09/29/2026
I don't talk about this part much, so bear with me.
Running a small business is the hardest thing I've ever done. Not hard like a long day. Hard like laughing and crying in the same hour. Hard like bleeding on equipment at two a.m. because it has to work by morning. I've come close to walking away more times than I'd like to admit, and every time, something pulled me back. Usually it was one of you. A message, an order, somebody telling me the mushrooms were the best they'd ever had. You have no idea what that does for a person at the right moment.
I owe you some honesty. I've given timelines I didn't hit. I said a couple weeks and it turned into a lot longer. Some of that has been transportation problems that shut me down cold. Some of it is doing this as a single father full time, where the day only has so many hours in it and my kids come first. I'm not going to lay all of it out here, because nobody needs my whole ledger. But I don't want you thinking I forgot, or that I stopped caring, or that I was ever just going to disappear on you. I wasn't. I'm not.
Here's the thing I've figured out, though. Every hardship I go through turns into something I can hand to somebody else. Every setback teaches me a workaround, and then I know the workaround, so the next person doesn't have to learn it the hard way. That's the whole point of this for me. I have a real passion for fixing things and feeding people. I want communities around here that don't have good food to have good food. I want to grow it, get it to people, and help the next grower over the same hurdles I've already tripped on. That's what all of this is building toward, and I'm still building it.
And I want you to know it's bigger than mushrooms. The mushrooms are always going to be here, that's the heart of it. But what I'm working on is the part of the food system that's missing out here. Rural Kansas has good growers and hungry communities and almost nothing connecting the two. So I've been building that connection. Market gardening alongside the mushrooms. A produce distribution network that moves food from Kansas growers to Kansas people instead of letting it die on the vine three counties over. An incubation kitchen so folks around here have a legal, certified place to turn what they grow into something they can sell. And the technology to tie it all together, so a grower, a buyer, and a food hub can actually find each other.
None of that is just talk, either. Five years learning this craft, including time under one of the best growers in the state. Partnerships with K-State Research and Extension's Community Food Systems team, and people across Kansas working alongside me on the pieces of this puzzle. There are folks in this state counting on me to hold up my end, and I don't take that lightly. That's part of why the setbacks hit as hard as they do. It was never just an order that slipped. It's a promise, and I intend to keep it.
Now here's something I want to ask of you.
I've been brought on as the Southeast Kansas contact for the Kansas Specialty Crop Growers Association. That's a real contract with real responsibility, and what it means is that getting our corner of the state on the map is now my job. Not a side project. My job.
Here's what that map is. KSCGA keeps a statewide directory of Kansas growers and markets, and every grower who joins becomes a dot on it. What you grow, where you grow it, when it's ready. That's how a buyer three counties over finds you. That's how a farmers market finds a grower who has what they need in July. That's how a restaurant stops ordering from out of state. Right now there are big empty patches over Southeast Kansas, and every empty patch is somebody growing good food that nobody can find.
Joining gets you more than a pin, though. You get connected to growers across the state who'll share what they know, because they will. You get educational and technical help. You get member discounts through their business supporters. And you get a voice. KSCGA is grower-led and grant-funded, and one of the things it does is carry the concerns of small specialty crop growers to the people making policy. When something in this system isn't working for us out here, that's an organized body that can say so, instead of each of us hollering into the wind alone.
Membership runs fifty dollars a year. I'll be straight with you, that money doesn't disappear into an office somewhere. It goes right back into bringing new growers in. And if fifty dollars is the thing standing between you and getting on that map, message me. There are ways to work with that, and I'd rather have you on the map than not.
So if you grow anything in this part of Kansas, go look up the Kansas Specialty Crop Growers Association at kscga.org and sign up. If you'd rather talk it through first, message us on Facebook or email us at [email protected]. I'm starting these conversations across Southeast Kansas soon, about how we connect growers, markets, and the people who eat what we grow, and I want you in the room.
So I'm still here. Still pushing. Your product is coming, and the thing I'm working toward is bigger than a single order. Thank you for sticking with me while I get there.
