“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.”
Although I had no idea when I started Shop Kansas Farms (SKF) I was creating a large community on the internet, that’s exactly what happened. From the beginning and to this day, when I am asked what makes Shop Kansas Farms unique, I reply, “It’s a community.”
Community is defined as, “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests and goals.” If you apply those principles to SKF, we offer all those things.
Fellowship with others SKF is made up of two basic groups of people: those who grow food and those who want to purchase that food directly from them. These groups might be called different names like producers and consumers, sellers and buyers, farmers and customers, growers and the public, but in the end, there are only two groups: people who grow food and people who want to buy it. The beauty and power in that is food is one of the greatest unifiers of humanity. The church I belong to even calls the wonderful potlucks they have “Fellowship Dinners.”
Common attitudes
There has been a growing interest in people knowing where their food comes from, who grows it and how it grows. Conversely, there is growing interest from people who grow food to be able to sell it directly to people and share their story as they do.
SKF provides a real-time educational platform where people can ask farmers questions and farmers can learn how to answer them in ways that make sense. The 163,000 members of the SKF Facebook group are not a focus group; they are customers ready to purchase locally grown food.
Interests We love good food! We all have to eat, and we all know food is a great way to gather people together, whether it’s a church fellowship dinner, community barbecue, chili cookoff or a host of other reasons, food unites people. Food bringing people together is exactly why SKF was started. When the pandemic hit and the grocery stores were empty, SKF connected people who grew food to people who wanted to buy it. As one lady posted early on, “We don’t live off the land like you (farmers) do. We live off the shelves at the grocery store and when those were empty, they struck fear in our hearts that no one had ever felt or ever should feel. But you had our backs; we could buy food straight from your farm.”
Goals
We have two groups that comprise SKF, therefore we have two goals, but both are wrapped up in our motto: connecting you to the wonderful farm and ranch families of Kansas so you can purchase the food they grow.
One goal is to prosper farmers. From the beginning, one of the internal principles for the admins of the SKF Facebook group has been to “prosper and protect farmers.” We want to do all we can to help prosper those who provide the direct-to-consumer options. We love farms and ranches, no matter their size. We know we cannot feed the world without the diversity of the nation’s farmers and ranchers, and they are deeply committed to providing safe, high-quality food.
However, there’s a growing interest both from the people who grow food and the people who buy food, in being able to do it directly. Our other goal is to provide opportunities for consumers to find and purchase food from local farms. As we discovered during the pandemic, both of these groups already existed, but they had a hard time finding each other.
SKF connected the two groups and continues to create even more opportunities. We do that with our website, our Market of Farms events and our Harvest Hubs – regional food systems meant to increase prosperity for farmers and ranchers and access to local grown food for consumers.
We are proud of our community, and we want this community to continue to grow and you can help us by sharing these articles, encouraging family and friends to follow us on social media and at our website, www.shopkansasfarms. com and, most importantly, find more farmers and ranchers to purchase the food they raise.
