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LionBerry Regenerative™ at Stems: A Garden Soirée

LionBerry Regenerative™ at Stems: A Garden Soirée

LionBerry Regenerative™ at Stems: A Garden Soirée

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Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens • May 16, 2026

Nature that Nurtures. Grown feral from the ground for a clean label.

LionBerry Regenerative™ is honored to be pouring at Stems: A Garden Soirée — A Cause to Celebrate, the signature fundraiser supporting the The Arts & Recreation Foundation of Overland Park and the Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens.

Join us for an unforgettable spring evening surrounded by peak blooms, live music, botanical beverages, artful experiences, and enchanting garden moments — all while supporting a beautiful community cause.

A Night in the Gardens, A Gift to the Community

Guests will enjoy an all-inclusive evening featuring:

  • Exceptional food from dozens of Kansas City favorites

  • Craft cocktails, mocktails, wine, beer, and botanical beverages

  • Live music and immersive garden experiences

  • Art installations and fireworks throughout the evening

  • Recovery hydration drinks and mocktails from LionBerry Regenerative™

We’ll be serving our farm-grown LionBerry Regenerative™ Hydration recovery mocktail — built from the ground up with ingredients rooted in regenerative agriculture and soil health.

Featured Ingredients

  • Elderberry

  • Elderflower

  • Butterfly Pea Flower

  • Lion’s Mane Mushroom

  • Tart Cherry

  • Local Apple

  • Local Honey

  • Lemon

  • Meyer Lemon

What We’ll Be Pouring

LionBerry Regenerative™ Hydration

Elderberry Sips

Lion’s Mane Mushroom Tinctures

Food is medicine — while sustaining soil health.

Building the Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative

LionBerry Regenerative™ is proud to be helping build the Heartland American Elderberry Collaborative — the first AgriCluster of its kind in the Midwest.

This growing elderberry network brings together regional farmers and producers to:

  • Share agricultural resources

  • Strengthen regional farming systems

  • Support regenerative agriculture

  • Educate consumers from soil to shelf

Joining LionBerry Regenerative™ for Sampling

  • Wild Ivy Farms

  • FairShare Farms

Meet Our Extended Elderberry Network

  • Casa Summerset

  • Good Oaks

  • Fossil Winery

  • Fyler Farms

  • Regional elderberry growers throughout the Heartland

Event Details

Saturday, May 16, 2026

Overland Park Arboretum & Botanical Gardens

8909 W. 179th St.
Overland Park, KS 66013

VIP Patron Entry: 6:00 PM
General Admission: 7:00 PM

  • All food, drink, and entertainment included

  • Must be 21+ to attend

Learn More

Presented in support of the The Arts & Recreation Foundation of Overland Park

P.O. Box 26392
Overland Park, KS 66225

Visit:
https://artsandrec-op.org/

To register for this event please visit the following URL: https://artsandrec-op.org/the-arts-recreation-foundation-of-overland-park/stems/ →

 

Date And Time

05-16-2026 @ 07:00 PM to
05-16-2026

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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