POTWIN, Kan. (KSNW) — In April 2020, Rick McNary's wife told him there was no meat at the grocery store. He knew of farmers and ranchers who sold directly to consumers.
"I created a Facebook group called Shop Kansas Farms to connect people to the wonderful farm and ranch families of Kansas so they could purchase the food they raise," McNary said.
The page grew to 5,000 members in one day, then 50,000 in one week.
"We're now 165,000 members. Most of those are consumers who want to purchase food from their local farms and ranches," McNary said. "We make that connection."
Their main goal with Shop Kansas Farms is to prosper farmers who want to sell directly to consumers and build a local supply chain. Farmers can sell their products through commodities, getting paid what the current market is, or they can sell directly to consumers.
"That's a different revenue stream," McNary said. "It's also, at times, a more profitable one. So, people who want to know where their food comes from, that's called identity preservation. They will often pay more. That's actually called inelastic demand. In order for identity preservation, knowing where your food comes from and inelastic demand to work together. And so it provides them more revenue in direct-to-consumer sales, but it's a lot more work."
It takes three things to get the food from a farm to your plate: a grower/producer production, processing, and distribution.
"We build those supply chains out on the local level," McNary said. "So, for example, Laurie and Joel are perfectly perfect examples of they are producers, but they created the processing component they needed and were lacking with this commercial kitchen. And they've got an incredible distribution system, so that they've created their own local supply chain, and it's critical for their business. We want to help other communities do the same."
Laurie and Joel Bruce are first-generation farmers who now operate a commercial kitchen.
"Rick had started Shop Kansas Farms, sent me an invite to like the page, I advertised, and literally in a short matter of time, my business exploded because I had that online aspect, and it just keeps growing," Laurie Bruce, co-owner of Bruce's Bullseye Farms said. "So Shop Kansas Farms was really a good kickoff for our business."
McNary has been writing about farmers since 2015 and worked in international hunger for 20 years.
"If I want to fight hunger, I need to understand agriculture because they feed us three times a day," McNary said. "So, as I wrote about farmers and fell in love with them, I also saw the challenges that they often don't make money because depending on the market and what people are willing to pay. They can lose the farm literally overnight. So, providing them with a different way of selling and sometimes a more profitable way of selling directly to consumers is encouraging to me. It gives small and large farms both new revenue streams and new opportunities."
McNary says this provides food in places that may not have had it before.
"Especially in rural Kansas, with food deserts, if you can't get to a grocery store that becomes a desert, a food desert," McNary said. "This is one of the ways that you can provide an opportunity for Kansans to have access to local food, but it takes a different strategy than what we've done before. And that we provide smaller opportunities and localized and shipping like Laurie and Joel can do here."
A branch of Shop Kansas Farms is Harvest Hubs. One is around Caldwell.
"A Harvest Hub is basically a community engaging in creating a local supply chain, production, processing and harvest, and distribution in order to provide economic opportunities for producers, processors, and distributors," McNary said. "It's a local supply chain that's really driven and engaged by a community and not making the processors and producers and distributors operate independently. They come together."
There is a website that helps the different entities connect. McNary says there has been an increasing demand for consumers to buy from their local farms because they want to know where their food comes from.
"The sticking point and that is that many farmers can't do more because they're missing the processing component," McNary said. "Meat lockers are booked for two years out. There's no commercial kitchens or cold storage available for those who grow specialty crops, so we build that connection. And there's an increasing demand, and so if a community can come together and support that, it helps create jobs, raises entrepreneurism and creates access to healthy local foods. That we've been lacking in our society."
He is talking to five other communities in the state about making them Harvest Hubs.
"The unique part of our harvest model is that we build out a practical and physical local food system that involves the producers who are growing, the processors who are processing that and then the distribution channel," McNary said. "We do it on the local level. That's the unique part of our local food system or our harvest model."
Jill Kuehny with Vision Caldwell says being a Harvest Hub helps build up rural.
"We're surrounded by beautiful fields of experts in how to grow things," Kuehny said. "So let's bring that and help that grow and so bring that prosperity back to all the little pieces. Instead of looking for the one big thing, it's going to be, think small. I believe going forward, it's think small and input the little things that we can do."
The hub will include multiple counties around Kansas and Oklahoma.
"Partnerships that have operated in silos for probably 100 years, breaking down those barriers and those walls really connecting with our neighbors," Kuehny said. "So being that you have neighboring communities are almost natural default of wanting to compete, and there is no room for that competition out here. What's more, how do we connect as a region, and then, what are our assets and all of that, and how do we play off each other to where we can have that bigger prosperity for all? So it's going to affect everyone, whether they live here, eat here, produce here, make the food, buy the food, distributed all over the country."
The digital Harvest Hub is being built now. Laurie Bruce hopes to serve as a processor and distributor for more producers in the community, working together with local neighbors.
