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STRENGTHEN THE VINE – FIRST FRIDAYS – October 2, 2026

STRENGTHEN THE VINE – FIRST FRIDAYS – October 2, 2026

STRENGTHEN THE VINE – FIRST FRIDAYS – October 2, 2026

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Join LionBerry at Strengthen the Vine First Fridays in Kansas City’s Historic 18th & Vine District. Enjoy local vendors, live entertainment, food, family activities, and community connections every First Friday from May through November.

This highly anticipated season will mark a major milestone for the district as we celebrate the completion of construction improvements and the official opening of the new Jazz District Pedestrian Mall—creating a more vibrant, walkable, and welcoming destination for residents and visitors alike.

From May through November 2026, the district will once again come alive with the sights, sounds, and flavors that make First Fridays a beloved Kansas City tradition. Guests can enjoy an energetic evening filled with:

🎶 Live music and entertainment
🎨 Local artists and cultural experiences
🍴 Food trucks and culinary vendors
🛍 Retail and small business vendors
👨‍👩‍👧 Family-friendly activities throughout the district

And the excitement doesn’t stop there…!!!

Summer 2026 will bring an unprecedented wave of tourism to Kansas City as the city hosts several FIFA World Cup matches, welcoming thousands of visitors from across the globe. Strengthen the Vine First Fridays will provide a unique opportunity for vendors, entrepreneurs, artists, and organizations to showcase their brands, products, and services to both local audiences and international guests visiting the district.

SEE MORE INFO

To register for this event please visit the following URL: https://www.juneteenthkc.com/first-fridays →

 

Date And Time

10-02-2026 @ 05:00 PM to
10-02-2026 @ 09:00 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