REX OBERHELMAN: $27,000 (Net!) from Five Organic Acres

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That led me to believe that we had to develop a market for mass units of produce. So I went up to the buyers with the Red Owl grocery store chain at Hopkins, a suburb of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Red Owl services 187 stores in that area . . . and buys $770,000 worth of produce a week! I asked the people there if they'd work with me, and they said that if I could consistently produce grade-A produce and truck it to them, they'd buy it.

I'd found a market. So I hit on the idea of licensing my idea and name, Blue Ribbon Gardens, to other area growers. After all, those guys who were foreclosed on and were left with five or seven acres of land wouldn't be able to make a living raising five acres of corn and beans. But they could get by if they grew the type of crops I've been growing and we marketed together to the Minneapolis area.

PLOWBOY: You're suggesting that farmers who've spent years riding giant tractors and growing megacrops of corn and soybeans turn totally around and raise five or seven acres of vegetables using mostly their own hand labor. Have you had trouble finding takers?

REX: No. I bet you I have 100 people who want to do it. Everyone who's come to me knows that it's going to take a lot of time and hard work. But they want to live in this area and keep what they've got. Some people do still want to work.

PLOWBOY: How are you going to finance all this?

REX: That's a long story. My good friend Kenny Crawford and I have been working on the figures for this for quite some time now. We know we'll need a food-processing center to gather, prepare, and ship all the produce. We'll need a large greenhouse to start all the farmers' plants. And we'll need to be able to lend these growers some money to finance their first season in this venture.

Well, the government of Minnesota had appropriated 3.5 million dollars to help deal with the farm crisis in this state, so we went to them with a fully worked-out proposal for our Blue Ribbon Garden licensing plan and asked them to lend us $750,000 to get started. For a good while, it looked as if they weren't going to help us at all, even though no one else had come up with any good proposals for spending the money they'd appropriated. Finally, though, they decided to lend us the whole thing . . . all three and a half million dollars!

PLOWBOY: What are you going to do with it all?

REX: First off, we'll construct that greenhouse and put 20 of Ron's friction heaters in there. It'll be 40,000 square feet — almost an acre — and will cost $750,000 to build. Then we'll have to spend $1,000,000 to build the food-processing center. We'll put the rest of the money into working capital for the growers. We'll give each one $27,500. Of that, $9,000 will go for living expenses, and the rest will go to pay for plants, extra labor, fuel, insurance, and other farming costs.

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