Kansas Farm Bureau recently hosted a rural economic driver panel at the Gardiner Angus Ranch near Ashland, Kansas. Included on the panel was Luke Jaeger, entrepreneur from Minneola, Kansas; Garrett Love, farmer and guided hunt operator, Montezuma, Kansas; Catherine Moyer, Pioneer Communications, Ulysses, Kansas; Chrysanne Grund, Greeley County Health Services, Sharon Springs, Kansas; Simone Elder, Network Kansas, Leoti, Kansas; and Tracy Thomas, U.S. Premium Beef, Kansas City, Missouri. Holly Martin, publisher of High Plains Journal, moderated the event.
Rural health care’s impact
Grund said in her community, health care serves important roles in a couple different ways. First, residents need access to care when they need it. Distances between facilities in smaller towns to larger tertiary care hospitals are often great distances.
“When you have a major medical event, the ability to have high quality primary care in your own community makes all the difference,” Grund said. “Keeping those systems viable and healthy is a large challenge for all of us that are involved in health care.”
Grund said rural health care system studies show for every dollar spent in a community on health care, $7 more is spent in the pharmacy, grocery stores and gas stations. Those types of expenses filter out into the community. Greeley County Health Services produces more than $1.2 million in salaries for the 120 people employed.
“We’ve got to work together, we’ve got to reach out,” she said. “We have to remain the opportunity to be part of a strong economic member of our community.”
Rural community, government divide
Love, a farmer and former Kansas legislator, said many young people have made the decision to come home or move to a rural community because of important intangibles—the quality of life, the pace, low crime, traffic, great schools, good teacher/student ratios. Rural southwest Kansas has a low unemployment rate.
“But one thing that I think is a equalizer in that is in the opportunity is those jobs and technology,” Love said. High speed internet allows users to connect from Montezuma and Ashland to anywhere in the world. “You can compete on that global level or national level with that.”
Love believes government is encouraging growth in technology in rural areas, and in turn it’s providing incentives to get other people into the community, such as doctors.
“We have a rural opportunity zone program earlier where it made it so someone who moved in from out of state wouldn’t pay income taxes for five years,” Love said. “Counties could partner with the state and that individual they want to recruit and pay student loans.”
Jaeger said the biosystems engineer at his biodiesel plant in Minneola, Kansas, couldn’t have been secured without the help of such incentives.
“He loves it out here,” Jaeger said. “Once you spend a little bit of time—it’s not the scenery, it’s not all of the fun things there is to do, it really is the people. That’s what makes it great out here.”
Why the need for communication networks?
Moyer, general manager and CEO of Pioneer Communications, said broadband access was something that was important 10 years ago, and now she feels like it’s kind of like asking for electricity and water.
“I really do feel it is a key to an economic driver in rural America,” she said. “I think it used to be that we looked at it and thought of it as a rural-urban divide. The people in the urban areas had it and people in the rural areas didn’t.”
Today’s conversation is now almost a rural-rural divide. Many parts of Kansas aren’t very well served when it comes to internet services and focus needs to be pushed to those areas even though costs for infrastructure make it daunting.
“We will always continue to fight that very far-reaching rural piece of our customer base,” Moyer said. “But those are the places that we continue to invest the dollars.”
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How has Network Kansas helped?
Elder, who is regional manager of rural entrepreneurship for the western region of Network Kansas, is based in Leoti. Network Kansas was created by a state statute in 2004 as part of the Kansas economic growth act. The group acts as a quasi government agency and receives state tax credits to sell. Now it offers a referral center where entrepreneurs can find and get connected with the right resources.
“So whether they’re looking to transition their business or they’re looking to a business plan to get started,” Elder said. “We have over 500 resource partners in the state that we can connect entrepreneurs with and then we can help walk them through that process.”
They were also tasked with getting rural entrepreneurs connected with capital. With the $2 million in tax credits the startup Kansas Loan Fund was created. It’s a GAP financing program that requires business owners to bring in local funding sources such as banks, such as local revolving loan funds.
In 2007, the entrepreneurship community partnership was created to take resources to the grass roots level and provide individual communities with entrepreneurship-based economic development.
“This allowed the decisions to be made at the local level,” she said. “We asked communities to put together a local leadership team and a local financial review board that can really know what their community needs most. They can also analyze the quality if character of those potential entrepreneurs.”
USPB helping small ranches
Thomas detailed what U.S. Premium Beef is all about and the impact it has made on local communities.
“We’re pretty excited for the future. There’s a very talented pool of young men and women coming back to the ranch,” Thomas said.
Producers who benefit the most from USPB are not big operations, as one might think.
“The producers who do the best in USPB, the top group were those who deliver less than 250 head a year,” Thomas said. “Our No. 2 group was those producers who feed and deliver less than 100 head per year.”
They raise quality beef that performs. Thomas said young producers struggle to even get started in the cattle business, much less have all they need in rural America.
“The young producer, I think what keeps them up at night is access to capital,” Thomas said.
Kylene Scott can be reached at 620-227-1804 or [email protected].
