Many city residents want to visit nearby farms and gardens and buy locally grown foods in their restaurants, food courts, and grocery stores. Most will be disappointed because of well-known barriers to financing for marketing, land, and food processing.
Our company is developing a package of privately funded business services to increase local financing for local food systems.
Farmer-Led Demonstrations Projects
Our two Omaha area farms are part of farmer-led demonstrations to expand and organize new farms and gardens.
Although counterintuitive for many small farm advocates, the first steps toward sustainable food systems for cities, towns, and farming communities are to combine and diversify some (not all) small farming and gardening operations.
We need bigger farmers to supply more people and offer a path to profits for more small farmers.
Landowner and farmer-controlled consolidation can reduce costs, and at the same time, produce a much larger variety of healthy and affordable foods – all without selling land or taking on more farm-level debt.
Production Units
My late father’s Bennington farm and garden offer lessons on need for landowner and farmer-controlled consolidation and financing in this farm economy. His name was Bob Steffen, formerly the farm manager for Father Flanagan at Boys Town.
Dad once produced more than fifty different seasonal varieties of fresh fruits and vegetables. Most were sold to restaurants in Omaha. But his 78-acre farm and garden was much too small to supply even a few products on a year-around basis to a local school, restaurant, or grocery store.
To scale up, reduce costs, and increase variety we are asking farmland owners to work with their neighbors to consolidate production of some crops and livestock, and lease farms to experienced operators that they select. This type of collaboration can increase profits without selling farms or cutting corners on potential profits for farm and garden operators or wages for farmhands and food workers.
We call these combined operations “production units.” These scalable units will be locally financed and managed by experienced producers who lease contiguous and nearby farms and gardens for five to seven years from cooperating farmland owners – with purchase options.
Please read on and then call me with your questions and comments.
Thank you.
Jim Steffen, President
Massena Corporation
402-317-2639
jim@massenafarms.com
PS: Our Bennington Agrihood website has more on housing and local foods.
Posted: 11-13-2026