“Shake The Hand That Feeds You” - Brian Alexander

This is a quote that changed my way of thinking.

In the early 90’s I was just a young boy learning to ride a bike, hanging out with friends from the little (extremely little) town I grew up in. Levant, KS, if it wasn’t for the exit off of Interstate 70 you most likely wouldn’t know it existed. I remember riding my bike around the dirt roads with my friends all day long. If we weren’t riding bikes we were running, playing ball, or exploring into some abandoned building that we should not have been.

One of those buildings happened to be an old school house. Two stories high, but crumbling. A no trespassing sign left us feeling like we were dangerous rebels, searching for something, not really knowing what, just being kids exploring. It was on the west end of town and the back side was torn down or blown down, we didn’t know or think much of it, but when we would climb up to the second floor we could see for miles.

That’s one thing about Western Kansas. You get a false sense of hope that you are close to your destination when you see the grain elevators in the distance. When you see it, you’ve got a solid hour before you get there.

I used to climb up in the tree in our backyard as well, just to see the wheatfields in the summer.

I loved it!

A combination of seeing the big tractors and combines, and spending summers with my grandparents on their farm in Northeast Missouri, made me want to be a farmer. Well at that age I wanted to be a farmer, a cowboy, a preacher, a bull rider, and a professional football player, because that’s what little boys want to do.

Looking back, I’ve always had a heart for helping people, getting them connected to what they needed in life, whether introducing them to a person they need to meet, leading them to the right place, or giving them what they are looking for.

I suppose that’s why it was so easy to buy into “Feeding The World”

We bought some farm ground a couple years back and I thought I was going to do just that. Raise the cattle, grow the crops, and do my part to feed the world.

We hit a bad year to start out, year two of a three year drought. Inputs went up, cost of raising cattle went up, fuel prices went up, everything went up, except for the crops we were trying to grow. Well, I guess they dried up so technically… anyway, I started to see my lifelong dreams fade. I was never going to be a Dallas Cowboy!

Just kidding, I learned that one pretty young.

All I could see was dollar signs floating away, never to be seen again. I felt like an extreme failure. I knew there had to be something I was missing. How do you do it? How do you stay alive in this industry? Especially if you don’t have much money to spend.

Thanks to social media and an app that most people have a love/hate relationship with (TikTok). I stumbled upon this term called “Regenerative Agriculture”.

I followed a few people in the ranching industry and a few farmers that were changing their way of thinking. I thought why not hear them out. I was recommended the book “Dirt to Soil” by Gabe Brown, and that’s where I began to have a paradigm shift in my perspective of agriculture.

Listened to a few podcasts and started to understand somethings about soil health I had never heard or thought of before.

I went from believing soil was just a medium for what we want to do, to understanding that soil health is was allows us to be able to accomplish what we need to do.

Just like everyone else that has heard these things before I had a hard time being convinced that it would work here, where we live.

I joined a couple Facebook groups that were centered around soil health, and found one that was based out of Kansas and Nebraska, I thought this is closer but its got to be Eastern Kansas, and Nebraska has so much more moisture on a yearly basis, still great to see people changing, but it won’t work here.

Until I listened to a podcast (Ranching Reboot episode #25, highly recommend!) Michael Thompson, A regenerative farmer from Norton County, KS (closer to home). I thought to myself “I’ll hear it out, see if its believable.”

He made this comment, I might not get it word for word but he says, “What the country looked like before it was totally broken out and farmed, reading about the settlers, started talking about what I knew as dried creek beds, and they weren’t just dried creek beds they were actually full flowing water, that would run mills, flowing water in, what I see now as, these dried creeks”

I thought to myself that it is kind of odd, how many creeks we drive over on the roads that have no water in them. Why? What happened between then and now?

To avoid the long rabbit trails that I usually end up going down I will shorten it up with this; We pump a lot of water out of the ground to demand that the soil grow what we want it to, only to raise a crop that we cannot directly consume.

This is where the light bulb came on, or the hamster started running. One way or another I came to this conclusion; We sure put a lot of work into something we don’t have any control over what we do with(outside markets, supply and demand), and we lose our sense of community in the process.

We raise a crop, to sell a crop, to buy a product that we know nothing of where it came from or how it was raised, all in hopes of being able to raise a crop the next year so that we can then buy a product again… seems tiresome.

I’m not saying we need to live a life like that we see on Little House On The Prairie, but I could see some benefits.

So where does “Shake The Hand That Feeds You” come into play?

#EatLocal

Know where your food comes from and how its been treated, or raised. What has been done to it to make it grow, better yet what’s the quality of it.

Something we found out while raising our own garden, Melissa can have fresh produce from our garden, but not from the grocery store. You do the math on that.

If you can shake the hand of the producer you buy from you are one step closer to raising it yourself. If you can raise it yourself you should, but not everyone has the ability to do so. If you buy a product from someone and it is less than your standard, let the producer know.

A good producer would not want to sell a bad product!

Shaking the hand that feeds you is about feeding your community, feeding your neighborhood, feeding people you know personally and taking pride in the product you raise because you know the people that will be consuming it.

If we fail at raising a high quality product, we fail at our business, and that is not something we are ever going to be ok with.

Know and understand where your food comes from. If you ever have questions about our products just ask. I would love to have a conversation with you!

p.s. Check out The Ranching Reboot Podcast for farming, ranching, all things regenerative ag, and how you can be a part of changing the world, one handshake at a time.