Jay Matteson's Rural America brings to light the impactful story of rural resilience and innovation during challenging times, particularly through the lens of the pandemic. The episode, hosted by Jay Matteson and Ron Robbins, features guests Rick McNary and Stacy Davis, who share their experiences with Shop Kansas Farms and the Border Queen Harvest Hub. As the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, Rick recounts how he used social media to create an online marketplace connecting local farmers and consumers. The rapid growth of the Facebook group illustrates a community's need for direct access to local food sources. With over 168,000 members, Shop Kansas Farms not only provided a platform for farmers to sell directly to consumers but also highlighted the importance of supporting local agriculture. Stacy adds an economic development perspective, emphasizing the collaboration necessary to sustain such initiatives beyond grant funding. Together, they illustrate a model of economic resilience rooted in community engagement, local food systems, and innovative partnerships that can thrive even in adversity.

Links referenced in this episode:

• shopkansasfarms.com
• borderqueenharvesthub.com
• www.agricultureevents.com
• jcida.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Shop Kansas Farms
• Kansas Farm Bureau
• Jefferson County Economic Development
• Sumner County Economic Development Commission
• Patterson Family Foundation
• Vision Caldwell Group

Welcome to J. Madison's Rural America. It's a journey through the stories impacting rural economies and country lifestyles. J.

Madison's Rural America is also a production of Jefferson County Economic Development. Now here's Jay.

Well, hey there, folks. Welcome to Jay Madison's Rural America. I am your host, Jay Madison, and along with me is the one, the only, Mr. Ron Robbins.

He's come in out of the field. How you doing, sir?

I'm doing good, Jay. And harvest is over for us.

I was just gonna ask. Everything's all done?

Everything's done.

We still got a little some odds and ends coming into the grain facility from neighboring farms, but we wrapped up Friday afternoon and everybody's pretty happy. Great weather, great harvest, everybody's doing awesome. So lots to be thankful for.

You couldn't have asked for better weather.

Oh, my God, what a great fall. After a horrible summer with all the rain and the last two months have just been gorgeous.

It's been an incredible fall and I'm wondering what we're going to get for winter. Yeah, if we get any winter, you.

And I will have to start looking at that, Jake.

Yeah, I think we'll have to do our long range predictions here coming up soon. Well, hey, we're going to have a great show today, folks.

We've got some folks calling in from Kansas to tell us a story about a great effort that they started and have just, it's blossomed. So we're really excited about this. And it's folks I met while I was at that Advanced Economic Development Leadership Academy.

Right. We did our last podcast about that and some great, some great feedback from that conference.

Well, yeah, we've actually been talking about it at both my board of directors meeting and at our Ag Development Council. We're trying to change a few things.

Absolutely.

Based on that. Well, hey, folks, I would like to introduce to you our guest today. We have Rick McNary. He is the founder and now a consultant for Shop Kansas Farms.

And we also have Stacy Davis, who is the executive director for the Sumner County Economic Development Commission. And first, we'll start with Rick. How are you, sir?

I'm fantastic. Thanks for having us on your show.

Well, we really appreciate you joining us. How have things been out in Kansas here lately? Ron was just saying we've had a beautiful fall, hardly any rain.

We've been able to get the crop harvest done.

Oh, they've been harvesting and hoping for some rain and some rain is finally coming in. But we're still facing, especially in western Kansas, the drought and those Conditions so doing a little bit better, but could still use more rain.

Yeah. So they've been in a different situation in Kansas, Ron. They've been on the drought side of things.

Right.

We actually were a little bit too wet this summer. So a little bit different situation for us here in northern New York. And would like to introduce Stacy Davis.

Stacy is the executive director for Sumner County Economic Development Commission.

And Stacy had the great pleasure of having dinner with you and a few other economic development people while we were at that conference in Missouri and right across the border from you, correct?

Yes. Actually it's a short little three hour drive from Sumner county up to Kansas City.

And it was a great opportunity, I think, for all of us that attended that, especially getting to meet, you know, our counterparts in other states like you. And I appreciate the opportunity to be on the show today with you.

No, thank you very much. We're real excited to hear your story now. And like you said, that conference, there were so many people there, 60, I believe, was the number.

And so many little pieces of information you could take away to improve the economic development efforts you have back back home. And like for us, there was a lot of things I gleaned away. So pretty excited to share this. Now going to Rick.

Rick, you were going through the pandemic.

If I remember the story correctly, we were going through the pandemic and your spouse happened to notice that there wasn't any food on the shelves and you decided to do something about it.

And we had just dined on some beef that we had bought from a local ranch and farm couple and kicked our feet up to watch a Hallmark movie because it was about the only thing that was hopeful on television at the time. And he made the comment that the meat counter was empty at the grocery store. And I thought, well, that's kind of odd.

In the previous 10 years, I'd been trying to figure out how to know more about farmers and ranchers and done some freelance writing for the Kansas Farm Bureau, met a number of those who sold direct to consumers.

So I grabbed my laptop and opened up Facebook and thought, well, I'll start a Facebook group and I'll call it ShopKansas Farms because that's what I wanted people to do. In fact, the mission was to connect you to the wonderful farm and ranch families of Kansas so you could purchase the food they raised.

Wow, Rick, just. I apologize for interrupting, but okay, so you said you launched it at what, 2:00 on a Tuesday afternoon?

No, it was actually 6:58pm I launched it. Okay, in the evening.

That evening we had 400 members. And 24 hours later, we had more than 5,000.

Wow. Holy jeepers. That. That's just crazy.

All right, so are you like some social media guru who just, you know, you know all the ins and outs of getting your Facebook page out there? I mean, I try really hard, but I don't have 5,000 people following me in just three hours.

No, I'm not a social media guru at all. In fact, I didn't know what to do with it. It was a wild west rodeo, and farmers put their stuff up there and people were buying it.

You know, they were trying to reach out and consumers were asking questions. And then, of course, it got political and people started getting nasty.

That never happened. Social media.

No, never happens.

So, okay, so when you started this, you had 5,000 people join up, and of that 5,000, some of them were selling and some of them were looking to buy.

Correct, but mostly they were looking to buy. There were probably only 50 farmers and ranchers that were offering things for sale. So the other almost 5,000, and we gained 50,000 the first week.

Jeez. Wow, that would be scary. I mean, Rick, I can relate in a very small way. When the pandemic hit, we ran into the same situation.

The store shelves started drying up. I was still sneaking. I wasn't supposed to. My boss got kind of mad at me, but I was still sneaking into the office here because nobody else was here.

I was getting phone calls from consumers saying, there's no burger. Where can I buy burgers? So I started working with cooperative Extension and we started connecting people. Nowhere. I mean, wow.

Nowhere like that kind of volume. And Ron, what was your experience during the pandemic as far as you were selling beef to consumers?

Yes, correct. And, you know, certainly can see where you saw that kind of success.

I guess one question I have, Rick, is what kind of geographic region did all those people encompass? Was it, you know, did you ever do any, you know, dive into how far and wide you've been able to reach with this?

Yes, fortunately, within that first 24 hours, Megan Kramer, the director of communications with Kansas Farm Bureau, whom I had written for for several years, reached out and said, you need some help? And like, I'm dying.

So she was able heard another lady from Farm Bureau, Nancy Brown, put the real structure to it, behaviors and things, how people should act, but also started measuring the metrics. So we kept it to where in Kansas, people who grew food to sell, they had to be within the state borders. But we had two basic groups.

We had the seller and the buyer.

So the sellers had to be geographically placed in Kansas, but buyers, we had people truly from all over the United States and even Alaska reaching out to farmers and figuring out how to purchase them.

Wow, that's, that's just crazy.

And for folks that are listening to the podcast right now, it is the website for this is shop kansasfarms.com that's shop kansas farms, and that's farmsploural.com that's the website that we'll be referring to throughout the show. So. So, Rick, I mean, how long before 50 farms ran out of product to sell them?

Ran out quickly.

Yeah.

Fortunately, they had made arrangements with local lockers and so were able to get their pork or beef or whatever into the lockers to be able to hit that supply and demand.

So many lockers who were, as you know, a lot of the small meat lockers were dying on the mine and they suddenly found a resurgence and did and are still doing quite well. But it got to the point within just a couple of months that people couldn't find locker dates for the next two years. They filled up that quickly.

So, Rick, when you refer to lockers, I don't know if our listeners, some of our listeners anyways, are completely familiar with that, what that term means. What is lockers as the way you're referring to it?

Sure, Candace, we refer. So they're meat processors. They're small individually owned meat processors that process pork and beef and lamb.

They're available in small communities and again, family owned, typically pretty small, and have really been struggling until the pandemic hit.

And of course, the reason that there wasn't meat on the grocery stores is because the big meat processors and 30% of meat that's processed in the United States actually is processed in western Kansas and Dodge City and Garden City and some of those areas out there.

And so those lock Those meat plants were shutting down because of COVID There were many Covid clusters that arose and people were being sent to college campuses in various places so that they could be away from everybody and still get fed and taken care of. But the meat plants, those massive lockers, massive meat processors shut down. So then the small ones then had a tremendous resurgence.

So Stacy, from your perspective from an economic developer, how did you come to get involved in all this?

And you know, it's pretty exciting when I'm sure as an economic developer when you see kind of this so called organic growth all of a sudden take place within the ag community in your area, that had to be pretty exciting. But what brought you into the mix here?

Well, it is very exciting, especially because Sumner county, their two main sources of employment are agricultural, aerospace. And so to see the ag sector actually come, I would say come back to life was fantastic. But Rick and I share a mutual friend at Karen Sturm.

And Rick had met Karen previously and she kept telling him he needed to meet me.

And so at a campus economic development alliance conference, Rick hunted me down and said, Karen Sturm said I should meet you and we need to talk about a harvest hub. Following that conference, Rick and I got together along with the president of the Vision Caldwell Group and had a meeting.

And within about the first 10 minutes I was completely sold on the idea.

Rick shared a vision that I could just see the agricultural economy for not just Sumner county, but the south central region and the northern region of Oklahoma, the south central region of Kansas and the northern region of Oklahoma coming back to life. And so I was very excited about that.

So, so with that said, what when you talk about, okay, because Rick's been talking about Shop Kansas Farms, which was basically an online connection between the consumer and the farms that could sell directly to the consumer. You just mentioned the harvest tub. So what is that, Rick?

You want to take that one?

So a food system, whether it's small, local or global, is comprised of three basic components, production, processing and distribution. So somebody grows a product, then it gets to a maturation point and they've got to figure out how to process it and then get it to the consumers.

And that's distribution. So I've actually been working on that for a decade before Shopkins Farms took off. And I saw two gaps that needed to be filled.

One was it needed the digital hub. If you're going to connect those three things on a local level, you need a digital hub. The other one is the processing.

Meat processors were shutting down processing for vegetables, fruits were really no commercial kitchens or canneries. So that was the other gap. So the third day into Shop Kansas Farms, we hit about 15,000 members. I realized I had created that digital hub.

So if you go to Shop Kansas Farms right now and we're at 168,000 members, I think. And so a producer put something on there because I have this to sell. It's being processed at X and you can pick it up at Y.

And so that whole system is going on. So my desire was to draw it, drill it down instead of all across the state of Kansas into a small, more hyper local.

So hyper local is a term that's used that means you're buying food within a radius of 50 or 60 miles. And so building a system that involved producers, processors and distributors so consumers could understand how their food is grown.

And also know if I buy that and it has the Border Queen Harvest tub brand on it, then that is coming within a 50 or 60 mile radius of where I'm at. That's what a harvest tub is.

So the Border Queen Harvest Hub is not only a. Creating a system for folks to acquire, like you said, hyper local food, but it's also a branding system as well.

Exactly.

Rick, if how did you. How did you create or.

And Stacy, whoever wants to handle this, how did you create that brand and how did you educate people, market that brand so that people started to embrace it?

Caldwell is right along the old Chisholm Trail, and it's right on the southern border of Kansas, right by Oklahoma. And that's where the cattle drives came up through.

And so Caldwell was quite raucous in its history 120 years ago, and it was known as the Border Queen. And so since it kind of originated out of Caldwell, we called it the Border Queen.

And then we had a contest for a brand because, you know, they branded cattle. So we wanted the brand that people would recognize. So that's where that's where that started.

The way we marketed that is through a variety of communication methods. So the model is based upon two things. One is economic development and the other one is community engagement.

And we use the Stanford Collective Impact model for the community engagement, which has common agenda, shared measurements, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous communication, and a backbone organization. The communication strategies are varied. You know, so we use social media, we have town halls.

I write newsletter articles every week that get put out to all the Kansas Press Association. So it's just a variety of ways that we try to communicate and educate.

Very interesting. Very interesting.

Now folks, how. How does this from A financial standpoint, how does it sustain itself? Can we briefly explain some of that?

So the Rick, along with the team at the Kansas Farm Bureau, wrote a grant to a wonderful foundation that we have here in Kansas called the Patterson Family Foundation. And we were awarded a two year grant to get this program up and running.

One of the things that Rick hit on was the economic development side of, of this program.

That is, I think, very important to understand that as an economic developer, we definitely want to be able to help all of our businesses from every angle. The producers, the processors, the distributors. And so we have to bring into that the economic development organization piece of that.

And that is where our office has come in to offer assistance and partner to bring the vision to light and to help develop the marketing, the branding, the training, the education, all of that.

I have been very fortunate with my organization and the board of directors that I work for in that they're a very visionary group and could see the benefit of this.

And so by having the grant available to get us kick started for a couple of years, our board is looking at additional ways to continue to help fund this when the grant runs out, as well as the model that is being created by our team between Shop, Kansas Farm, Kansas Farm Bureau, our organization and vision. Call Caldwell, excuse me. In making it sustainable and being able to replicate it.

Perfect.

So you've been growing this, Are there, are there plans to expand this even more?

Yes, there are. In fact, we're talking the Oklahoma Farm Bureau. We're already kind of going into Oklahoma and I made a presentation in D.C.

last year to an agricultural summit.

The National Association State Department of Bags came up to me afterwards and we've had a number of conversations with them on how we can build a replicable and scalable model. And so we're building the airplane as we fly.

I've been working on the model for 10 years before it started, but now it's real time and we're developing it. There's membership type opportunities that people will be able to get both consumers and the producers and sellers.

So there's a variety of revenue streams that can be generated through economic development. They're also the components of helping the farmers through education workshops and things of that nature.

We're building up something called certified Business trainers. So we're selecting farmers who are really good at what they do and turning them into business trainers.

Because there's nobody that can train in business better than the person that's laying in bed at 3 o'clock in the morning trying to figure out how to keep the farm afloat.

So you're doing.

Those are the people.

I apologize for interrupting, Rick. So you're doing that through Farm Bureau?

Yeah.

Well, that's, that's great. That is, that is fantastic. What would be the barrier that you ran into? What was the greatest challenge you had?

Obviously initially it was just the sheer volume of demand. I'm assuming that was the initial challenge. But then from that, what, where did that, what was the challenge that you faced afterwards?

That if you were going to advise somebody on how to do this, what would you say to them they should be prepared for?

So two of the biggest challenges from the social media standpoint is the handling and creating a civil society because people just got so ugly. So we've been really, we have rules that you have to follow or you're not going to be allowed in. And keeping that civil has been a real challenge.

But we've done a great job and it's become part of the brand. People thank us for that. The other part is staying on brand and that is our focus is to help the farmers make money by selling directly to consumers.

So we don't sell hay, we don't sell farm equipment, we don't sell land. It's just food for human consumption.

But I think some of the challenges that came along with that is once this happened and then there's this glut right now coming from foundations and federal agencies like, okay, we need to fix these food systems, we need to start local. And so there's a whole lot of confusion about what that actually looks like. And so there's a lot of money being thrown at things.

And I've been involved with it for 12 years now altogether, and I'm not convinced it's money well spent because it's not building the sustainable economic development. So like for Stacy, when she came along, it just changed everything about what we were doing.

Without Stacy, we would not be where we are growing this because she brought that economic development component to it. To think like business people are not just oh, what are we going to do when the grant runs out, but to stand it up and be sustainable.

Well, that's always been my concern with grant funded programs organized by not for profits and or government agencies is you create a great program but it's grant funded.

And if you don't have a plan on how it becomes sustainable, then you're just, you're raising people's hopes up and then you're dashing them when the grant fund runs out because then you're out searching for More money.

And I think Stacy, you and I and the others with us at the dinner table there down in Kansas City, I think we had that conversation about we have to be careful that we're not creating grant funded programs, that when the grants run out, there's no way of continuing it despite it being a great program.

Exactly, exactly.

And that is where I think programs fail is that they don't get into conversations or in partnerships with the local economic development organization. And not every program is going to be a right fit. But you know, we face uncertain times with the pandemic.

And you know when you stop and think, I mean, I remember going to the grocery store and you know, toothpaste, toilet paper, food, all of those things were, the shelves were getting bare.

We as a group, as a board, my board said what can we do to make sure that Sumner county in our area, south central Kansas, prepared to make sure that if something like this happens again, we're in a position of not having put up a program through grant funding and then it going away. And so they have been very forthcoming in saying we want you to continue to go forward with this.

We want you to look at programs that the Kansas Department of Commerce also has. We want you to look at our budget over the next couple of years.

We know where we're going to be, you know, and how this partnership works together to make sure that the program is sustainable, work with other organizations that do charge a membership fee and help set that on course for this program so that it's the right fit.

And being able to have the partnerships that we do, you know, between Rick, Megan, Kylie, Jill, myself, through all of our organizations has been very beneficial. And I think that when a program gets funded initially by grants, you have to be thinking about how does economic development fit into this.

No, I definitely would agree, Stacy.

A follow on question to that would be how prepared do you think your community is now to provide local food, especially in a time of crisis compared to where you were at shortly after the pandemic?

Oh, we are, I won't say we are at 100% ability to do it, but we are way up there in the high 99.95% to be able to. Oh, I would say so.

One of the great things about Shop Kansas Farm and Farm Bureau and the Harvest Hub is that we have done town hall meetings where we have gathered in different communities throughout south central Kansas and discussed the Shop Kansas farm. We discussed the Harvest Hub and we put people together. You know, a medicine lodge has a new locker.

We were Able to connect people who are looking for someone to process their beef. And, you know, medicine lodges from where I am is an hour and a half away, but that's still a lot closer than being without food, you know.

And so it's not only that, but we've also had events like the market of farms where producers can come sell their goods. And it's a very different model than a farmer's market. And that was Rick's idea. We just had a successful one on October 26th in Caldwell. We actually.

I was very excited about this. I was standing at the front table, and these two ladies came in, and I was talking with them.

They were on a road trip from Florida going across the United States. They were headed to Pawhuska, Oklahoma, to the pioneer woman and had seen on Facebook the market of farms ad.

And so they detoured and came up, and when they both left, they had their arms full of bags from our vendors that were there at that event. And they were thrilled, and they were still headed to Pawhuska afterwards.

And so it was a great story, and it was a great feeling to know that we're making a difference, not only just for our community members and the opportunity for being prepared when it happens again, or if it happens again, I should say, but also being able to help our vendors, our producers, our processors, and even our distributors, that we've got something in place for them so that they can sustain their livelihood.

Well, that's fantastic. Stacy, is there a separate website for the Border Queen Harvest Hub?

There is, and I believe it is. Rick, help me out here. I apologize. Border Queen harvest.

Go ahead.

Borderqueenharvestub.com that's what I was gonna say.

Borderqueen harvest hub.com.

Yes.

Okay, perfect.

So that's where folks can go to learn more about the Harvest Hub and that initiative, which builds off of the whole Shop Kansas Farms initiative, if I said that correctly.

You did.

So, Ron, your thoughts based on what you heard?

Well, it's just awesome, Jay, to see this kind of success come out of, you know, an effort, really, with somebody sitting in their living room and. But, you know, we've.

We've seen on a much smaller scale here, you know, a lot of efforts to create things like food hubs and other things that obviously haven't have not been real successful. You know, the grant programs you're running here.

Yeah, we've. We've had good success with those.

And so that really does tie back to what Stacy's saying is once you involve the economic development piece, it takes on a little different life than just simply, you know, having maybe an agency out there trying to administer a grant kind of thing.

And that may sound, you know, kind of negative, but without that economic development piece, I mean, that's where I've always believed that, you know, agriculture, no matter how big or small, is our cornerstone of economic development for a rural area. And I consider us to be in a rural area.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I don't know if we're quite as rural as some of the places in Kansas, but for New York, we're certainly rural.

Yes. And, you know, obviously, yes, Covid did change a lot of things, changed a lot of buying habits.

And obviously these folks being able to capture that change and build on it, you know, sounds just awesome, but, you know, it's a great message. Really congratulate both of you folks for. And your team for pulling something like this together. It's. It's awesome.

Thank you.

So.

And there's another important.

Go ahead, Rick.

There's another really important point I'd like to make, and especially with economic development. So people who want to buy local or want to buy from people who they know, that's called identity preservation.

They want to know where the food comes from. With identity preservation comes the economic principle of inelastic demand, that people will often pay more for that product.

So, for example, Starbucks, as opposed to Mickey D's for a cup of coffee. But for identity preservation and inelastic demand, to work together and function well, you have to be able to control the local supply chain.

So in essence, our harvest hub is controlling that local supply chain. And one of the things I learned, I'm not a farmer. I don't have the courage, the faith, the smarts to be one.

But in writing about them, I learned one of the most important things with farmers is one of the biggest fears is losing the farm on their watch. When you talk to farmers in Kansas, they'll say first, second, third, fourth, fifth generation. But most of them are fourth and fifth.

They don't want to lose a farm.

And because of commodity farming, and it's all about having more land and bigger equipment and more and more of all of that, they're seeing this opportunity, that direct consumer sales with higher profit margins. It's not going to replace all that they do, and we don't expect it to. But it's an income, It's a revenue stream.

And during the pandemic, I have story after story of farmers telling us, you saved our farm or Shopkins farms. Not me, but shop Kansas farms saved us one guy particularly had 800 hogs that was going to Nebraska to a meat packer up there.

And the packer called, said, yeah, we're not taking them. And his daughter's like, you need to put them on Shop Kansas Farms advertise there. We just heard about this.

He told me that he not only got those processed to the local locker, a friend that he knew, he had another 800 and then another 800 and another 800 that year. And he made more money that year farming than he had in the previous 40 years. That's the kind of stuff we want to stimulate.

Yeah, that's real economic development.

That is.

That is.

That's a phenomenal story, Rick, and thank you for sharing that. That piece right there in and of itself is worth its weight in gold for somebody out there listening, you know, thinking about these things. That.

That was. That was a very good story to tell and very appreciated. Stacy, any parting thoughts?

I really appreciate the opportunity to share this amazing partnership that we have created through the Harvest Hub with Shop Kansas Farms, Kansas Farm Bureau.

And I hope that your listeners get from this that it is very important to have those partnerships and to think as a community and not just a silo when they are looking to make a program work or develop a program.

And I can't thank Rick enough for finding me at that conference and not laughing at all my crazy, harebrained ideas when I say send him a text that just am so grateful for our producers, processors and distributors that have the faith in us to do what's right for them as we move forward.

Your region that you serve is very lucky to have the two of you and your team that helped you do this. So congratulations on a job well done and thank you for joining Ron and I here on Jay Madison's Rural America.

We really appreciate both of you joining us today.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, folks, so that's a wrap on the podcast today. Thank you very much for staying with us here and. And make sure you come back and catch future editions of J. Madison's Rural America.

For more information, visit www.agricultureevents.com or JCIDA. Until next time, thanks for tuning in to J. Madison's Rural America.