I know there are ways to do it with XCode 5 but is it possible with my infrastructure? I'm using Visual Studio 2012 and MonoTouch.
In XCode I can go under Debug > "Simulate Background Fetch" or there is also a second way: XCode Menu, "Product" => "Scheme" => "Edit Scheme" enable the option "Background Fetch".
Unfortunately this is currently not possible in Xamarin Studio/Visual Studio.
But we're working on it, and it will be included in a future release.