Hop on the Bus, Get Schooled on Local Food and Value-Added Production and Processing! Farmers of all experience levels are invited to hop on the bus and gain a better grasp of the opportunities and challenges of our local food systems. The Kansas Beginning Farmer Bus Tour leaves from the Topeka Ramada and winds southward to Parker, KS. Our first stop is Iwig Family Dairy in Tecumseh. They bottle milk and produce butter and ice cream on the farm which they sell at their three retail stops. Next up, we visit the famous Lawrence Farmers Market’s Holiday Market before heading to Ottawa to tour the Bauman’s Butcher Block. The (local) lunch bell rings for us at Princeton’s Brand N Iron. Down in Garnett, we’ll stop in at Cedar Valley Farms’ ANCO Poultry Processing and Bauman’s Farm Feeds, the new non-GMO FeedHub. We’ll wrap up the tour in Parker by visiting Synergistic Acres and Grandview Livestock.
Click on the ‘+Box’ to read the stop description.
The Bauman family began its adventure in ag in 2001 when John and Yvonne Bauman purchased 180 acres in Anderson County. Today, they, along with their six children and two daughters-in-law, run an enterprise where they do everything from raise pastured poultry and eggs, beef, and row crops to process a gamut of local ag products.
Rosanna developed a passion for poultry, later realizing that lack of processing capacity was holding back the growth of local sales. So she got her HACCP and opened ANCO, Kansas’ only on-farm, USDA-inspected poultry processor.
The latest Bauman venture is a GMO-free grain FeedHub, Bauman’s Farm Feeds. Winning the 2014 Slow Money BeetCoin Campaign–and a $60k 0% interest loan–will permit local, non-GMO grain markets to grow. “Farmers are willing to raise it, but must be able to get it to the consumers. That infrastructure is totally gone in the grain industry.”
Kansas Beginning Farmer Day Concludes
Thank you for sharing your day and time with us. Safe travels home!