Minnesota

For the last 32 years, Minnesota Diversified Industries (MDI), a non-profit social enterprise, has been dedicated to providing job opportunities for people with disabilities. Founded in 1964 by John DuRand as an Occupational Training Center, MDI transitioned into an Affirmative Business in 1978...

Several years ago, commissioners in Lake County in Northeastern Minnesota began researching the possibility of bringing fully network connected broadband services to the region.

Thanks the efforts of community members and financing from USDA Rural Development and Agstar Rural Capital Network, a project nine years in the making will soon be a reality in Hutchinson, Minn.

On October 4, fellow USDA Food and Nutrition Service staffer Julie Mikkelson and I attended the Minnesota Vikings annual Taste of the NFL bash at Minneapolis’ Mall of America. This enormously popular charity event funds feeding efforts operated by Second Harvest Heartland, the Upper Midwest’s...

In September, I was one of 28 Junior Professionals and two advisors from USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) who traveled to the Midwest for an annual agricultural training trip. This training opportunity exposed members of FAS’s Junior Professional Advisory Committee (JPAC) to a broad range...

For most of its 130-year existence, the city of Adrian, Minn., has had the services of a hometown pharmacist. That is, until the local pharmacy was forced to close in 2008.

Jim Joens remembers planting crops on the Minnesota farm where he grew up as early as 1973, when he was 14 years old. Even then he knew that farming was what he wanted to be doing, and he’s been doing it ever since.