MPR’s Jim Ragsdale reports on ten Hmong men selected for a farm training project with the hope that they would settle with their families on a plot of farmland near Homer, MN.

When Hmong refugees first arrived in Minnesota, they had a lot to learn about adapting their farming techniques to regional agricultural practices. The fields in Homer are a lot different from the mountainous farming regions in Laos. Farmers in Laos enjoy a 10-month growing season, with few frosts, and when the ground was ready all the farmers needed to get started was seeds and a sharpened planting stick.