SKF, Kansas Living and BQHH together at the State Fair

I’ve exhibited at numerous local, national and international trade shows in my career and learned how to “read a booth” from a national marketing firm in Washington, D.C. They taught me how the human mind innately absorbs visual information in order to understand the message being portrayed.  

I recently shared the Kansas Farm Bureau (KFB) booth for a day at the state fair with Dr. Jen Kern, the executive director of the Border Queen Harvest Hub (BQHH). It was fascinating to watch people walking by to stop and pause to “read” the visual message of our booth.

Then I challenged myself with putting language around what people were seeing because the booth’s message portrayed four separate, yet connected, entities. The back wall of the booth was covered with small KFB logos, and inside the booth was a Kansas Living pop-up graphic and grocery giveaway, a Shop Kansas Farms pop-up graphic plus the delightful display and giveaway Jen had assembled for BQHH.

Once Jen worked her magic, I walked across the aisle to gaze at the messaging and realized it told a story that was deeply personal to me. I turned that story into words.

Kansas Farm Bureau is the umbrella organization under which all of these entities flourish. I wanted to get to know KFB in 2010 because I was working on international hunger relief and needed to learn how agriculture worked in Kansas. Later, I began writing feature stories about farmers and ranchers for Kansas Living, KFB’s quarterly magazine, in 2015 because I realized that writing about farmers would be the best way to learn more. 

In so doing, I fell in love with the wonderful people who grow the food we eat. Then when the pandemic hit in 2020 and grocery store shelves were empty I, along with help of Kansas Farm Bureau leaders, launched Shop Kansas Farms so consumers could find local farms and ranches so they could purchase food directly from them. 

This was so successful on a statewide level that we decided to dial it down to smaller, more regional levels of approximately a 60-mile radius and we call those Harvest Hubs. Our first one is the Border Queen, named after the city of Caldwell’s nickname because of its proximity to the Kansas-Oklahoma line. We are just launching the second one in Sedgwick County. Our Harvest Hubs are designed to connect consumers to local farmers, ranchers and growers so they can purchase the food they raise.  

Then I would finish as I often do, “Our real goal is to help you fall in love with the people who grow the food you eat, whether it’s from a grocery store or direct from the farm.”