Rick McNary

This post was submitted to Kansas newspapers Oct. 5, 2023.

Two of the most difficult parts of managing Shop Kansas Farms (SKF) for the last three and a half years has been maintaining the original vision to connect people to farmers so they can purchase the food they raise and maintaining civility. That we have been successful with both is neither an accident nor a stroke of luck; there are underlying leadership principles that guided us through creating civility in this community.

After 40 years of sharpening my skills in building communities, whether they’re online, such as Shop Kansas Farms (SKF), or geographically defined like the small town where I live, I’m convinced farmers and ranchers understand the concept of community better than the rest of us.

Here’s why: they understand community based on survival; we understand community based on convenience. Let me explain the difference.

 “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.”

In the late 1940s, Dorothy Lynch and her husband ran a restaurant in St. Paul, Neb. She created her own tomato-based salad dressing, which became so popular patrons would bring empty bottles for her to fill with Dorothy Lynch Home Style Dressing. Her famous dressing is now produced in a 64,000-square-foot space in St. Paul, population 351.

How many Dorothy Lynches are there in rural America that have to-die-for family recipes, but can’t produce it in their home kitchens? I firmly believe access to commercial kitchens are the key.

The tiny village of Jicaro (hee’-ka-row) Bonito sat along a river high in the mountains of Nicaragua near the border of Honduras. While delivering truckloads of food and supplies in 2005 for relief after the rains had destroyed their sesame seed crops, I met with the villagers to ask them what we could do to help them make a living. 

I learned early in the fight against hunger that there are two concepts: relief (give a person a fish) and development (teach a person to fish). 

When the city and county leaders of Lyons in Rice County offered Shop Kansas Farms (SKF) their Celebration Centre for the first Market of Farms, I was delighted because it was about as smack-dab in the middle of Kansas as it could get. With my love for all things rural, it was the perfect place to host our first event which drew more than 1,400 shoppers to Lyons to purchase food directly from 42 of our Shop Kansas Farms sellers.

If you like to eat local and would like a more regular delivery of local farm produce grown near you, then you might look for farms that offer CSAs, an abbreviation for Community Supported Agriculture.

I was flabbergasted when I walked out of the Bar-K-Bar Arena building in Lyons and saw that huge parking lot filled with vehicles at the first Market of Farms in 2022. More than 1,400 people came to buy from the 42 vendors we had set up in the Celebration Centre, just south of the Bar-K-Bar Arena.

Have you ever had an idea grab hold of you so tight, it just will not let go? You think about it, research it, ask other people about and try to let it go, but it just keeps hanging on? Then you try to make the idea come to reality and you get great traction, then, poof, it is gone? But you cannot quite give it up, so you wait. And wait. And wait.