wanted to evaluate the growing under plastic and for the farmers to really get the feel of what if they like that or not and some of them actually  have their growing on the plastic now because we also do drip we also do drip irrigation and so so not only did we do the training again all hands on y r we also wanted to see if farmers would adopt the drip irrigation system because it saves water and we have to provide that and show them because if you if you don't show farmers how it works why is it important does it really work you know farmers are the most the smartest people in the world or they it but you have to you have to show him it doesn't make sense and also so we actually showed farmers how to install and how to prepare ok and so everybody learned this is a he's an he's a farmer he's also a farmer and up not with us but are now on like five miles away and he came and did the training and of course yes he does some of the work there women primaries actually did a lot of the installation during the training this was you know because they learn by doing so we because it was there this belongs to them ok so by this time they knew how many rows they had and they were installing it themselves ok and then they got two to plant whatever they wanted on the arrows and on this one we planted transplants so also we do we do trainings on equipment and again trying to figure out how things work we have people that come in the sky sold us the tree the tailor and he also made sure that we know how to operate it we also received a grant from the massachusetts society for the promotion of agriculture in half or international and the farmers bought a tractor so this was specifically to buy a tractor and so the farmers right now farmer this three farmers that can can prepare their own land they're totally independent in they don't have to wait for anybody else they will they operate because they have a tractor we have it shared but we have a tractor in tiller's in all of the implements necessary  so every all farmers who are certified to to operate the the tractor and not just the men we also have women that can operate the tractor me being one women can operate machinery they can not only am i an example because i operate every piece of machinery that's in my farm along with my husband but also jamie jamie can i can can run this tractor just as well as anybody else events if we don't have one of those barbecues and this is the best way to cook right in the fire in doing our events that's what happens  we also build our own no have built our own who pulses and all of that we during a training all of the farmers help so in and after we work we like to celebrate so after after dinner we celebrate and that's one of the things that i like doing during our events there's always afterwards and everybody shares their own cultural dance i've been known to share mine ok so the cops real fast so this is a list of the crops that we have ok popular in the mung i growing it to the markets so the farmers have learned to assess the market it's not what you like to grow but what you can grow to sell in the markets ok this is again not a not an asian vegetable but it sells well in the markets this is spinal plant pea tendrils a very very popular in the markets in our farmers do very well pumpkin vines shoots ok it's one of our best money makers in the markets by the way when i say hours each farmer operates his or her f independently independently i'm just there to kind of look around so the flats we try to provide as much marketing help as possible families already know exactly how to grow these fish you know the for the all of you in this room can teach how to grow vegetables in how to farm you actually can teach the rest of us sometimes it's the marketing that's lacking in we go to whole foods and so if you look at the very top right here right here the top this is pictures of our farm in of our farmers in all of these other than other than this this right here came from the flats meant to farm so whole foods they they they used a picture to sell but we are they also bart crops ok so chinese broccoli it was it says from right here right there in and they too they took a pallet of vegetables twice a week that's what we sold ok the presentation is very very very important guys presentation presentation presentation ok in two thousand trouble going to over thirty fires markets in massachusetts and all of these cities and it's very very important that farmers teach their children how to to sell at the i'm going to go through these faster these are just examples of farmers markets how fresh this this stuff is i mean who wouldn't want to buy  ok so i'm going to tell you a little story about this this happened like six years ago but what there was over a thousand dollars taken in fifty five minutes because this community is mostly vietnamese and they like their veggies and there it was fast it was fast and furious he was the by the way with this table after this picture was was taken if l over because there was so many people right here trying to trying to buy it in trying to get ahead of each other so so this is see this is what happened it was that crazy and this was the farmer this is china i think this woman now is in california again same market in people are fighting fighting for the for the veggies don't forget now it's a lot more calm or you know so here again it's this is a different market people stay in line for some of these vegetables because we have done the market assessments we have we have identified what vegetable is popular in white community in the farmers grohl specifically for that community that's what we do again there's a line of people for this particular here ok and there's there's new trying to make sure that that everybody gets in and out farmers in the back way there market are encouraged in they do this they teach their other fellow farmers these are farmers who are learning from from new right here and this is again got schumacher when thinks ten years later this is two thousand and two when i started with i helped the first farmer who i helped that the markets was triangle at all past no longer with us very good friend of mine thats it