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Mickey’s Kansas Roots: High Tunnels & Elderberry Fields

Back in Kansas Mickey shows us his high tunnel at KC Farmyard and Casa Somerset’s elderberry in which Mickey is the caretaker.

In the evening we joined more members of the AgriCluster AMERICAN HEARTLAND ELDERBERRY COLLABORATIVE to learn about fruit and specialty crops on a tour of Gieringers Family Farm

Siri Leonard a member of American Heartland Elderberry Collaborative works on the Growers Subcommittee shaping good Elderberry growing processes, standards, and stewardship.
Here Tom Buller is enjoying the special tour around the farm. We are thankful to have Tom jump in to help lead up our structural framework. We are lucky to have his expereience in building the business bones and legal 
frame-raising of a new AgriCluster! Tom has elderberry on his land and thinking about more! 
Robert Leonard who has been with the AgriCluster since the early days! He and wife Siri have their elderberry in the ground and adding more. He is involved with plans to strengthen the market of elderberry. Next to Robert is a farmer we are wooing. Jacob of JET FARMS. GOT ELDERBERRY YET?

As it turned dark we dropped Lori Trojan our Elderberry Story teller and core member off at her WILD IVY HERB FARM. Next farm visit we can take a look at Loris elderberry and Mark Allison seen below who has elderberry at his Fossil Creek Winery. Mark also has the agritourism bus The Miami Trolley!

Loris elderberry and Mark Allison with elderberry at his Fossil Creek Winery

Stay tune as the co-chairs visit more members of the elderberry AgriCluster American Heartland Elderberry Collaborative!

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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