- Hello and welcome to Farm Connections.

I'm your host, Dan Hoffman.

Today on Farm Connections, we are joined by Wayne Gannaway, Kim Sin and Kelly Kilpatrick to discuss the importance of ethnic farming and the modern issues surrounding food insecurity.

And the University of Minnesota brings us a new "Best Practices" segment.

All today on Farm Connections.

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- Welcome to Farm Connections and with me is Wayne from the History Center, Olmsted County.

Wayne, welcome back.

- Thank you, Dan.

- You have some guests with you today.

Can you introduce them please?

- Sure, yeah, these are some fabulous partners that we've made here at the History Center who are helping us make the most of what we have at the History Center.

So the first is Kim Sin.

And he is helping us make better use of our community garden.

And the other partner is Kelly Rae Kirkpatrick and she is really giving us a lot of great knowledge on urban gardening and food security, the relevancy of farming to today and also she helped set up a partnership with the library for a seed library or a seed program.

- Thank you, Wayne.

Welcome Kelly.

- Thanks, Dan, glad to be here.

- Glad to have you, welcome Kim.

- Thank you for having me here today.

- Well, Wayne talked about food security and that's wonderful because that's a topic.

We begin to be rather complacent sometimes when we see the bounty in the stores, but things can change that.

Whether it's insects or markets or wars or some kind of supply chain disruption, so we've seen some of those things happen.

We've seen markets disrupted, we've seen people in some cases not get products and food that they want.

Any thoughts on that Kelly?

- Yeah, we saw a lot of supply chain disruption this spring.

As a matter of fact, our industrial meat packaging hot spots in the nation are COVID hot spots, as well, just because of the fact that they're processing so quickly.

You've got a high concentration of people and the staffing that's there is just so tight that it was significant outbreaks for COVID and we lost a lot of things that way.

Farmers were dumping milk because there was no place to send their milk.

We also, on the opposite end of the spectrum, we saw a lot of our seed houses throughout the nation shut down because they could not just keep up with the impact of everyone wanting to grow their own food this year.

This is a pandemic not unlike the pandemic in 1918 where the first victory gardens were started, where everyone was pushed to grow their own food for the war effort.

So, we have this sort of historical resurgence coming along this year and it's been really frankly quite neat to see.

- Thank you.

Kim, did you notice any of this in the people you work with?

- Yeah, Dan, the pandemic of the COVID-19, we have seen a number of diverse community that live in Rochester have a lot of challenge because some of their places have been put on furlough or being laid off or being shut down and we see a lot of family are in need of wanting to access more plot as they indicated that they wanted to grow more to feed their family.

This is a tough time and we are trying to do our best to provide food.

I know food security is a big issue within Rochester because of land access is not accessible for our community and that is something that, you know, with Wayne and Kelly and with other organization that we are a partner, able to provide this need to our diverse grower in Rochester.

- Wayne, Kim mentioned you.

How have you been involved in trying to reduce food security issues?

- Well, traditionally, the History Center has set aside a large portion of our gardens for Channel 1, so volunteers with the U of M extension service, I believe, would actually be in charge of growing the vegetables and they would donate it all to Channel 1 and unfortunately the pandemic put a crimp on that.

So, we were able to get connected with Kim and his group to provide plots for some new Americans that he works with and it was, I just thought it was so cool to be able to see people from different cultures use the gardens probably for the first, in our space, probably for the first time ever.

To have such diversity in the gardens was awesome and then the types of vegetables they were growing might have been a little bit different and the way they would use them might have been a little different and probably there's a lot more that we could learn from that, how they use those foods, so I think it's gonna be an ongoing conversation with Kim and other groups, as well.

- Wayne, as you're telling that story, I'm thinking about a family reunion I was at at my parents' farm, not to far from Rochester, about 35 miles, and that particular year it was decided that people would bring, at least select people, would bring things like green beans, cooked right on site, rutabagas sauteed in butter and brought out the the Party Palace as it was, which is a restored chicken house that's now a Party Palace.

Guess what food left first?

The wrapped up processed ones or the rutabagas and the green beans?

- Probably the fresh food.

- Empty pan.

And, of course, it was populated maybe by a lot of senior citizens in the family, but it went quickly and we appreciate nutrition, so Kim, how is the History Center helping the people you're working with with food security and getting access to healthy food?

- Let me tell you a little bit about the history of, you know, like the immigrants, from like, I came from Cambodia during the early 1980 a little bit because there was a war situation going on back in Cambodia and we arrived, my family arrived to Rochester, Minnesota and, you know, when we came here, the weather, the culture and everything is so different.

And so coming here, we had to rent, we couldn't afford to purchase a home or anything, so a lot of new immigrant or refugee that comes to live in the U.S. had to rent and when they rent, there's no land access for them to grow any of their produce and landlord would not permit them to grow because that would damage their lawn and, you know, over here they value lawn more than valuing food.

And so that was a big challenge for a lot of, you know, the Cambodian refugee that immigrated in the early 1980, especially in Rochester and so it was a struggle for my mom, for a lot of her friend and so we, you know, didn't have that opportunity and so that's why it was a passion for me to, you know, to see that our community have land access to grow and feed themself because of the produce, the vegetable cannot be grown, you know, we cannot buy it from the local grocery store because they cannot grow here and so that was a hard thing for a lot of the immigrant that live here.

And they, you know, didn't seem like, to call this home because they weren't able to do things like back in their country, so with the History Garden Center, I've, this year that we've partnered with other places, a lot of them tell me they feel like this is home for them, you know, that they are able to grow produce that were grown back home.

They see, you know, they see people that they can interact and communicate and it's making them feel like they're connected to their community and some of them are able to communicate with other that are different from them without having that fear and they exchange food, they exchange their ingredients, they exchange their skill, so it's providing a food security for a lot of the family and they learn so much from each other that they actually produce so much that they are able to exchange and also offer into their neighbor at their house that this was never happened before and so this is, you know, because of partnership and collaboration and all the team, I forgot to introduce the organization that I'm a part of is The Village Community Garden and Learning Center that, you know, I'm the co-founder with Amanda Crowley and then with our great team, Kelly, and we have a wonderful team that really put the village and all the network and all the, you know, support that we have with different organization, like the Olmsted History Center has, you know, has given that opportunity for our immigrant family to really not just to grow, but to cross culture learning with other grower that are different and that is so important during the, you know, pandemic to let them know we're in this same situation and that, you know, we learn to take care of each other without fear and that's the thing that I see during this time and it's great that our community is coming together to fight food security.

- Thank you, Kim.

Kim mentioned you and some of the work you do.

You're a master gardener, trained by the University of Minnesota and also you've talked about Victory Gardens.

Can you elaborate on that and how you work with Kim and others.

- Sure.

So, I guess my journey with the food system really began in October of 2017.

I created my Plant a Seed initiative, which basically educates about the food system and I was in the process of writing my thesis on food security and how urban agriculture could really reduce food insecurities within a community and I met Kim and we got to talking and I began sitting on the advisory panel for The Village Community Garden and Learning Center and I've been able to use a lot of my skillset as a horticulturist, landscape designer and I love historical gardens in particular, especially historical food gardens, so just kind of connecting those dots for what I like to do and I'm a real kind of a soil biology geek and I love forming partnerships.

So, Kim and I started working together and we pulled things together and we just finished in my neighborhood here in Rochester the MLK Park Community Food and Learning Garden and that's being used a a model for Rochester Parks and Rec as to ways that communities can come together on public land to grow food and do educational things that benefit the broader community and can increase food security.

There's just so many ways that we can go forward to help so many people to reduce the food insecurities.

I'm really excited about some of the zoning things that are gonna be coming forward in Rochester, the agricultural zoning, the legislature passed some new agricultural zoning in Minnesota, so I think it's exciting to know that we're gonna be able to grow more food closer to our back door than we have seen in a few decades.

- [Announcer] Farm Connections "Best Practices" brought to you by.

(upbeat country music) - Hello, I'm Seth Naeve.

I'm extension soybean ergonomist at the University of Minnesota and this is today's "Best Practices" segment.

So, today we're gonna talk about foreign material in soybeans.

This is a really critical piece for farmers to think about this time of year.

There's multiple reasons to think about harvesting clean soybeans.

The first one obviously is around storage and sale of those soybeans.

We want to maintain clean soybeans as they go into the bin and maintain those as they go out to the elevators.

Because of some new restrictions on exports into China and imports into China, it's become more and more important for farmers to maintain clean soybeans and for those that be maintained all the way through the market channel.

The Chinese market demands a 1 percent maximum foreign material in soybeans moving forward and this is a critically important market for us, so we have to be sure that we can sell less than 1 percent foreign material into our local elevators so that they can maintain all the way through to the exports.

A few things that are really critical to think about in terms of foreign material in soybeans is simply combine settings and mixtures with other grains like corn in our wagons and elevators as we load our bins and haul those into the elevators.

But a really important critical topic right now is around weed seed bank and weed seeds in that foreign material for our soybeans.

So, it's important for farmers to go out and pull any residual weeds that they have in their fields, remove those from the system.

If they've got bad patches of resistant weeds, herbicide resistant weeds to go out and mechanically till those up, mow those down, et cetera before we go in with the combine this fall.

So, again, it's really important for farmers to maintain clean fields during the summer, harvest clean soybeans and make sure those soybeans are clean going through their system and into the elevator.

This is today's "Best Management" segment with Seth Naeve, extension soybean ergonomist, University of Minnesota.

- Kim, you spoke a little bit about generations working together in the garden.

Take us on a little path of how that looked about different demographics, different ages and the outcomes that happened as they came together.

- So this year we have a number of diverse coming from Kenya, Cameroons, you got Sudanese, Mong, Laos, Vietnamese, Cambodian and then you got, from Ukrainian grower that are out there, Hispanics from different part of the Hispanic community and so it's a big population of diverse grower and a lot of them, you know, if we look back at history, you know, we all came here with nothing, with, you know, a way to try to start a new life in a new world and all of us are part of, you know, we came with agricultural kind of skills to come and grow and be a part of this.

And so, as I learn through now we got more of grower that want to grow on a large scale.

They want to continue to contribute to the agriculture system as a lot of farmers are entering the retirement and so a lot of our immigrant grower now wants to really take on in big farming and help contribute to our economy, so we are working on a model, as well, to kind of get them to grow on a larger scale and to really help our community to cut down that cost.

When we support local farmers, we really benefit as a community and so we get a lot of our new American that are interest in becoming a farmer and really contribute to the whole community in Minnesota as well.

- You mentioned skillsets being exchanged or taught to others.

How did that look?

Was it grandpa and grandma and mom and dad teaching teenagers or what happened?

- Yep, we have like father and son would, you know, go out there as he's trying to teach his son the benefit of why it's important to grow as he was taught, you know, through his parents when he was back home and then you got grandmother and grandpa trying to teach the grandkid the important value of growing your own food, why is it important and a lot of them talk about, you know, the fear of all of these chemical that is being put into the food that, you know, that are causing a lot of the health issue and a lot of like, in my community, they never hear anything about diabetes, they need hear anything about blood pressure.

Back home, none of that were a health issue, but coming here, I don't know if the lifestyle, the, you know, the comfort that they are not really exposed to a lot of exercise, but back home everything was, they're more mobilized, they're walking, they're working.

Here, we all rely so much on technology and so that is kind of, the lifestyle is different.

So a lot of these growers are trying to teach their kid, their grandkid the important about, you know, health and there's so many things that, you know the vegetable that they are growing, I've learned and Kelly also have interacted, they teach us about each vegetable contributed to certain health that help providing vitamin, nutrition and all these things that I did not know until they were teaching.

So there's a lot of that exchange happening and how do you grow certain vegetable to get it really, you know, growing in a better and getting rid of these bugs?

So, it's a lot of, you know, skillset being exchanged there.

- Thanks Kim.

You mentioned several nationalities or places of origin for people.

Can you tell us a little bit about the list of vegetables or the groups of vegetables grown over the past year?

- So, I've seen a lot of the huckleberry are very popular in the Kenya community.

That is like they say that is very hard to really have access and so a lot of them grow that and they would preserve that and would use that during the winter to eat that and so those are something that I would see and then you see a lot of bok choy within the Asian community and a lot of the Asian are crawling vine plant, like from bitter melon to winter melon and then you got different kind of melon and squash throughout and then when you're looking at the Hispanic community, you see a lot of the corn, the tomato, there's a lot of the different kind of type from different region.

We try to do a collective garden, like we would put them in sections, so this way they can help each other water or weeding, because everybody's on a busy schedule, so collective gardening is the best model to really do and it's very successful and we have, this way they work within their community and so there are number of vegetable.

I can't really, you know, name it all.

Like the spider plant is something that I was amazed that there's Asian spider plant, but then there's the African spider plant that are bigger and that they cook it in a different way, like the African spider plant are mainly used for stir fry, but the Asian spider plant are used for pickle and preserve and so those are the things that I find that they're similar, but the way that they cook it is totally opposite.

- Wonderful learning experience.

Just to wrap up, can each of you tell us, starting with Kelly, what you think the most important issue is regarding food security, Kelly?

- I think the biggest issue for food security is our supply chain.

It's become so large that I think as our country expands and as our populations expand, we're gonna see broken links in the chain and one of the parts that go along with that is land access.

Land access is paramount to increasing food security.

If we can't grow our own food off of a small piece of land, then we really are at the mercy of others to feed us.

I think it was Winston Churchill, Herbert Hoover, one of those great guys from around the World War II, post-World War II era that said if you control the food supply, you control the people.

- We've seen it.

- [Kelly] Yep.

- Thank you very much Kelly.

Kim, what's the most important issue around food security?

- I would say having land access for them to grow their produce like their vegetables from their native country because it's hard for them to go into a supermarket that would carry a variety of produce that provide the health, nutrition that a lot of are diverse grower that live in Rochester or live in Minnesota would have access to.

And if they did, it would be so expensive to get them and especially in winter, it's double and triple the cost, so food insecurity is a very big issue, especially with the new American.

- Thank you, Kim.

Wayne, what's the most important issue surrounding food security?

- Well, from a public history standpoint, I would say being active citizens so that active citizens can organize and identify areas where they can have an impact on policy, on land use and the best, one of the best ways of being an active citizen is by knowing your history, knowing the history of land use and knowing the history of agriculture in your area can inform your policy and your organizing strategies.

- Wayne, are you saying if we don't value it, we may not have it?

- That's true, yes, that's what I'm saying.

You have to value it.

- Wonderful conversation.

Wayne, Kim, Kelly, thank you so much.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you Dan.

- Stay tuned for more on Farm Connections.

For generations, people have come to the United States in search of a better life.

Sometimes it's been to pursue opportunity, while at other times it has been to find freedom away from tyranny.

Each generation has had their own unique problems and solutions.

Put in those terms, people searching for basic needs and provisions are no different today than when this country was young.

We must remember that no matter where you come from, we're all in this together.

I'm Dan Hoffman.

Thanks for watching Farm Connections.

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