Can Legislative, Business, and Financial Leaders Learn from Rural Leaders?
Chad Bontrager’s distance from Freda Dobbins’ farm (see Rural and Urban Food Desert ‘Tennis”) kept her from initially thinking of him. She was trying to come up with the name of a potential young leader who might take on freeing her rural community from food desert status. Freda thought of Chad as someone who might do that, but his hometown was thirty miles away. I followed up.
Chad is a savvy, enjoyable leader living in a local rural Kansas town vulnerable to our nation’s concentrated food systems. In 2017, after returning to their hometown of Holton, he and his wife, Mandy, began with a thorough redesign of a former independent grocery—less than two blocks from the new Walmart Supercenter. That Supercenter’s new retail grocery section had prompted the closure of the previous IGA store where Chad’s family shopped when he was growing up.
Chad, Mandy, and his cousin Carly Whorton remodeled the former IGA as Cecil K’s Hometown Market. They named it after Chad’s great-grandfather, a rural grocer in the 1930s.
Cecil K’s offers fresh, local produce and fresh-baked local goods. Their specialty is cinnamon rolls—oh! That fresh aroma! Chad also offers locally raised and processed meat and in-store food events.
The store’s success removes Holton from food desert status. Its nutritional food, often local, is price-competitive with the big box stores. Its personalized customer service is superior. “If you’re dropping in … say for a gallon of milk, you can be in and out in less time than it takes to walk across their big parking lot,” Chad observes.
Cecil K’s is part of a quickly expanding set of local food businesses that Chad, his family, and his business partners have worked to preserve and rebuild these past eight years.
After growing up on their sixth-generation family farm near Holton, he and his brothers continue a cattle operation. Chad drives its feed truck and hauls its cattle on Saturdays. After majoring in milling at Kansas State University, he worked ten years with Cargill, eventually managing their flour mill operation near Indianapolis. He explains,
“I’ve always been interested in value-added food systems and supply chains. I learned a lot in my ten years with Cargill and five years with the Kansas Department of Agriculture, including as Deputy Secretary—so I’m not coming in green to these businesses. My wife is from Holton. We always knew we’d return with Cargill as a beginning job.”
In January 2016, Walmart was busy replacing its older store and was set to open a new one in July. Even though Cott Coleman closed Ron’s IGA after 45 years rather than trying to compete, he couldn’t let go of the idea he could reopen one day. Holton’s other independent grocery, Country Mart, closed six months after the Walmart opened. Erica Blair of Kansas State Extension’s
Rural Grocery Initiative reported in 2018 that one in five rural Kansas grocery stores have closed over the last ten years
Working his way up at the Kansas Department of Agriculture, Chad learned first-hand what was happening in value-added meat processing.
“I saw these smaller meat processors and lockers around the state. So many owners were at retirement age with no one to sell to. Selling was necessary to create their retirement income! My family grew up taking our animals to local lockers, so I was familiar with local meat processing. My wife and I said, “Let’s buy a local locker plant if we can find one.’ I came across two friends of mine with the same idea. We found an excellent prospect, Bowser Meats, 24 miles away in Meriden. We bought it in January 2016.“
Chad’s partners, Billy McCauley and David Tinney got requests for an outlet for those meat products in Holton. They opened Heartland Meats on the courthouse square that September. Tinney also operates Community Assisted Living, serving people with disabilities. Their store offers some of them a chance to assist as part-time employees. Chad meanwhile scouted Holton’s U.S. Highway 75 business strip, including Ron’s closed IGA building near the new Walmart construction.
“We wanted a small hole in the wall to sell our meat there. Scott was trying to
sell or lease the building. We approached him to see if we could lease part of it. He told us, ‘I
think you oughta carry several items.’ Before you know it, we’d decided to reopen the store with
a full-service line of groceries and supplies.”“Those first years were really tough. You have to want to do this. At three years we were
able to say ‘we’ll figure this out’. And we felt pretty confident at five years. It’s still sometimes
tough. We couldn’t have done it if it was our only source of income.”
‘Sounds like a family farmer talking.
“We were thinking eventually of a second or third store. We went into it with that in mind. After five years we could see where there could be some operational efficiencies, having Cecil K’s, the larger store, with the bakery and supplying the butcher.”
Chad’s business savvy and community-oriented service underpinned the Cecil K’s sixth-anniversary celebration in February. And 45 miles away in Westmoreland, population 740, the second grocery they re-opened has celebrated its first anniversary.
In my next op-ed, I’ll write more about how Chad, his family, and friends developed another, bigger value-added food venture,
to back reopening those small-town groceries.
Meanwhile, join me in reflecting on Chad and the other rural and center-urban Americans whose essential stories I have covered in these op-eds over the past two years.
- Dolores Mertz, Josh Manske and friends, Ellen Belle, Brenda Bormann and her husband
Merrill, Deborah Taylor, Faatma Oné, Ron Finley, James Grevious, Jim and Freda Dobbins,
Chad and Mandy Bontrager.
These leaders attack the root problems preventing the food system and financial redevelopment of their local Iowa, Kansas, and Colorado communities. With the ‘can do’ attitudes they grew up with, they gather people and financial resources to take
steps to preserve and restore threatened local community relationships, farms, and food businesses. They do so directly beside the super-concentrated ownership and economic entities that dominate our food, legislative, agricultural, and financial practices and policies.
Can our public farm and food policymakers begin to learn from them?
Can they redevelop supportive public or public/private agricultural and financing policies and structures for our small, independent farms and businesses?
Can they learn from and begin to help replicate the rural and small-town methods and successes of these leaders across the nation?
Watch this space. I will continue to report on Chad’s major food venture, which financially anchors his and his network’s local successes. As they learn from their experiences, we will, too. I’ll also take on some of these big policy questions.
Meanwhile, SHOP LOCAL!