- [Amanda] River Fest is Dawson's big Summertime Festival. It's full of barbecue, and baseball, and gnomes. If you missed episode one of this series, you also missed learning that local people called Dawson, Minnesota, Gnome Town USA, and if you pay attention, you'll notice little gnomes throughout town like these at the school. We'll be coming back here later. When we went to River Fest over the summer, we saw the latest gnome unveiling, and chatted with its creator. Do you have a special strategy when you craft the gnomes?

- Hmm, if I had a lot of art, ability, and skill, it would be easy, but it's hard.

- [Narrator] By the time River Fest rolled around this summer, Puris, the largest operating processor of pea protein in North America, had been up and running in town for about a year and a half. Tell me what you know about Puris.

- It involves a small town. You have to have people, you have to have young families and children, and you gotta have a place for them to work.

- How did you feel when you learned that Puris was gonna be moving into that building?

- Oh, I thought it was great 'cause it was standing empty for a while, and like I said, it brought a lot of jobs to the whole area, not just Dawson all the way around here.

- [John] If you can have industry, you have a chance for a small town to survive.

- Do you think that Dawson had the infrastructure to support that many people coming to work in town?

- I think so, housing is a problem.

- Yeah.

- Housing's always a problem.

- Everywhere. Yeah.

- Yeah.

- Hmm, throughout this series, we've talked with local people, people who may or may not know exactly what Puris is, but they do know this. Like our friends at River Fest said, Puris provides jobs. Everybody loves jobs, but are jobs alone enough? Despite everyone's love of jobs and job creation, you might be surprised to hear that the unemployment rate in the county Dawson is in is low. 1.5% as of November, 2023. For context, the national rate is 3.7%. Okay, jobs and industry are important, of course.

- We had our first new hire class in February of 2021, we had 22 new hires that day that came in.

- But there are other things that hold equal weight when people and families consider moving to a new place. There are three big elements. Jobs, housing, and childcare. The three-legged stool of community growth, if you will. People operations manager, Megan Lynch, grew up in Dawson. She moved away in 2002, and recently moved back in 2020 to work for Puris's Dawson Plant.

- I think with, you know, the population of Dawson being a little over about 1,500 people and us needing to employ a hundred people here in Dawson, I think we realize that people are willing to commute, and we might of course be drawing from nearby communities. About 95% of our current workforce is driving within a 50 mile radius of the Dawson plant.

- [Amanda] Megan does all of the HR things like recruiting, onboarding, and office management, but this is her hometown and you can tell she cares about the people here.

- I feel very great being able to offer employment opportunities to these people, and it's life changing.

- [Amanda] Megan knows that hiring and retaining staff isn't just about the job. When she moved back to town, she and her husband had a really hard time finding a house to buy, especially one that would fit their growing family.

- It was very character building to, you know, go from like owning your own home to moving out here, and then living with my parents for a few months, and then renting an apartment.

- [Amanda] And with her young kids, she also discovered the shortage of childcare providers in town.

- We don't want them to have to leave our community or leave Puris because they can't find a house or they can't find childcare.

- We have a interest in making sure there's daycare in town because we want families to be able to move to Dawson. Some studies we've looked at there's like a shortage of at least 40 to 50 daycare slots just in our community.

- Tony Aafedt is the athletic director, transportation director, community ed coordinator in the Dawson-Boyd school system. Subtext here, the school runs on thin employee margins, and it hits hard when they lose workers.

- When Puris opened, it wasn't like this mass influx of people coming in looking for work. We thought that was gonna be the case. We had several people leave the school to go to work at Puris, but that was kind of the biggest impact is just losing a few people.

- [Amanda] Because Puris pays more than a lot of other businesses in town including the school, and it's been hard, nearly impossible, for Tony to recruit people to work in the daycare at the school. Yes, childcare falls under Tony's giant umbrella of jobs.

- [Tony] You know, when I retired from the military, I never thought I'd be like in charge of a daycare.

- After COVID, the school became the largest daycare provider in town, but the school of course wasn't built as a daycare. So it's been piece mealed together with childcare areas scattered throughout. Like the toddler daycare area took over part of the theater's green room. Hello, toddlers. Appropriately dramatic. And through the lunchroom, and down a hall, and down another hall are preschool aged kids.

- `[Tony] And here's our new daycare coordinator, I guess we call it 'cause she's Nancy's over the preschool and the daycare.

- How long have you been in that position?

- A week and a half.

- Oh. Nancy just moved to Minnesota from Florida in the middle of winter. Welcome, Nancy. And how have you noticed, I mean, being new, but have you heard people talk about a need for childcare?

- Oh yes, I've already been to several meetings, and absolutely I have a waiting list of babies that that waiting list of babies is gonna bump up our numbers in every other class as well because we have to move kids along to make room.

- And we have an aging population, which we've had for a long time. They are definitely ready to move out of their big house that they've lived in for 50, 60 years, but they're not ready for the nursing home, and there wasn't the housing in between.

- [Amanda] Janell Welling is a local realtor. For her, it's personal. This is home.

- I'm a farm girl from Milan, Minnesota. I never felt that anywhere was home until I came back, and finally hit that point where I thought, you know what? This is where I feel the most comfortable in who I am, and I'm proud to be from here. So if I'm proud to be from here, I should be proud to live here.

- And she wants to help other people find their place, but it's hard when housing options are limited.

- Right now in Dawson, as of today, there are three houses for sale.

- We went to go check out these three houses on like, the coldest day of the year. So this is our first house, Rambler. They're asking 270,000 for this one. I should note to those outside of the Midwest, a rambler is the same as a ranch house. Short, long, single story, and very cute. This is house number two that we're seeing. This one is a hundred thousand dollars they're asking for. I'm not lying when I'm saying it's cold. It is negative two degrees. Brr.

- [GPS] In a quarter mile, turn left onto Second Street.

- This is our third stop on our tour of houses that are available in Dawson.

- [Janell] What Puris did is it brought to the forefront the true need that not only Dawson is having, but all of our communities is having. Where there's a need in one spot, it creates a need in another.

- So Dawson has jobs. That leg of the stool is made out of galvanized steel. It's these two other equally important parts that are still being built.

- It is important to me to be involved in my community. I think it matters. I live here, so why not try to make it better? 'Cause it's gonna impact us. It's an important need in the community, and it's an important need to our employees.

- I'm reminded of Dawson Mills, the company that built the exact building that now houses Puris. It was a hard start for them. They were ahead of their time as anyone in town will tell you, but it eventually evolved into one of the largest businesses in town. The three-legged stool might not be fully reinforced at the moment, but perhaps the changes brought by Minnesota's alt-meat revolution take longer than a year to sort out. On the next final episode of "Minnesota's Alt-Meat Revolution", we return to the many changes that Puris's arrival here have and have not started in this farming region. And we explore if meat and alt-meat production can work together in a sustainable food ecosystem.