Author David Engelken: Telling Chad and Mandy Bontrager’s story, “Rebirthing Local Food Communities,” brings to my mind some sources and stories embedded in our local community’s hopes and national hopes for moving America forward into its true, life-fulfilling potential.
Long-lived sayings and stories indeed, like Joel’s, “Your old ones shall dream dreams, and your young ones shall see visions.” Like our Indigenous young people who’ve continued through these thousands of years going out on their vision quests, each seeking the particular life purpose calling them. Like Jesus, even through redemptive suffering, seeking to re-create local communities as God’s kingdom on earth. Like Dr. King, fifty-one years ago last month, standing before Abe Lincoln’s immense marble presence: “I have a dream today.”
At first glance, Chad and Mandy’s dreams might seem on a much smaller scale. A second glance reveals how persistent, challenging, and rewarding theirs are.
“I’ve always been interested in value-added food systems and supply chains,” Chad says. “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.”
“These businesses” are the vision and the developing reality that is hard-won from Chad and Mandy’s dream. After Chad’s job as CEO of Cargill’s Indianapolis flour mill, they returned home determined to restore local food systems. Chad was ready to turn their dream into strategy, to build, centered in Holton, a capacity to operate at all three basic levels of the food supply chain. And, doing so, to keep the business benefits flowing back into their hometown and other local towns like theirs.
The first level of Chad’s strategies is local, sustainable agricultural production. He raises high-grade cattle with his two brothers on their fifth-generation family farm near Holton. Chad works there part-time, on Saturdays, transporting cattle or feed. He has partnered with two brothers who raise cattle sustainably on their nearby family ranch for added beef production. (Chad notes that, without the value-added processing markets below that he, his family, and friends got into in 2016, beginning their second-level strategy, the Covid market catastrophe would have forced the closure of their family farm operation.)
For Chad’s second-level local food system strategy, value-added processing, he assembled a small but growing group of family members, friends, and partners, some former high school and college mates, for needed breakthroughs. In 2016, they bought the Bowser Meats processing and locker plant in Meriden, Kansas, one of many such local Kansas plants that are in danger of closing. That purchase immediately opened a pathway to a further dream he and Mandy had centered in the third level of their strategies below. Their vision is to redesign and reopen three small-town groceries, keep local ownership, management, employment, entrepreneurial skill-building of the town’s young people, and local residents’ food dollars.
With Chad’s cousin Carly, they bought the IGA store building Chad had grown up with. It had closed due to Walmart’s new Supercenter recently opening a grocery section two blocks away. They remodeled and redesigned it to reopen as Cecil K’s Hometown Market, carrying their locally produced and processed meat, some locally grown produce, and their own fresh-baked goods. Opening it took Holton out of local produce food desert status. Cecil K’s went on to celebrate its sixth anniversary last January.
As if that weren’t enough coming off the blocks, long-established Yoder Meats went on sale the following year in Kansas’ largest Amish Community. Its specialty products and three retail outlets in Wichita were bringing production and processing profits back to Yoder. Chad’s ability to move quickly on crucial opportunities found him allied with another new partner to buy that company in August 2017.
So, their quick expansion at their level two strategy, meat processing, found them growing exponentially in their level three strategy, value-added retail.
“We got the three stores Yoder Meats had in Wichita, the one in Yoder, and we opened another one in Lawrence the following year, 2018.” All of this, beginning with the Meriden locker purchase, they had achieved in less than three years.
Then another friend offered another opportunity—a former high school classmate who worked with the bank in Westmoreland, Kansas, population 740, forty-five miles away. The town’s grocery store closed in 2017, just as Chad and his wife opened their own grocery store in Holton. Chad, Mandy, and Carly joined forces to buy and redesign it. It reopened as the Westmoreland Hometown Market in 2022. Their level two processing plants and three urban retail shops have financially backed the purchase, the reopening, and the return to financial stability of these two small-town groceries. Westmoreland Grocery entered year four, succeeding with the hometown relational marketing experience that had begun in Holton. It offered lunches, a salad bar, a wide variety of meat products custom-cut at the Holton store, and organic produce grown at a nearby aquaponics. Goods fresh-baked in Holton included fresh bread, previously unavailable at retail in Westmoreland.
“You have to want to do this work,” Chad notes. I’m not gonna make a ton of money at this. You’re hoping to be profitable enough to survive. There are a lot more lucrative things we could be doing.”
That’s true with many promising dreams, the ones that call us, our children, or our grandchildren, into action. Practical dreamers like Chad and Mandy help lift their communities in small ways, our America into its life-enriching potential. I’ll keep these practical dreamer stories coming at you, rooted in their historic, even ancient precedents.
- David Engelken is a writer, musician, experienced urban community organizer, and retired public school Spanish teacher. Engelken is intrigued by writing and organizing for rural and urban cross-alliances that create grassroots democratic empowerment from shared self-interests. He currently aids a fast-growing group from Kossuth County, Iowa that is taking the state by storm. His body of literary work includes a cover story for Boulder Weekly and the Progressive Populist called “Milking the Family Farm” and two topical non-fiction books with extended stays on metro-Denver’s national best-seller list. He grew up on a northeast Kansas family farm and has long lived and worked in central Denver. With his wife Tricia, he has three adult children who have each started families of their own in Denver, Colorado.
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