Can “energy combined with business and social media savvy” seen in a new kind of young agribusiness entrepreneur help reverse the population decline in rural America?
That’s the question posed in a Christian Science Monitor story by Laurent Belsie, who gives anecdotal evidence that the Great Plains has a new generation of entrepreneurs — the first born after the farm crisis in the 1980s — who want to make their way by starting businesses in America’s farming communities. He describes them as “young people who straddle the end of the millennial generation and the beginning of Generation Z.”
They go straight to building businesses in small communities rather than going first to cities to acquire skills.
“Unlike those who take over a conventional farm and help make it bigger and more efficient, these enterprising young people are starting small and unconventional operations,” Belsie writes.
Among several examples of young entrepreneurs starting “small and unconventional operations” is Hannah Esch of Nebraska, who owns Oak Barn Beef. Her new business has $52,000 in sales and has sold out of beef four times. She expects to double the business in the next year, around the time she finishes college.
Twin brothers Matt and Joe Brugger, who market beef directly from their own cows and grow hops for microbreweries, are renovating an old farmhouse on their family homestead. Free housing is a benefit, but there’s more to their desire to be back home. “It’s the place their great-grandfather bought when he moved here from Switzerland. It’s where their grandfather was born and where they played as children when the house was later rented by people who kept sheep.”
Last September in Gothenburg, Neb. (pop. 3,448), Taylor Walker opened T. Walker’s restaurant on Main Street. He left college a year short of a teaching degree, explaining, “I’m not a real fan of the big cities … I had seen how the community of Gothenburg treated my dad with his businesses. If they continue that for me, then I owe it to them to be here.” Gothenburg also has a new newspaper, the Gothenburg Leader, started by two local entrepreneurs. The town is a financial and services center for the surrounding agricultural area.
“There is a spirit in these young people that is different than anything I’ve ever experienced,” says Tom Field, director of the eight-year-old Engler Agribusiness Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Of the 120 or more of its alumni, “90 percent of them say their goal is to return — or they choose to live in — a small or rural community. These are students who have had international experiences, had internships on both coasts, but they choose to live and work and play in places where they have a deep affinity with the culture, the people, and the landscape.”
That’s the question posed in a Christian Science Monitor story by Laurent Belsie, who gives anecdotal evidence that the Great Plains has a new generation of entrepreneurs — the first born after the farm crisis in the 1980s — who want to make their way by starting businesses in America’s farming communities. He describes them as “young people who straddle the end of the millennial generation and the beginning of Generation Z.”
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| Great Plains (Department of the Interior) |
“Unlike those who take over a conventional farm and help make it bigger and more efficient, these enterprising young people are starting small and unconventional operations,” Belsie writes.
Among several examples of young entrepreneurs starting “small and unconventional operations” is Hannah Esch of Nebraska, who owns Oak Barn Beef. Her new business has $52,000 in sales and has sold out of beef four times. She expects to double the business in the next year, around the time she finishes college.
Twin brothers Matt and Joe Brugger, who market beef directly from their own cows and grow hops for microbreweries, are renovating an old farmhouse on their family homestead. Free housing is a benefit, but there’s more to their desire to be back home. “It’s the place their great-grandfather bought when he moved here from Switzerland. It’s where their grandfather was born and where they played as children when the house was later rented by people who kept sheep.”
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| Gothenburg in Dawson County and Nebraska (Wikipedia map) |
“There is a spirit in these young people that is different than anything I’ve ever experienced,” says Tom Field, director of the eight-year-old Engler Agribusiness Entrepreneurship Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Of the 120 or more of its alumni, “90 percent of them say their goal is to return — or they choose to live in — a small or rural community. These are students who have had international experiences, had internships on both coasts, but they choose to live and work and play in places where they have a deep affinity with the culture, the people, and the landscape.”
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