A three-day farm show has an impact long after the gates close, with a community harvest that fills food pantry shelves thanks to FFA members.
The Heartland United Way food drive at Husker Harvest Days collected more than 13,000 pounds of food this year, as FFA members tipped the scale with a mountain of canned goods.
For Joseph Thede of Palmer, giving back is what he was raised to do.
“Because you have to give back to the community to get anything out of them. You become more of a family instead of just all your people going your own ways. You become this family and have a bond in your community instead of just being your own person,” Thede said.
He’s a senior who’s grown up on a family farm with parents who have emphasized service, something United Way executive director Karen Rathke noticed.
“When you see the next generation really taking care of the generation younger and the generation older and teaching all these FFA students about the importance of supporting people that really struggle with food insecurity,” she said.
This year, Palmer brought in 419 pounds of food — the most of any school participating. And it wasn’t just an FFA project. Teacher Payden Woodruff says the entire school got involved.
“We do it the week leading up to Husker Harvest Days. Even the elementary kids get involved and they want to give back and help contribute to us winning the Heartland United Way food drive,” Woodruff said of the effort in Palmer.
It may be a friendly competition but the need is real. Rathke said it’s the primary food drive in the fall that supports 18 pantries, shelters, and backpack programs.
One of them is the Howard-Greeley County Food Pantry, serving the area around Palmer. Sandra Mudloff sees the needs on the faces of those who come through the door.
“We see a lot of the need for families that have children, probably two, three, four. And then we also see needs for the veterans, a lot of our veterans who are either widowed or with widowers. A lot of them had farms back in the day, didn’t get a lot back in Social Security right now,” Mudloff said.
Higher grocery bills and fuel costs are making it harder to stretch a fixed income in rural Nebraska.
Mudloff says the pantry’s shelves were getting bare, and this food replenishes supplies.
“It has a huge impact. Right now our shelves are a little bit bare with some items. It also gives us that chance to get a little bit of a variety of items for our clients that we wouldn’t normally purchase or be able to get from the Food Bank for the Heartland in Omaha. And so it gives them a little bit of a treat too as well,” she said.
For Palmer’s Payden Woodruff, the lesson is that food insecurity isn’t something happening somewhere else. It can affect the very community her students call home.
“We talk about food insecurity in my classes leading up to this and how it helps benefit local communities. And it could even benefit some of the kids that go to our school,” she said.
Overall donations were down from last year — a reminder that the need doesn’t end when the food drive does.
But for the Palmer students, the lesson has taken hold that serving your neighbors is part of what makes a community.
“Most definitely,” Jospeh Thede said.
When school compete, the winners aren’t just those gaining free entry to a farm show but also the neighbors who won’t go hungry.