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At the beginning of the pandemic, when consumers were desperate to connect directly with producers to get the food they needed, Rick McNally volunteered to offer a solution.
He created a Facebook page called “Shop Kansas Farms,” which has grown to include 165,000 shoppers browsing products from about 5,000 farms.
In 2023, Shop Kansas Farms celebrates three years of hosting a major “Farm Market” trade show in Lyons, Kansas. More than 1,400 shoppers attended a similar event last year.
This unique social media-based buying community was born directly out of the pandemic. By then, McNally had been thinking about ways to bring farmers and consumers closer together for years. The panic caused by the pandemic prompted his efforts to go into overdrive.
“When you think about people who are hungry in general, it’s because they don’t have money, they’re poor,” he explained. “Suddenly, America was hit with a whole new type of food insecurity, because people couldn’t find food to buy. It was no longer associated with poverty. What drove the explosion at Shop Kansas Farms? , it was fear, plain and simple.”
Although McNally was never a farmer himself, a trip to South America in 2010 sparked a strong interest in agricultural economics. As part of an international famine relief effort, he delivered one million meals to Colombian villages whose crops had been wiped out.
He was then invited to a parade through the old cobblestone streets, where the town’s mayor bluntly told him: “Without farmers, we die.”
“At that moment, I realized that if we wanted to tackle hunger, we needed to understand agriculture,” McNally recalls.
Shortly after joining the Kansas Farm Bureau and Kansas Farmers Union, he decided to learn everything he could.
At the suggestion of a colleague, he also attended the FFA national convention in Louisville.
“I was so impressed with the kids, and they kept talking about how we need to tell our story better,” he recalls.
That led him to start writing a column for the Kansas Farm Bureau, sharing his impressions from looking into agriculture as an outsider.
Then the pandemic hit.
“My wife came home and said the store’s meat department was empty that day, so I jumped on the computer and started Shop Kansas Farms,” he explained.
The site started working immediately.
From the beginning, McNally was determined to keep it effective and sustainable over the long term. In early 2023, he sold Shop Kansas Farms LLC to the Kansas Farm Bureau while continuing to serve in an advisory role.
He wanted to provide the platform with more financial resources and administrative support.
“It costs a lot of money to build a website with capacity and reach, and KFB invested in that,” he said.
The investment also gives Shop Kansas Farms another opportunity to grow and diversify.
At Lyons, McNally brought together community leaders to help craft a $140,000 USDA grant that will be used to build a “harvest hub.”
The project has progressed to the stage of recruiting new growers, and the city is considering improvements to its wastewater system to allow for the development of more treatment infrastructure.
“My real passion is local food systems,” McNally explained. “Farmers are entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs drive innovation and commerce, and society needs that.”
Mr. McNally is currently working on a book detailing how he created his unique food business development model.
“People say it was an overnight success, and I say it certainly was, but it took me 20 years to realize it,” he said with a smile.
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