Rural with a Capital R

The Roush family share their FFA experiences ahead of speaking at the Kansas FFA Convention.

Upcoming speakers at the Kansas FFA Convention, Emily and Kaden Roush operate R Family Farms and new businesses in Lebanon, Kan., including a grocery store and local farm-totable meat business.

“We’ve grown R Family Farms into a successful business. It was our brain child, and it was built on our backs,” Emily says. “Even though we’ve stumbled and there have been hard times, we’ve always kept plugging forward. Maybe it’s just our entrepreneurial mindsets, but looking back on what we’ve accomplished, we know that it came from hard work and perseverance.”

FFA Influenced

Emily joined FFA as a freshman at Iola High School due to her older sister who had been active in the chapter.

“I quickly grew to love the environment of our ag classroom and FFA chapter and was often the leader of many activities,” Emily says. “I gained a position on our officer team as a sophomore and continued my service through my senior year.”

She found a niche in the Ag Sales CDE to

Story by Lucas Shivers

research products and create sales pitches.

“My SAE was crop production - entrepreneurship,” Emily said. “I guess our SAEs say a lot about the both of us and our future of being entrepreneurs! I was also honored to be the first female from my chapter to obtain the American FFA Degree, something I strived towards with the help and encouragement of my advisor.”

Kaden started in FFA as a freshman at Smith Center. His SAE focused on diversified agriculture entrepreneurship businesses with crops, cattle and the largest area of swine production.

“I was very active in my local chapter which led me to be on the officer team for three years and grow into a district officer for two years,” Kaden said. “I won the state swine entrepreneurship proficiency award as a junior, and went on to become state star farmer as a senior. I excelled in livestock judging and the job interview where I went on to compete in nationals.”

Livestock judging led Kaden to a full ride scholarship at Allen Community College where he met Emily.

Rural Heartland Living

The Roush’s resettled in Lebanon after college.

“We are both active in so many different boards and committees in our small community. I can’t imagine not being involved,” Emily says. “My time leading and participating in FFA helped to shape me into this go-getter, community oriented person. I strive to look for answers outside of the box, not just necessarily cookie cutter solutions.”

Thanks to their time spent in strong youth programming honing a laundry list of character attributes and agriculture-based life skills, they believe that agriculture needs to tell its story.

“If you don’t tell your story, someone else will,” Kaden says. “When we started our own farm in 2015, one of our main goals was forging that connection directly to the people who consume our products.”

Moving back to rural America has major challenges, but also many positives.

“Eight years later, community members comment on how happy they are to have us as a young family in town,” Emily says. “I’m not sure our doorbell stopped ringing the first year we were here!”

They quickly realized making friends was sometimes hard, and finding things to do could sometimes be even harder.

“To be real honest, in college, I got very spoiled by unlimited dining options, delivery, extensive shopping and an unending list of extra-curricular activities,” Kaden says. “But, I always wanted to move back to Lebanon. You give up those conveniences for a slower pace of life and an opportunity to build community.”

Making a Mark

Putting their personalized stamp on how they want the Lebanon community to move forward, the Roush burn the midnight oil.

“For the first five years, I worked a full-time job for financial security while we worked towards positioning our farming enterprises to be profitable enough to sustain us full time,” Kaden says. “There were a lot of sleepless nights and 4 am arrivals from a pig delivery trip, then woke up to go to the day job.”

In the summer of 2017, a soured business deal turned their business on its end, but from the ashes they found new opportunities working directly with consumers via e-commerce and nationwide shipping.

“We spent the next two years honing our proficiencies there, mostly selling to friends and family, and a small but extremely loyal and routine customer base,” Kaden says. “It allowed us to hit the ground running when the pandemic forced consumers to start sourcing meat alternatively.”

When most farmers were scratching their heads wondering if they could even ship meat in COVID times, the Roush’s had a perfected shipping supply line, a freezer full of inventory and a website with hundreds of orders each week.

“In short, our meat business became an overnight sensation, going from a couple hundred orders a year to a couple hundred orders per week,” Kaden says. “We quickly realized that our garage based e-commerce business wasn’t adequate to handle the volume of orders.”

They began searching for a property in Lebanon for warehousing, dedicated pack stations and potential retail store front.

New Horizons

In 2021, the opportunity to acquire the town’s only grocery store fell in their laps.

“Losing that store, the anchor or the hub of our little community, would mean saying goodbye to the rest of our town,” Emily says. “Neither of us ever imagined we’d own a grocery store. We couldn’t pass it up.”

The couple saved the town’s only access point for food in a 30 mile round trip, and provided an already established retail front to merge their pork business.

A little more than a year into ownership, they secured over a quarter of a million dollars in grant funding and private capital to rehabilitate the rundown infrastructure and erect an adjacent warehouse to accommodate their meat business.

“We took risks and looked forward to the new trends,” Emily says. “We have always tried to be innovative and in most cases it has helped to propel us forward.”

The story-telling and e-commerce of R Family Farms meets a growing need for heritage pork with an actual family and personal story behind the label of “Bringing Berkshire Pork to Your Table Since 2015.”