Refugee Agricultural Promotion Projects Blog

Refugee Agricultural Partnership Project collaborators, Catholic Charities of Kansas City (KS) and the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture (KCCUA), have worked hard and successfully to foster relationships among refugees and African American farmers in the historic black neighborhood of Oak Grove.
 

 

New USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen A. Merrigan, a long-time supporter of sustainable agriculture, has written a memorandum Harnessing USDA Rural Development Programs to support local and regional food systems. The memorandum highlights three sources of funds for this support:
 

1. Community Facilities Program
2. Business and Industry Guaranteed Loan Program, and;
3. Value Added Producer Grant Program

 
You can read the entire memorandum here:
 
 

Maria Figueroa, pictured above (in the Stanford Sweatshirt) with a group of Karen Gardeners.
 

 
We met with Glen Hill, pictured above, at the Minnesota Food Association's Training Farm at Wilder Forest on August 14th, to talk with him about his latest efforts to produce and market organic vegetables to local restaurants, grocery stores and emergency food shelves in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area.
 

The following photos are from the Intervale farm in Burlington, Vermont. At RAPP Partner the Association of Africans Living in Vermont’s suggestion, they have added Bhutanese and Burmese clients this year. Last year they recruited 28 homebound women with families and gave each a 25’ X 25’ or 25’ X 50” plot. Eighteen of these families started selling at a farmers market.

Mary K. Holmes pictured above at a recent USDA gathering. Mary is the author of a highly useful report "Entrepreneurial Farming: Part of the Plan for Prosperity in Northeast Ohio" which is available in the Publications Section of this website http://www.ised.us/publications/rapp.

 
Heather Quinney, a graduate of the University of Arkansas Fayetteville with an MS in Horticulture, has been interning at ISED over the summer. Heather is also the Manager of the Eureka Springs Farmers Market and the President of Carroll County Fresh, a sustainable agriculture advocacy group.  ISED is grateful to Heather for her assistance on a markets research project we conducted in May and June and we wish her well in all her future endeavors.