Sep 05, 2025
By Rick McNary
Did you know the roots of the Shop Kansas Farms concept started more than a decade ago as a hunger-free community proposal for a National Innovation Award from The Alliance to End Hunger and Hunger Free Communities Network?
In my work in the hunger space (the intersection of corporations, governments, nonprofits, universities, faith-based and civic organizations trying to end hunger), I was challenged by Dr. Curt Kastner who was the director of food science at Kansas State University. He said they were looking for local food system models to serve as a backup mechanism in case of a terroristic threat to our global food supply. He broke a food system down into three components: production (someone grows a plant or animal), processing (once that plant or animal reaches maturity, it must be processed to be ready for human consumption) and distribution (how to get it to the plate of consumers).
As my team and I began researching our proposal, we noticed two gaps:
- A digital connection between those three components needed to be established.
- The small-scale processing facilities, both meat and produce, were either disappearing or non-existent.
Although we won the award, the idea never took root. I worked on that idea for years with no success until, by accident, chance or divine providence, I created the missing digital hub when I launched the Shop Kansas Farms (SKF) Facebook group during the early stages of the pandemic in April 2020. I realized about three days in, I had created a digital hub.
Those first few months of SKF were a wild-west rodeo with incredible growth of tens of thousands of consumers joining to “purchase food from the wonderful farm and ranch families of Kansas.” When I’m asked what I believed contributed to that growth, the answer is simple: fear. People were afraid the shelves at the grocery store were going to be empty. One of the first, and strongest, emotions in reacting to hunger is fear. I’ve worked with food security issues for more than two decades and understand that if people don’t have access to food, fear sets in.
SKF became a new kind of food security solution. As many people stated at the time, “Farmers had our backs! We discovered the people right down the road were growing the food we needed.” As I learned in a refugee camp near Somalia, when food comes, hope comes.
It's hard to believe that today, right here in Kansas, there are people — especially children — who don’t know where their next meal is coming from. They are fearful, too.
But you can help. I’d encourage you to act to support Kansas Farm Bureau’s Act to End Hunger campaign. There are inspirational stories about various counties around the state doing great work to end hunger. You can check them out here.
September is Hunger Action month, and you can make a difference in the lives of someone who wonders where their next meal is coming from!
Donate today by going to www.kfb.org/endhunger.