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| Members of the Cambodian American League of Lowell (CALL) and Tufts University pose with local farmers holding graduation certificates from a technical assistance program at the Lowell Small Business Assistance Center. SUN/TORY GERMANN |
The Economics of Farming
LOWELL Over the last seven years, Peg Ogonowski watched the transformation of the fields at White Gate Farm in Dracut.
"They went from scrubby fields at first to beautiful, pristine, organized fields," she said of the portion of land her family donates to local immigrant growers learning to farm in the United States.
Many growers who work the land at White Gate Farm have experience farming in their native countries in Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.
Peg Ogonowski's late husband, John, agreed to offer a small portion of their farm about 10 acres of the 150 they owned to Tufts University for the New Entry Sustainable Farming Project.
This year, the school has expanded the program to 18 weeks, and included classes on the economics of farming. Tufts had developed programs on crop production and farm management, but sought to provide expertise on business and marketing.
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"Many people are attracted to (farming) for cultural reasons," said Jennifer Hashley, the program's coordinator at Tufts. "They like growing food, or they like being in the field with their hands in the dirt. But they don't necessarily think about how to get access to credit, create a financial plan or build a solid foundation of a business."
So Tufts teamed up with the Cambodian American League of Lowell (CALL), where Bunroeun Thach has been working in "microenterprise training" for five years.
With a Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) and a grant from the Friedman Foundation, CALL last week graduated 40 students from the business portion of the Tufts program.
"Their program promotes farming, and our program promotes entrepeneurship," says Thach. It teaches banking, bookkeeping, marketing, business plan development, budgeting, tax laws, and Web design and marketing.
Classes are translated on the spot to Khmer, Hmong, Spanish and Portugese. Several students are from African countries.
Rechhat Proum of Lowell, originally from Cambodia, has worked small plots (less than 1/4 of an acre) in Nashua and at White Gate for the past seven years, growing Asian cucumbers, lemongrass and watermelon, and other vegetables.
He grows enough for his family of six. Whatever's left he sells at a farmers' market.
Proum enrolled in the sustainable farming project hoping to add to his farming skills, which include a knowledge of pesticides and how to buy seed, when to sell, when to spend, and how to eventually make money for his work.
For Proum, 49, farming is serious business. When he cannot attend class, his 15-year-old daughter attends for him and reports back.
The project, run from the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition, Science and Policy is run with the help of a grant from Community Teamwork Inc. in Lowell.
Its goal was partly to address the aging population of family farmers in the Northeast.
John Ogonowski offered some land for the program at the request of Gus Schumaker, then secretary of agriculture in Massachusetts.
Ogonowski, also an airline pilot, died Sept. 11, 2001 piloting Flight 11 for American Airlines. His widow says she has been able to allow the program to continue because it has little effect on the rest of the farm's operations.
"I didn't feel that because he died this should come to an end," she said.
Rebecca Lipchitz's e-mail address is rlipchitz@lowellsun.com .