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5th Annual Love Your Mom Event

5th Annual Love Your Mom Event

5th Annual Love Your Mom Event

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735 735 people viewed this event.

What if there was a place where you could spend a meaningful day celebrating the women who mean the most to you?

A place where moms, daughters, grandmas, and friends could gather…

shop unique gifts…

support small businesses…

and enjoy a day filled with encouragement and community.

That’s exactly what the Love Your Mom Event was created to be.

Now in its 5th year, this special event has become a favorite tradition for families looking for a thoughtful way to celebrate Mother’s Day.

✨ Browse a variety of vendors offering handmade, natural, and unique items

✨ Find meaningful Mother’s Day gifts you won’t see in big box stores

✨ Support local small businesses

✨ Spend quality time with the women you love

Whether you’re looking for the perfect gift for Mom, planning a fun girls’ day out, or simply want to enjoy a positive community event, this is the place to be.

Bring your:

💐 Mom

💐 Daughter

💐 Sister

💐 Grandma

💐 Best Friend

Or come treat yourself — because every woman deserves to be celebrated.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1262130082551320

📅 Date: Saturday, May 9th, 2026

📍 Location: 1901 N. Kansas Ave, Topeka, KS

⏰ Time: 10am-3pm

🎟 Admission: FREE!!

Event: 5th Annual Love Your Mom Event

Invite your friends and make a day of it!

We can’t wait to celebrate with you. 💗

To register for this event please visit the following URL: https://www.facebook.com/events/the-woodshed/3rd-annual-love-your-mom-event/295708106307726/ →

 

Date And Time

05-09-2026 @ 09:00 AM to
05-04-2026 @ 03:00 PM

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Presentation at the Great Plains Growers Conference

Lionberry 's Weekly Delusion and Re-illusion Update.

Heartland Elderberry Collaborative (Heartland ECo)


“Instead of asking each farm to grow bigger, we’re building shared capacity so farms can stay viable at their current scale while accessing value-added markets.”

An AgriCluster Pilot for Shared Infrastructure and Value-Added Market Access
Eastern Kansas / Western Missouri


PROBLEM CONTEXT

Small and mid-sized farms face persistent structural barriers to entering value-added markets, including:

• Limited access to processing infrastructure
• Limited cold storage capacity
• Transportation constraints
• Fragmented, uncoordinated distribution
• High costs from duplicating equipment and logistics across individual farms

These constraints restrict grower profitability, inhibit vertical integration, and reduce the viability of diversified regional food systems.


WHAT HEARTLAND ECo IS

The Heartland Elderberry Collaborative (Heartland ECo) is an active, facilitated, place-based AgriCluster pilot organizing elderberry growers and processors in eastern Kansas and western Missouri.

• Facilitated through ACRE (AgriCluster Resilience and Expansion)
• Emphasizes collective capacity-building and shared infrastructure
• Designed to enable farm-level vertical integration (grow, process, and take products to market)
• Structured to share infrastructure, governance, and market access


WHAT HEARTLAND ECo IS NOT

• Not a single-farm expansion program
• Not a commodity-scale production model
• Not a vertically integrated corporate system


WHY ELDERBERRY

• Performs well on marginal soils
• Integrates with soil-health and regenerative practices
• Supports perennial hedgerows and diversified systems
• Enables multiple value-added pathways (destemming, juicing, beverage and supplement production)
• Aligns with growing consumer demand for regionally produced products

The pilot is explicitly designed to test repeatability across additional non–Big Ag crops, including tomatoes, fruit crops, and legumes.


CURRENT PILOT STATUS

• Core grower group established
• Regular coordination underway
• Shared infrastructure priorities identified
• Grower recruitment initiated
• Early coordination with grocery buyers in progress


SHARED INFRASTRUCTURE HUB CONCEPT

The Heartland ECo model proposes a centralized hub facility located south of Kansas City to support participating farms and processors.

• Aggregation and intake
• Cold storage
• Destemming
• Juicing
• Bottling
• Short-haul regional distribution

The hub is intended to reduce duplicated equipment costs, logistical inefficiencies, and fragmented distribution efforts that commonly limit small-farm participation in value-added markets.


PILOT OBJECTIVES

Establish a functioning elderberry AgriCluster
Create shared access to processing, storage, and distribution infrastructure
Build collective grant-writing and fundraising capacity
Coordinate educational outreach related to elderberry and soil-health practices
Evaluate feasibility of scaling the model across additional crops and regions


FORTHCOMING PILOT STUDY

This poster outlines a proposal for a forthcoming pilot study to formally evaluate the effectiveness of the Heartland ECo model.

• Economic impact
• Grower profitability
• Infrastructure utilization
• Soil-health indicators
• Logistical efficiency
• Replicability across crops and regions

DOWNLOAD POSTER HERE