Fundacion Paraguaya's Financially Self-Sufficient Organic Farm School

“There’s a natural assumption that the food chain starts with the farmer who knows how to farm,” observes Nik Kafka, director of Fundación Paraguaya’s sister organization, Teach A Man To Fish. “But the reality in most developing countries... is that that just isn’t the case. The educational system is set up to deliver people a piece of paper that shows their academic prowess, but students aren’t really learning how to be farmers, and this is the missing link in the food chain.”

The Farm School is designed to be this missing link. It’s a boarding high school for rural, low-income students that operates as an independent entity under the foundation’s nonprofit umbrella. It employs 20 full- and part-time staff, including administrators, teachers, cooks, and other support personnel. Sometimes interns from around the world support the staff, offering additional training and services in exchange for room and board.

When Fundación Paraguaya first took over the ownership and operation of the Farm School in late 2002, it resolved to walk the talk of entrepreneurship—to make the school market- driven and financially self-sufficient. It immediately stopped taking state money. It did raise some grant money from the Skoll Foundation, the Peery Foundation, AVINA (which stands for acción, vida y naturaleza, or “action, life, and nature”) and other entities, but viewed these as investments in its social enterprise.

Besides maintaining self-sufficiency, the school has two other express missions. One is to give students agricultural skills, so that they can become successful agricultural extension agents, to start their own food businesses, or to teach responsible agricultural methods in their own communities. Another is to promote and replicate their model of a self-sufficient agricultural school elsewhere in Paraguay, Latin America, and globally.

To achieve self sufficiency, the school developed 16 sub-enterprises on campus, including a hotel, a dairy, a restaurant, and a farmers market stand. Each of these enterprises is designed to provide experiential education for the students and to generate additional revenue for the school. For example, Hotel Cerrito and its surrounding chalets can accommodate up to 140 guests at once, and can be used as a conference center and a destination for tourists and travelers. The facilities generate up to 30% of the school’s annual revenue, but also train students interested in hotel management and hospitality. The school’s dairy processes the milk produced on campus into dulce de leche, yogurt, and cheese. Students make the products, bring them to market, and sell them, which gives them experience with food processing, packaging, and retail.

Community experience is regarded as one of the best teachers. For example, students must take turns running the school’s farmers market stands. By being involved in local markets, students learn customer service, merchandising, financial management, and production, all while meeting people in the community. “It’s important for students to hear and learn to decipher and interpret the messages the market sends them,” explains Jose Luis Salomón, director of the Farm School from 2002-2007. “Our greatest teacher—the market—gives us big, important classes all the time.”

Other Farm School programs give students more than just rudimentary skills. They teach students how to meet Grow Biointensive organic standards, which employ intensive soil conservation practices to produce more food on less land. They introduce students to AgroWin, a basic software program designed for farmers to easily organize and analyze accounting, budgeting, inventory, and production data. The school also introduces students to solar energy, composting, and vermiculture (farming with worms).

According to Luis Fernando Sanabria, the chief operating officer of Fundación Paraguaya, “The number of employees has been maintained or reduced—and in this sense we have gained efficiency. Sales volume has increased substantially. In five years, the school’s income level has tripled and it has increased not only its productivity but also the variety of campus enterprises.”

By 2007, the Farm School reported an annual growth rate of 10-15% and annual revenue reached US $300,000—an operational break-even point. The school now operates debt-free and has also generated a cash reserve to be used for teachers’ retirements.

The school takes its community relationships very seriously. For instance, with the exception of durable goods like vehicles, computers, and hardware, the school purchases all of its supplies locally—within an hour’s drive—and teaches its students how to best use local resources. As a community-based employer, the Farm School tries to hire its instructors locally and provides them with good salaries. The school has played a role in improving the local food system, generating nearly 70% of its income by selling locally grown organic food to local markets. It is also very conscious of its energy impact on the surrounding community, and strives to minimize its carbon footprint with its new solar energy panels and composting program.

For Paraguayan communities generally, the school has become an invaluable resource. According to Fulbright scholar Sarita Role Schaffer, who lived at the Farm School and studied its operations for two years, “Each year the school graduates roughly fifty young people who return to their communities not just to grow food, but to transform their local food systems by launching rural enterprises that introduce innovations at all points on the food supply chain. The Farm School graduates inject their communities with the vital intellectual inputs required to generate lasting social, environmental, and economic wealth from locally available resources.”