Where Christian faith gets down to business
Digital advice for small-scale producers
Robotic mushroom pickers address labor shortage
Mennonite contributions to Puerto Rican health care
Keeping solar farms tidy
MEDA gives back land for Paraguayan Indians
Sometimes the thread that connects the articles in The Marketplace only becomes apparent after the fact.
Innovation is a theme common to each issue. This one is no different.
Former MEDA board member Jim Alvarez’s testimony about Mennonite missionaries’ impact on the development of Puerto Rico’s healthcare system from the 1940s through the early 1970s (pg. 14) is an example.
MEDA has never worked in Puerto Rico. However, the efforts of Mennonite entrepreneurs from the US in helping to develop the poultry and dairy industries on that Caribbean island have striking parallels with MEDA’s earliest work in South America.
On page 6, you can read about Swap Robotics’ vision for cleaner landscaping. Its battery-powered robots continue to work at times when human operators prefer not to.
Swap’s current focus is on massive solar farms. Eventually, it hopes to sell robotic sidewalk cleaners and perhaps tree planters.
The robotic mushroom pickers developed by Mycionics (pg. 18) supplement that industry’s scarce labor pool. Robotic fingers guided by machine vision also have some advantages over human pickers.
The robots consistently pick mushrooms at the optimal size preferred by grocery chains and evenly cut the end of each stem. Neither of those issues is likely to be a primary concern for humans
who are paid piece work, by the pound picked.
Cellphones have long provided a technological bridge for people in the Global South.
They allow unbanked African farmers to send and receive payments, or to call distant extension agents to hear recordings about weather and crop management best practices.
Now Digital Green (see story, page 10) uses artificial intelligence chatbots to help small-scale farmers get the information they need to improve their livelihoods.
The non-profit has ambitious plans to eventually support “all low-resource language (groups),” as partnerships with nongovernmental organizations and private companies provide the funding to expand its work, says Alesha Miller, Digital Green’s chief strategy officer.
A LinkedIn post by Ahsan-ulHaque Helal, who oversees MEDA programming in Eastern, Southern, and Central Africa, summarizes the impact of MEDA’s recent efforts in Ethiopia’s Amhara region.
MEDA has just completed its Motivating Enterprises to Rise in Trade and Agribusiness (EMERTA) project. Here’s what Helal had to say about the results of this eightyear initiative:
“The project was driven by a clear vision: to empower women and men to achieve sustainable employment and income. MEDA made remarkable contributions in expanding rice production from 17,000 hectares to 120,000 hectares, increasing average net income by 69,000 Ethiopian Birr ($1,643 CAD), and creating 30,000 decent jobs. External evaluation validated that against each dollar spent, the project benefit was 2.36 dollars.” .
6 Features
Tim Lichti’s Swap Robotics is working to build sustainable outdoor work equipment.
Swap co-founders Tim Lichti and Spenser Kschesinski with their battery-powered robotic mower.
13
In 1976, MEDA transferred 26,634 acres of land to the Indian Settlement Board of Filadelfia, Paraguay, to benefit indigenous Paraguayan farmers.
14
Mennonite missionaries and entrepreneurs played a critical role in building Puerto Rico's hospitals and poultry industry.
18
Mushroom growers struggle with labor shortages, product damage and inconsistent product size. Mycionics, founded by Ontario grower Murray Good, has a robotic solution to these challenges.
Shorter good reads
22 Roadside stand
24 Soul Enterprise
17 Soundbites
22 Books in brief
by Jeff Haanen
It’s one thing to embrace customer service. It’s quite another to live a life of sacrificial service.
Jesus calls his followers to “take up your cross and follow me.” Peter wrote that serving as Christ did will entail suffering (1 Peter 2:21). It’s one thing to follow Christ when things are going well. But, in the words of biblical scholar Bruce Waltke, how many of us would qualify as the “righteous” — those willing to advantage others, even if it means disadvantaging ourselves?
People who commit to sacrificial service of a community through their work are rare. New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote in his book, “The Road to Character,” that the median “narcissism score” has risen in the last two decades.
When young people were asked about whether they agree
with statements like “I am an extraordinary person,” or “I like to look at my body,” Brooks says, “Ninety-three percent of young people score higher than the middle score just twenty years ago” — they score about 30 percent higher, to be exact.
Behind the thin veil of careers with social impact is often the Almighty Self, ever ready to find the perfect mix of social impact, comfortable work hours, and financial reward in “meaningful work.”
Especially since the pandemic, I believe the willingness to sacrifice for a cause greater than ourselves is diminishing. Especially if it costs us.
Yet, meaningful work is found not in success or financial reward, but in sacrificial service. When people struggle to find a cause worth sacrificing for, boredom and meaninglessness tend to creep in.
“Far too many people in this
country seem to go about only half alive. All their existence is an effort to escape from what they are doing,” writes author and dramatist Dorothy Sayers about how most people view their work.
“And the inevitable result of this is a boredom, a lack of purpose, a passivity which eats life away at the heart and a disillusionment which prompts men to ask what life is all about.”
People need a reason to sacrifice for something beyond themselves. It’s what puts wind in sails, feet on the ground, and energy in a workday. Paradoxically, what we’re really looking for is the right cross to bear, not the best throne from which to rule.
We live in a cultural moment in which there are multiple issues calling for sacrificial work. Take, for example, the growing inequality in American society.
In 1989, the Federal Reserve reported that the bottom 50% held $22 billion in wealth while the top 10% held $1.7 trillion. Fast forward to 2021, and the bottom 50% held $260 billion in wealth while the top 10% swelled to $36 trillion.
To make that clearer, the top 1% of US households have 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% of households combined. The simmering discontent and anger so prevalent in American society has its root, I believe, in millions of people seeing the wealthy get much wealthier — even in the last 20 years — while their standard of living stagnates or declines.
And yet, some decide that sacrificial love for others trumps personal comfort.
Julie (Sapp) Stone works as an investment director focused on family economic mobility at Gary Community Investments, a philanthropic organization in Denver. Before that she worked at Teach for America, an organization that places talented young teachers in low-income schools. Bright, energetic, connected, and committed, Julie was deeply formed by Catholic social teaching, which motivates her work on behalf of low-income families. When I asked Julie about her commitment to issues around justice, I was surprised to learn it didn’t come from academic study. Rather, it came from growing up at a truck stop on the Wyoming-Nebraska border.
Julie’s grandpa and his brothers were Depression-era survivors who bought a car dealership, which turned into car leasing and eventually into a small truck stop chain headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska. Her dad became the general manager of Sapp Bros. Cheyenne Travel Center and her mom, the store manager.
The establishment employed over 100 people between a motel, gas station, restaurant, and store.
Julie grew up just a few miles away and started to work in the family business alongside her brother at just age five, picking up trash around the truck stop because of her parent’s pride in their work.
As she grew, she waited tables, stocked shelves, and served the truckers. Her dad would famously pause mid-bite while eating in the restaurant to check out a customer after their dinner because “nobody should have to wait to pay.”
“I’ll pound the table in defense of truck drivers. They are an extraordinary community,” Julie says. “They’re hard working, responsible, God fearing, family centered, and make tremendous sacrifices for their work.” Julie pauses, with almost reverence in her voice.
“My dad always trusted that I’d be okay at the truck stop, whether he was there or not. Truckers know that their actions reflect on other drivers, which creates a sense of shared responsibility. If there was ever a conflict or a tactless comment, without fail, another driver would step in and sort things out.”
Sapp Bros. was employeeowned, provided full healthcare coverage, and even paid for college tuition, which was practically unheard of in the 1980s. Julie’s parents believed that their job was to lead and serve their employees sacrificially.
“I remember one Christmas my dad had it out with corporate. Since the combined portfolio of travel stations didn’t turn a profit that year, there would be no Christmas bonuses,” she recalls. “I watched my mom and dad divide their past and future paychecks to make bonuses happen for the Cheyenne employees.”
Julie believes her parents’ leadership was built on love. “At the end of the day Mom and Dad recognized that each employee was
giving of their time and talent to help make our company successful. My parents were genuinely grateful for their people, which explains why so many who were hired on opening day in 1983 were still there when I graduated from college in 2003.”
Julie’s commitment to justice today isn’t abstract. She sees the faces of those who worked for her parents for 30 years in frontline jobs — people of enormous integrity. “I see working families first. They show up for the physical work. They provide services and make products the rest of us rely on, they almost always go unnoticed. These are the families whose sacrifices benefit us all. .
Volume 54, Issue 4
July August 2024
The Marketplace (ISSN 0199-7130) is published bi-monthly by Mennonite Economic Development Associates, 100 S Queen St Ste 235, Lancaster, PA 176035368. Periodicals postage paid at Newton, KS 67114. Lithographed in U.S.A. Copyright 2024 by MEDA.
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Tim Lichti’s vision for Swap Robotics goes beyond generating profits and creating jobs.
“It gives a great sense of meaning, what we’re doing, in that the work can hopefully make clean energy more affordable and lead to a world with more clean energy,” said Lichti, the company’s cofounder and CEO.
Swap, based in Kitchener, Ontario, makes robots that can cut grass and clear snow. The company’s current focus is on cutting grass at large solar farms.
Swap’s business model is based on leasing robots as a service.
Lichti started a residential grass-cutting firm while in university. He grew that business to several hundred customers in a few cities by the second year. He majored in history but decided that the business world would be more suitable for him than teaching.
“I think I’ve always had that entrepreneurial streak. When I was a kid, I had a lemonade stand, snow shoveling for neighbors, that kind of thing.”
Living in Waterloo, he was influenced by the changes Blackberry was bringing to the business world with its innovative smartphones, years before Apple introduced the iPhone. “The writing was on the wall, that this technology was going to change how businesses function. It would be possible to
manage mobile operations and mobile businesses better.”
He recognized that people could submit their timesheets from their phones. That helped him to better understand how long workers took at different job sites. But that didn’t mean he knew how to code or make the app that would replace paper-based timesheets.
Eventually, he worked with some contractors and got some investment capital. Lichti learned by doing, starting several tech companies over a few years.
None of those firms reached critical mass. He realized that others had beaten him to the larger contracts.
However, Stanford University learned about his product and ended up using it for its staff. That connection led Lichti to do some custom software projects for the university. Then an encounter with a vice president of Carnegie Mellon University led to a conversation about a future where robots would bring things to people.
The person asked Lichti if he could develop a salt-brining robot. Lichti then asked some snow contractors if they would find such a product useful.
They responded no. But they told Lichti that winter sidewalk clearing contracts were a “pain in the butt” due to the difficulty of finding workers willing to get up in
the middle of the night for the job.
That conversation led Lichti to start a company that was originally called Top Hat Robotics, in late 2019. Its original plan was to use robots to clear sidewalks in the winter and to cut grass at sports fields in the summer.
While attending a lawn and tech conference, company staff repeatedly heard that huge, 1,000-acre, and larger solar panel installations were a maintenance headache for their owners. Controlling grass and other vegetation was said to be the largest single maintenance expense at solar farms.
The idea of tackling this problem appealed to Lichti’s team for a few reasons. Solar farms are fenced in. Operating robots within the enclosures poses less risk to robots than clearing snow and having to cope with unpredictable human drivers.
Second, most solar installations have single-axis trackers. Once the problem of cutting close to panels while avoiding cables or other obstacles is solved and mapped out, maintaining an entire park is “like building with Lego,” Lichti said.
Staff map out a few arrays in a solar farm using a surveyor stick. Then they use custom software to produce the pattern for the rest of the facility.
The size of the solar farms and the swappable, rechargeable
batteries that are used to power the quiet, electric robots means that they can be used “as close to 24 (hours a day), seven (days a week) as possible.”
Drivelines and wiring under panels around I-beams require a special cutting deck, he said. The cutting decks on Swap robots can be offset up to six feet to get underneath panels and around poles. The robots’ massive cutting blades can cut through vegetation up to an inch in diameter.
When the ground at a site is very wet, cutting can be challenging, Lichti said. Swap can use retrofittable tracks analogous to tank treads on its robots to manage this problem.
The robots’ batteries will run for between four and 10 hours, depending on the thickness of the vegetation being cut. The batteries can recharge within 2.5 to three hours. Each robot is equipped with two sets of batteries, allowing for close to continuous operation.
Two trends support Lichti’s confidence in a steadily growing market for Swap’s products. Solar
power and battery storage will be responsible for 81 percent of new generation capacity in the US this year, he said.
Second, some jurisdictions are banning the use of gas-powered lawn equipment. “The world’s going in that direction.”
Renu Robotics is currently the only competitor in the market niche Swap is pursuing. Swap is
“Long-term, our 20-year vision is to be the world’s number one work equipment platform. Helping the world transition from diesel and gas-powered equipment to electric.”
— Tim Lichti, CEO and cofounder, Swap Robotics
beating Renu on many aspects, Lichti said. “We’re in really good competitive shape.”
Swap Robotics’ machines cost about $100,000 each. Lichti hopes that within two to three years, each machine will return its investment within two months of being put in operation.
Each robot could last up to 10 years, he said.
Swap offers customers contracts that save them money compared to conventional maintenance. Those forms of maintenance require human machine operators and machines that need to be regularly refilled with gas or diesel.
Lichti is confident that within 18 months, Swap’s products will generate 70 percent gross profit margins.
Swap has raised $7.5 million US in investment capital. Investors include SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar farm operators in the US. “We probably will be doing another (fundraising) round fairly soon.”
Lichti wants to raise another $2-$3 million in the coming months
to build more robots and advance growth. Within a year, Swap could use another $10 to $20 million to fuel future growth.
The company has 35 staff and is aiming for profitability in mid2025. Swap had about $900,000 Canadian in revenue in 2023 and projects 300 to 600 percent growth this year.
“We’re going up against people (for contracts) with riding mowers and skid steerers, and we’re winning the jobs,” he said.
Lichti expects to hire more staff soon, primarily “chaperones” who physically oversee the installation of robots at new locations.
Swap has received $9 million in contracts to date. Much of this has come from a solar vegetationcutting firm that is also among Swap’s investors. Ninety percent of sales have been in the US, particularly in Florida and Texas.
Solar already supplies five percent of the power flowing into the Texas grid. That will triple to 15 percent within a few years, Lichti said.
He has ambition goals for
Swap, aiming for $100 million in revenue within three years. Once the company hits that milestone, it will turn some of its attention back to using robots to clear sidewalk snow. It is also considering other applications, such as attachments for solar panel laying and tree planting.
By the time Swap hits that sales level, there will be another $1 billion of market opportunity in the US solar farm sector due to growth in the solar industry, he said.
Swap has filed for two patents on its technology and has been accepted into a government patent program. Lichti expects the firm to file more patent applications after its next funding round.
Robotics is like a decathlon for startups, he said. “You have to be good at everything.”
Swap hopes to have a trimmer attachment commercially ready to do weed whacking within the next year.
Lichti grew up in the Mennonite faith. He attended Rockway Mennonite Collegiate for high school and then Winnipeg’s Canadian Mennonite University.
He values the sense of community and calls to social justice that he learned in those settings.
“I find that really satisfying, for me personally. Folks here at the company really align with that vision as well. Our mission is to make outdoor work equipment sustainable. Long-term, our 20-year vision is to be the world’s number one work equipment platform. Helping the world transition from diesel and gas-powered equipment to electric.”
“Also, it’s just personally for me, it’s just a lot of fun.”
All staff are shareholders in Swap. “I see that as one of the biggest factors in why we can move so quickly.”
“We’re not going to allow ourselves to be acquired. We’re going the distance.”
After its next fundraising round, the company plans to reserve the SWAP stock ticker for a time when the business could become publicly traded. That would only happen once Swap has several hundred million dollars in revenue, Lichti said. .
By Jake Smucker
Long-time MEDA supporters are familiar with MEDA’s unique model for international development.
Digital Green, a small not-forprofit company, deploys an entirely new type of model — artificial intelligence large language models (LLMs).
How can artificial intelligence (AI) play a role in the life-changing work of developing agricultural solutions to poverty?
Alesha Miller, Digital Green’s chief strategy officer, explains the organization’s specialty.
“We are … co-creating a world where farmers use data and technology to build more prosperous communities,” Miller said. “That’s our mission. And we have reached six million farmers over the course of our 16-year history in 17 countries.”
The funny thing about techcentric organizations is that their business models change as new technology is developed. That is exactly what has steered the course of Digital Green’s history.
With every twist and turn, Miller focuses on the problem: a lack of access to timely, quality agricultural advice for small-scale farmers.
A 2006 pilot project at Microsoft Research India (MRI) was driven by the idea that technology could help rural farmers. In 2007,
Microsoft Research India decided to fold the project. However, a few of the researchers were inspired by the results they found. Rikin Gandhi and a couple of co-founders left MRI to continue the work with a new, independent organization. They named the organization Digital Green. Gandhi became its CEO.
The first breakthrough technology for agricultural extension was surprisingly simple: video. Digital Green’s partners and trainers
used miniature projectors to play instructional videos for rural Indians and Ethiopians.
To their surprise, they often found that the whole community showed up. In some cases, it was one of the first videos the farmers had ever seen. By teaching through video, Digital Green increased farmer incomes by 24 percent.
Digital Green reached farmers in 17 countries over the next decade. In 2020, it faced the same catastrophic interruption as the rest of the
world — the COVID-19 pandemic. This forced the company’s next major change. Instead of hosting community video events, Digital Green started communicating virtually with farmers.
Amid the pandemic, AI researchers made several breakthroughs in artificial intelligence. When ChatGPT launched publicly in 2022, the developers at Digital Green saw an opportunity.
They started to dream about chatbots that could instantly educate farmers using regionally specific advice in the farmer’s native language.
Today, smartphones and access to video are found across most communities where Digital Green works. Though community video continues to be effective, it is no longer as revolutionary as it once was. Digital Green is finding that AI chatbots may hold the key to the future of agricultural education.
Through a popular messaging app called Telegram, farmers can ask questions of Digital Green’s chatbot, Farmer.Chat, in several languages: English, Hindi, Kishwahili, or Hausa.
A chatbot will almost instantly reply with advice, tips, and relevant YouTube videos. During the chatbot’s testing phase, answers are checked by a human extension agent for accuracy and clarity. However, Digital Green sees a future where their chatbot is accurate and consistent enough that it would not need human oversight.
From its start at MRI, this research sought to reach and educate more farmers using technology. Digital Green is finding success with this approach.
Traditional, in-person face-toface ag extension costs about $35
per practice that is adopted. That means it costs about $35 to teach a farmer a certain type of cover cropping or how to use a method of fertilization.
Digital Green found that community video reduced the cost of each practice adopted to $3.50. The organization expects to reduce the cost to 35 cents per practice using AI chatbots.
MEDA and Digital Green overlap in many areas of interest but do not cross paths directly — at least not yet. Miller can compare the organizations well because she works at Digital Green and hears stories from a family member who works at MEDA.
“MEDA and Digital Green share a lot of the same goals, but we are working on different parts of the problem,” Miller identified. “I think that’s really important for development organizations to be
very focused about where their particular special sauce is.”
Digital Green’s expertise in
technology makes it unique in the international development world. MEDA is respected for its ability
Have you ever taken the time to chat with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot?
Alesha Miller, Digital Green’s chief strategy officer, thinks you should. She suggests chatting with an AI chatbot such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, Gemini from Google, or Microsoft Copilot.
You’ll be amazed by the casual, conversational tone. This experience often makes it hard to tell you’re not talking to a person.
AI has been all over the news in the past year and a half. Headlines such as, An AI Bot Has Passed the Bar Exam, AI’s Powers of Political Persuasion, and Was This Written by Human or AI? have made terms like ChatGPT and LLMs commonplace in tech, business, and news.
“Generative AI relies on something called large language models (LLMs),” Miller said.
LLMs are giant digital collections of data and information pulled in from the internet, digitized books, and many other sources.
“They essentially represent general intelligence ... on a whole range of topics by understanding the associations between words and being able to generate responses and anticipate … a reasonable
way of responding to a query,” she said.
Generative AI chatbots can converse with you about almost any topic you can think of. As you chat, it may reference earlier moments in your interaction or find connections between ideas and concepts. Instead of searching for answers online and seeing a list of links, you can ask an AI chatbot. It will attempt to provide you with a direct answer.
What are these online tools used for? Anyone can type a request into a chatbot with as much detail as they want.
The chatbot can, for example, summarize papers or articles. It can create fake photos and videos. And it can write content for social media, blogs, or magazine articles.
This new technology also makes errors and displays concerning behavior at times. These issues create a wide range of moral, ethical, and legal concerns about its use.
Nevertheless, Digital Green believes that “Gen AI” can also help small-scale farmers in India, Ethiopia, and the Global South. Digital Green’s chatbot, Farmer. Chat, seeks to offer these farmers quick and accurate farming advice to improve their lives. .
to build sustainable markets for small-scale farmers. Yet, both organizations focus on improving livelihoods for subsistence farmers — particularly women — in the Global South.
“Agriculture is probably the best engine for poverty alleviation that the world has,” Miller said.
She believes that both MEDA and Digital Green are great at finding and supporting local leaders to help their entire communities out of poverty.
The rise of artificial intelligence gives reasons for excitement and concern. But both enthusiasts and skeptics of AI can celebrate the positive impact Digital Green is making using AI chatbots.
With every era and pivot in its history, Digital Green has made research central to its process. As technology evolves, the company continues to ask what’s next.
Looking to the future, Miller said, “We continue to keep researching and experimenting with, ‘What are the other ways that technology can help solve these problems for farmers?’” .
As part of celebrating MEDA’s 70 years of investing in entrepreneurs, The Marketplace magazine looks back at significant events in the organization’s history.
The Mennonite Central Committee News Service issued the news release below on June 6, 1976. Thanks to the MCC archives in Akron, PA, for sharing this.
Akron, Pa.: On April 30, 1976, officials of Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA) and the Indian Settlement Board (ISB), Filadelfia, Paraguay, met to transfer 26,634 acres of land from MEDA to the ISB.
needs facing the ISB.
A total of 771 Indian families have been settled on their own land under the ISB. Eighty families were settled in 1975.
A signed agreement states that the land must be sold by the ISB to Paraguayan Indian families who wish to farm. Funds from these sales are to be used to build roads, schools, clinics and churches in the area.
Initially the land will be divided into 100-hectare (250 acre) plots. Each of these plots must have 10 hectares (25 acres) of land on which crops can be raised. The rest will be used for raising cattle.
The ISB will approve the settlers’ plans and work closely with each family as it starts out.
The land, called the Casaurina ranch, was purchased in the late 1950s by a group of MEDA members. It was first used for growing crops and raising cattle then later rented to an individual for a cattle ranch.
There are 250 Indian families waiting for farmland on which to settle, mostly young families from the second generation of Indian settlers. The ranch, therefore, responds to one of the most urgent
MEDA has been working in credit programs with the Paraguayan groups since the early 1960s. Each Indian settlement has organized its own credit committee to administer MEDA funds. The funds are being used by individual families to purchase horses, harnesses, wagons, and plows.
Recently Indian cooperatives have begun using MEDA funds for cattle purchase, fence building, digging water holes and clearing land.
When the first MEDA funds were loaned to the Indian people it would not have been surprising if the entire amount had been lost because of the people’s inexperience with handling money. To date, however, no funds have been written off.
This program has become one of MEDA’ s most important and MEDA will continue to work with the ISB to meet credit needs of both individuals and cooperatives.
Erie J. Sauder, chairman of the MEDA Paraguay committee, his wife Orlyss Sauder, and Lloyd J. Fisher, MEDA executive director, were present to sign the agreement on April 30. .
Mennonites played a significant role in Puerto Rico’s economic development, in the health care and agriculture industries, a former MEDA board member says.
“It’s a fascinating story to me, and it’s very closely aligned with the work of MEDA,” Jim Alvarez says.
Alvarez currently serves as director of finance and chief financial officer at Maple City Health Care Center in Goshen, Indiana. During his career, he has worked in health care, in agriculture and at Everence, where he served as CFO for 15.5 years.
Alvarez was born and raised in Aibonito, Puerto Rico, during the tail end of the Mennonite mission work in Puerto Rico.
Telling the story of Mennonite influence in Puerto Rico between the 1940s and 1970s has become a passion project for Alvarez. He wants to document the efforts of as many people as possible so current and future generations will know of their efforts.
The story of Mennonites in Puerto Rico begins in 1943, a decade before MEDA was created. During World War II, Anabaptist and Mennonite Christians whose belief in non-resistance was at odds with the military draft requirement, sought alternatives to going to jail, Alvarez said.
A US army general who had Anabaptist roots was sympathetic to their pleas and allowed the conscientious objectors to serve as healthcare workers in Puerto Rico.
At the same time, Mennonite Central Committee found that they could not send people who had volunteered to serve in China and India to either of those countries due to the global conflict. “So this came together, and they started sending some of them to Puerto Rico.”
Puerto Rico’s colonial history had created a significant economic problem, Alvarez said. Both Spain and the US had focused on “an extraction economy.”
Metals, food, sugar and coffee were all extracted from the country. The agriculture sector was developed along the coast of Puerto Rico for easy access to maritime transportation. “The people in the inner part of the island were forgotten and got nothing.”
When Mennonites arrived in the mountainous La Plata region in 1943, they took over some agricultural projects, but quickly became aware of great needs for trained health care workers.
“That’s how the healthcare program began in Puerto Rico.”
Decades later, Alvarez became a board member at the Sistema de Salud Menonita hospital, which was created due to Mennonite efforts. He has served in that role
While MEDA has never worked in Puerto Rico, the efforts of one Mennonite entrepreneur in that country has parallels to MEDA’s earliest work in Paraguay.
Illinois entrepreneur Raymond Ulrich heard about Mennonite efforts in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s, and decided to see what he could do to help farmers there, Jim Alvarez says.
Ulrich bought land “and started planting different crops to see what worked, what didn’t work.”
He and others started a dairy farm with the intention of training people and
then turning the farm over to the local farmers.
“One of the things they did was, they started improving the breeding stock for dairy cows,” Alvarez said.
That effort involved flying bull semen from Ohio to Puerto Rico in the 1950s to inseminate cows and improve the genetics of the cows’ offspring.
Others involved in the effort included Stanley and Paul Miller from Holmes County, Ohio, who had training in the artificial insemination industry, Alvarez said.
Alvarez has seen a video of a single engine plane flying over a Puerto Rican farm and dropping a small container of bull semen by parachute. “It’s just amazing stuff,” he said. “Creativity. They just figured out how to make things happen and did them.”
Readers who are familiar with MEDA’s origins will know that the first MEDA project was an investment in the Sarona Dairy in Paraguay’s Chaco region. That effort involved lending farmers money so they could improve the genetics and milk production of their cows. .
for more than 12 years, and on a Goshen hospital board for a similar tenure.
“I want to give back, and part of it is the storytelling around this topic,” he said.
Alvarez’s father was “an agribusiness guy,” raising layer hens among other ventures. The elder Alvarez attended Goshen College in Indiana, meeting people like Stanley Miller and others who helped to develop commercial chicken production in Puerto Rico.
Jim Alvarez first learned about MEDA while attending Goshen College in the early 1980s. He attended his first MEDA convention 20 years later after reconnecting with a college professor, started attending MEDA chapter (now called hub) meetings in Indiana, and eventually joined MEDA’s board in 2012.
Mennonite contributions to the
Puerto Rican health care system have been more profound and enduring than efforts made by other church groups, he said.
Even though the largest hospital in the Mennonite system has been a community hospital since 1976, the Mennonite name, brand and way of doing things
endures, he said. The hospital’s tagline, “Caring with the love of Christ,” is an example of that, he said.
The Mennonite health care system includes six acute care hospitals and 18 urgent care clinics, serving about 20 percent of the country’s population across the southeast one quarter of the island.
“It’s the most sustainable and financially stable system,” he said.
Some other privately owned Puerto Rican hospitals have gone into liquidation or closed due to financial difficulties. Others need to find new partners due to carrying too much debt, he said.
“It’s kind of a strange financial situation, but the Mennonite system has been run, I think, fiscally conservatively, and we’ve been blessed financially.”
“Hospitals and education are part of the story. The church is part of the story. Then you also have the entrepreneurs who came down to serve and then stayed and became local entrepreneurs. There were several that stayed and developed mostly in agriculture, so the whole poultry industry was ramped up.”
That led to the poultry industry becoming one of the largest employers in that mountain area of the country, he said. .
A Manitoba Hutterite colony builds fire trucks for other colonies across the country and municipalities in multiple Canadian provinces, says a story in Anabaptist World magazine.
The Green Acres Colony is home to 120 people in 32 families.
Hutterites are pietist Christians believing in adult baptism and pacifism, as do other Anabaptists such as the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Brethren in Christ. They also follow biblical texts encouraging communal ownership of property.
The Manitoba colony has been making fire trucks for 22 years. It aims to produce 24 trucks annually but hasn’t yet achieved that goal. In 2023, it turned out 18 trucks. Each unit is expected to last 20 to 30 years.
Acres EV, a company based in the colony, receives truck frames. A crew of 23 workers adds “lights, sirens, wiring harness, water tanks, and other elements.”
The Green Acres colony also farms 7,000 acres of wheat, barley, canola, and corn.
Close to one-quarter of Canadian farmers live in urban areas, the country’s 2021 census data shows.
That’s up from 16 percent in 216, according to “Robots on the Farm,” an article in The Walrus magazine. https://thewalrus.ca/ inside-farmings-tech-boom/
The article discusses how an entire farm can be in a backyard shipping container “gleaming trays of lettuce or strawberries or herbs — with controlled water and light and every parameter for optimal growth customizable with an app.”
The US’s largest private owner of farmland is a wealthy city
slicker, the article notes.
Tech billionaire Bill Gates owns land worth an estimated $690 million US.
Tyndale University’s Centre for Redemptive Entrepreneurship aims to transform business in Canada by serving entrepreneurs, a Faith Today article suggests.
The centre was established at the Canadian private interdenominational evangelical Christian university in Toronto, Ontario in 2021.
It aims to “equip, support, and mentor Christian entrepreneurs who are motivated by their faith to live out the gospel through their ventures.”
Philip Yan, the center’s director,
estimates there are 630,000 Protestant Christian entrepreneurs in Canada.
The centre offers courses for people at the early stage of their journey, startups, and more established businesses.
It has also created a digital platform called the 7,000 App to “facilitate group cohorts, community connections, and live meetings.”
The 7,000 number references 1 Kings 19, when the prophet Elijah feels alone in his ministry but is told by God that there are 7,000 others ready to defend him. .
Would you like to comment on anything in this magazine, or on any other matters relating to business and faith? Send your thoughts to mstrathdee@meda.org
Twenty years ago, Murray Good started investigating using robotics to augment the labor supply at his mushroom farm near Putnam in southern Ontario.
Finding enough reliable mushroom pickers, who are paid by the pound, was an issue then. Hiring and retaining workers continues to be a challenge, for Canadian and US growers alike. “There’s about a 20 percent labor gap, and a 40 percent labor turnover, and it takes three to six months to train someone,” said Michael Curry.
Curry is CEO of Mycionics, the robotic mushroom picker company that Good founded. The company will ship its first 46 systems to buyers in British Columbia and the Netherlands this spring, after more than a decade of research, development, trial and error.
Mushrooms are delicate, prone to bruising if touched improperly. Bruising degrades the product quality and value. “Quality is the number one thing,” Curry said. “There’s no point in picking it and damaging it. That was the number
one, first focus (for the robotic pincers), to mimic how the humans are grabbing the mushrooms.”
An early Mycionics product picked mushrooms of a consistent size without damaging them. But it was only picking 10 mushrooms a minute.
That system cost three times as much as the new version, which picks over three times as many mushrooms.
“Because of the space and unique requirements of these mushroom farms, there’s no such
thing as off-the-shelf technology to do it,” Curry said.
A customized gripper that feels like a rubberized finger pulls mushrooms from a growing bed at a rate of 30 to 44 mushrooms a minute. That’s the same rate at which an experienced human can pick. The gripper puts the mushrooms in a disc. Then the stems are evenly trimmed, and the product is automatically packed.
The robotic system has a few advantages compared to human pickers. First, it can cut each stem to the same length, with a straight
cut. That consistency can be lacking in people who are paid to work quickly.
The three-dimensional machine vision cameras ensure that the robotic finger picks only mushrooms at exactly the size retailers want, a 55-millimeter (about 2.2 inch) cap size.
Picking the perfect size is not easy. Mushrooms grow quickly, as much as 4.2 percent per hour. “You need the people there to pick at the precise time,” Good said.
“Mushrooms don’t stop growing if you have 10 percent of
by
people who don’t show up (for their shift) in a day, which is … not unheard of.”
Good thinks the data growers get from the machine vision system will be even more valuable than the robotic picking itself. Data provided by the Mycionics system senses the microclimate in which mushrooms are growing. The system measures carbon dioxide, temperature, humidity and pressure.
This information will allow growers to use less space in their growing bed. It will help them adjust or reduce their use of inputs,
and get more mushrooms, he said.
Having mushrooms picked at their optimal size could increase overall grower yield by seven percent, Curry said.
The Mycionics system sells for $150,000. It will pay for itself in labor savings within two years. That payback estimate does not include the better profit margins growers will enjoy from their improved yields.
Mycionics’ current product came about through work with a partner in the Netherlands. The Christiaens Group is the largest supplier of equipment to the global mushroom industry.
Christiaens has developed a new style vertical farm called a drawer system. A traditional farm has a two-bed system using wooden pallets.
The newer, more efficient aluminum equipment designed by Christiaens can be up to seven levels high. It allows the beds to come to the mushroom pickers, rather than the other way around.
Mycionics will focus on Canadian and European markets for the time being. That may seem odd given that the US produces more than three times as many mushrooms as Canada.
Still, Canada is the eighth
After spending 10 years developing a robotic mushroom picking system, Murray Good’s mushroom farm won’t be using the equipment that Mycionics created.
Good’s farm, Whitecrest Mushrooms Ltd., grew Portobello and Cremini (brown) mushrooms for over 20 years until this February.
He considered himself a small grower, averaging about eight million pounds of mushrooms a year.
Most of Good’s production was wholesaled to the largest mushroom company in Ontario. That changed after a foreign firm purchased his former client.
Good has a varied farming background. He worked for a dairy farm, then for Alpine Plant food in New Hamburg, Ontario for 15 years. He purchased a mushroom farm in 2001, then had to rebuild it after it was ravaged by fire.
Good also co-owns a 700-acre cattle farm with his brother and nephews near Meaford, Ontario, raising grass-fed beef, pork and chicken.
Good is unhappy with how mushrooms reach grocery shoppers. “The small grower can’t get into retailers,” he said. “They just won’t deal with it.”
“The retailers are marking up the mushrooms that we are selling to them 110 percent, which is criminal. Thirty, forty percent markup on food is reasonable, but not 110 percent.”
Good has spent the past number of months refurbishing his mushroom barns to grow an aero-mycelium product used for a meat alternative bacon and seafood.
The mycelium is a part of a mushroom that is very similar to the root system of any plant.
Modulating the mycelium of fungi can produce airy, soft and elastic material called aero mycelium that is used as replacements for many goods. This aero mycelium can be sliced thin to make vegan bacon or can be compressed and dried to form a leather-like material.
The new aero-mycelium production supplies Ecovative MyForest Foods of Albany, New York. “All of it’s going to the eastern seaboard, to supply that.”
“We’ll be their main supplier for the first few years here.”
Good needs to expand his buildings. His current operation can grow about three million pounds of “mushroom bacon” a year. “We want to put another 20 to 25 million pounds out the back, another facility out the back.”
Good has 48 employees and will grow his workforce to 150 within the next two years. The farm will be the first in Canada to produce aero mycelium. During an interview this spring, Good said it would be shipping the aero mycelium product by the end of May.
largest mushroom producer in the world. Canada ‘s 264 mushroom farms grow over 300 million pounds of mushrooms a year. About 45 percent of this production is exported, almost all of it to the US.
US growers produce over 965 million pounds annually.
But most US mushrooms are grown on old wooden beds, Good said. “They don’t have the systems… that we can adapt on.”
That will change as urban mushroom farms, particularly in Pennsylvania, home to half of the US’s production, move to rural areas and adopt new technology, he said. .
So-called “vegan bacon” is a rapidly growing market in the US, projected to be worth $2.4 billion by 2032.
While not all these products are fungi-based, some that are have high profile backers. MyForest Foods, which Good’s firm will be supplying, reportedly raised $55 million a year ago, from investors including actor Robert Downey Jrs.’ Footprint Coalition Ventures. The MyForest product was already being sold at more than 100 retail and food service locations across New York and Massachusetts last year.
The company says it spent two years researching and developing its “MyBacon” product, which is described as “a block of gourmet mushroom mycelium sliced and infused with coconut oil for sizzle and beet juice for color.”
Some firms are much earlier in their development. In early 2024, Meat the Mushroom, a Baltimore-based startup, appeared on the Shark Tank TV pitch program. It got a $150,000 investment from Kevin O’Leary and Lori Greiner in exchange for a 33 percent stake in the company.
Meat the Mushroom’s “cleanlabel vegan bacon alternative,” called Shroomacon, is made from long strips of oyster mushrooms, with olive oil, natural smoke flavor, salt and black pepper seasoning. .
As part of celebrating MEDA’s seven decades of working with entrepreneurs, The Marketplace is retelling stories of significant events from the organization’s history.
From the fall of 1987 to the fall of 2009, MEDA published MEDA News, a quarterly, four-page newsletter.
The items below are excerpted from those newsletters.
It was likely the first time Mennonite Economic Development Associates was mentioned by an American First Lady and “it sent chills up my spine,” says Allon Lefever.
Vice-chair of the MEDA board, Lefever was one of five panelists invited to share “best practices” at a White House conference Feb. 15 on controlling malaria in Africa.
He had just returned from Tanzania, where MEDA distributes insecticide-treated bed nets to pregnant women and infants.
Laura Bush addressed the meeting to encourage wider cooperation among faith-based, business, and government efforts to combat malaria, the largest single killer of African children. She referred to the President’s Malaria Initiative, a five-year, $1.2 billion program to combat malaria in 15 of the hardest-hit African nations, which was launched by her husband, George W. Bush, in June 2005.
MEDA devised and manages a Tanzania government program to use commercial channels to make bed nets available throughout the country. Recent new US funding has enabled MEDA to expand the
program to include young children.
Mrs. Bush cited MEDA’s program as an example of publicprivate coordination.
Behind the headlines in war-torn global hotspots, MEDA is reaching out to help young people create a better future.
A major new initiative builds on MEDA’s successful Egypt program, which offers loans with educational and safety components for children who work in small family businesses.
The new $5 million program, called Financial Innovations for Youth (sponsored by the MasterCard Foundation), expands the concept to the next age group. It introduces new financial services, along with improved workplace safety and financial education, to prepare older children for safe, productive jobs and possibly businesses of their own.
It will operate in Egypt (Cairo and Aswan) and Morocco (Casablanca and Rabat).
Another new youth venture, called Secure Futures in Afghanistan, aims to bring advancement opportunities to apprentices (ages 12-18) in informal construction workshops in the city of Kabul.
The success of MEDA’s Behind the Veil program in Pakistan has expanded and extended the model in a new four-year project called Pathways & Pursestrings. The
$8 million initiative ($7 million from the Canadian International Development Agency) builds on the embroidery project by adding other impoverished Pakistani women besides those who are sequestered, and including three additional value chains: seedlings, milk collection and decorative bangles.
A man walked into the PRISMA (MEDA’s micro-enterprise) office in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and asked how to get involved with the program. When asked about how he heard about PRISMA, he replied:
“My neighbor is Franz Guzman. He used to be lazy, and sat around drinking all the time. Now he’s cleaned up his shop, he works late into the night, and I never see him get drunk. I asked his wife what happened, and she said all these changes took place after he started coming to PRISMA. Well, any program that can make changes like that in people, I want to be part of.”
USA Today’s internet edition selected MEDA’s web site as a “hot site,” which led to meda.org being featured in “The Net: New and Notable” column in the paper’s Dec. 9 print edition.
The paper said MEDA “thinks it has found a way for people to make a charitable gift that keeps on giving. That is, by providing entrepreneurs in the developing world and North America a ‘hand up, not a hand out.’ “ .
Big Bets. How Large-Scale Change Really Happens by Rajiv Shah (Simon Element, 2023. 278 pages, $28.99 US)
Rajiv Shah is a disruptor.
President of The Rockefeller Foundation, he has had an amazing career that has taken him to many of the world’s hot spots. A medical doctor who grew up in suburban Detroit, he realized early on that he wanted to help make big changes in the world.
His desire to build alliances to make an impact has taken him through various careers. He worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, headed the US Agency for International Development, and founded a private equity group that focused on power and infrastructure projects in Africa and Asia.
Anyone has the power to make lasting change, he argues. Shah credits his career success to a combination of “pluck, luck, and a deep dedication to making a difference.”
Efforts he spearheaded, or was involved in, reduced preventable deaths by vaccinating close to a billion children and worked to reduce hunger through changes to African farming communities. He led major relief efforts in Haiti, Afghanistan, and across Asia. He worked to stem the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and to combat the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.
His definition of the big bets that are alluded to in the book’s title involves “concerted efforts to fundamentally solve a single, pressing problem.”
Three parts memoir and one part how-to, Shah’s book counsels new ways of thinking and applying innovations, whether the problem is energy poverty in sub-Saharan Africa or advancing racial justice in the
southern US. It’s a fascinating story worth the reader’s patience. — MS
The Sacredness of Secular Work: 4 Ways Your Job Matters for Eternity (Even When You’re Not Sharing the Gospel) by Jordan Raynor (WaterBrook, 2024, 224pp, $25.00 US)
If you’ve ever wondered how your work matters to God, this book is for you. Author Jordan Raynor defines work broadly as what we do for pay and what we do without remuneration, like washing dishes or studying.
Work is “the
opposite of leisure and rest.” All our work matters to God and has eternal significance.
Raynor’s book and his accompanying workbook, which is available as a free download at https://jordanraynor.com/response, are full of superlatives: “profoundly” helpful, “super” straightforward, “maximize,” and “hyper-practical.” It’s almost as if he’s trying too hard to promise too much.
Beyond the hype, his book presents solid teaching on the divine purpose in creation for us to be part of God’s creative work in the world. That “first commission” is as important as the “great commission” to share the gospel. To devalue work and focus only on the great commission, or to devalue sharing the gospel and focus only on work in this world—both fall short of God’s creative purpose for us.
Like Raynor, I’ve never liked the idea of a bucket list as if this world is all there is. And I like his proposal that we create an anti-bucket list of things we might set aside for the sake of kingdom living. But hmmm, are we really to do that as he suggests “to accumulate as many eternal rewards as possible”?
I agree with Raynor that our work has eternal significance, but his utilitarian, doit-for-the-reward approach leaves me longing for something more. .
April Yamasaki is a pastor, author, editor, and spiritual formation mentor.
Attention must be paid to yesterday and today to create a better tomorrow
Tending Tomorrow. Courageous Change for People and Planet by Leah Reesor-Keller (Herald Press, 2024. 216 pgs., $19.99 US)
Reflecting on family or national history can be challenging work that some prefer to avoid.
There may be parts of the story that no one wants to discuss. Stories that are told may not be accurate or complete.
Yet such reflection can be an important precursor to learning how to believe, act, and live “in a way that leads to the well-being and flourishing of all people, and of all creation,” Reesor-Keller writes in “Tending Tomorrow.”
The book’s nine chapters are organized under five
thematic actions: Redreaming, Retelling, Renewing, Reimagining, and Rewilding.
For the author, developing a broader perspective and appreciating people who may have been left out of our story is an important part of tending “the seeds for courageous change.”
Reesor-Keller served a term as Mennonite Church Eastern Canada’s executive minister. She can trace the roots of her Mennonite faith back 500 years.
As a child, she lived in Haiti, where her parents were volunteers. She has also worked in Canada, Jamaica, and Nepal as an adult.
Researching her family’s history as farmers in Ontario’s Markham-Stouffville area, she realized that her “life has been predicated on and subsidized by the suffering of others.”
Land that her ancestors settled in the late 1700s and claimed to be empty is the subject of a legal claim by the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation.
That new understanding has led her to ask profound questions about reconciliation, and the place of humans within God’s creation.
Julián Guamán, an Ecuadoran indigenous Mennonite author and church leader, gave her a new understanding of lived discipleship, of following Jesus. This includes “having a responsibility to other people and to the natural world, to live in community, and to practice reconciliation — making things right and bringing relationships into harmony again …”
Accepting that perspective moves the author beyond a stewardship creation theology to one of shalom as a community of creation.
The book makes a passionate case for overcoming our culture of individualism, going deeper into community to make changes “needed to transform the future of life on this planet.”
That will require the messy work of recognizing our personal and corporate blind spots.
In addressing climate change, the author wants to discuss accountability and repair before entertaining possible technological fixes. She urges us not to fear conflict, noting that it can “push us beyond our limited perspectives to deeper empathy.” — MS
