Rick McNary

“Our communities need us to dream for them.” 

-Marcia Taylor-Trump

As I traveled to Howard down the undulating two-lane road sandwiched by sienna-colored prairie grasses of the Flint Hills, I reminisced about previous trips there. In my high school football days, I bounced along these same roads in big yellow buses from Rosalia when our Flint Hills Mustangs endured repeated beat-downs by the West Elk Patriots on the football field in Howard. My dad referred to their victories over us as shellackings. 

When I launched the Shop Kansas Farms (SKF) Facebook group during the pandemic, I had one purpose: To connect you to the wonderful farm and ranch families of Kansas so you can purchase the food they raise. 

Facebook required me to list at least one rule, so I made one: Be nice and share or else you’ll end up in timeout. 

When Katie Carothers accepted the challenge to write and speak her dreams at a small business retreat, she knew exactly what she wanted: to expand her direct-to-consumer sales of beef, pork and chicken to restaurants wanting to buy local.

One unique quality of farmers and ranchers is they work together as a family. Taking care of livestock and crops requires everyone in the family — even small children doing chores like feeding bucket calves, collecting eggs and feeding chickens — to be a part of the work. 

Are you looking for fun, educational and outdoorsy ways to spend time with your grandkids?  Although you might have grown up on or around a farm and have your own garden, there are a surprising number of children who don’t know where their food comes from.

My wife, Christine, and I began taking our grandchildren on farm tours around Butler County a few years back. We even had t-shirts made that read, “McNary Cousins Farm and Ranch Tour.”

Below are ten tips you can use to show your grandchildren how their food is grown.

Thanks to a generous Thriving Rural Grant from the Patterson Family Foundation, Vision Caldwell and Shop Kansas Farms are partnering together to launch the Border Queen Harvest Hub. The Harvest Hub is a community-based approach that creates economic opportunities for farms and ranches by establishing a physical system of production, processing and distribution of local food that can be purchased by local, regional and national consumers.

I have been fascinated by the direct-to-consumer model of selling products from the farm since 2011. I learned the concept after asking a person at an agricultural conference to explain the sign, “A Kansas farmer feeds 155 people plus you,” since I had never purchased any food directly from a farm or ranch.

“Dad, you need to build some kind of a community,” my son, Caleb, told me when the pandemic hit in 2020. “Building community is what you do best.” 

He’s right. I do love a good community.

I reminded him that, suddenly, people were not allowed to be around each other and, since my idea of community involved gathering people in a physical location, I didn’t have a clue how to build one.  

“What’s that you always tell me? Commit, then figure it out?” he asked. “Commit. You’ll figure it out.”

I learned a powerful idea about community in an African refugee camp near Somalia. As thousands of refugees streamed into the camp, I was surprised at how quickly they shared whatever food was given them. Our guide summed up their philosophy of a survival-based community with this Swahili phrase translated into English: “Today it’s me; tomorrow it’s you.” 

In other words, if someone had food today, they would share with someone without food knowing that tomorrow, the roles might be reversed. Their ideas of community were based on needing each other to survive.

The best award I’ve ever received was the "Friend of Agriculture" from Kansas Farm Bureau. Being considered a friend from people whom I admire, especially since I'm not a farmer, is something I want to encourage you to do, also. Here are some suggestions: