Our company and partners are uniquely qualified to organize investor-funded production units and farmer-owned retail food brands. My extended family has been in diversified, regenerative, and organic agriculture in eastern Nebraska, western Iowa, and North Dakota for generations.
Conflicts of interest are not an issue. We do not buy and sell commodities, and we are not in real estate, farm management, banking, finance, or government.
Jim Steffen: President Massena Corporation
In addition to my life-long experience in organic agriculture, I have marketed products and services for large non-profit and for-profit organizations. As a senior planner, I managed regional market research and planning for a nationally recognized environmental engineering firm. This work included public and investor information programs. My education is in the social sciences and business at undergraduate and graduate levels.
My family history in agriculture is shown at the end of this page.
Our team’s qualifications are summarized below.
Andrew Lancaster: CFO/CEO Bell Creek Feeders
Andrew develops cost and income projections for Massena Corporation’s regenerative beef cow-calf production program.
He has over 20 years of direct experience with large and profitable cow-calf operations.
Andrew grew up in West Central Illinois on a small family farm. Livestock included a beef cow-calf operation with feeder pigs, sheep, and chickens. His family raised row crops along with alfalfa in rotations. As a teenager he worked for a large cow-calf producer who also raised hogs and farmed. This farm had approximately 1,200 cows.
After graduating college in 2002 he followed his new wife’s career to Colorado where he worked on a large ranch in the eastern part of the state. This operation calved around 800 heifers every spring along with around 800 second calf heifers. After their second calf, cows were shipped to a sister ranch in Wyoming.
Andrew also worked for Leachman Cattle of Colorado where he managed all the donor cows and herd bulls. While there he developed a grow safe system to gather individual feed efficiency on sale bulls.
After a brief stint as a ranch manager for a purebred Hereford ranch in Oklahoma, the family moved to eastern Nebraska in 2011 where Andrew began work at a custom feedlot specializing in starting high risk southeastern calves.
After several successful years as operations manager, the new feedlot owners invited Andrew to become the CFO/CEO of Bell Creek Feeders. He now oversees all feedlot operations and is directly responsible for developing and implementing marketing plans for customer-owned cattle sold on contracts to major beef processors and at regional auctions.
Dakota Welch
Dakota offers unique regenerative farm management services. Dakota and his associates improve cash flows and reduce financial risks from changing weather conditions and commodity markets. He works one-on-one, and in groups, with farmland owners, retired and working producers, and young farmers.
After graduating from the University of Kansas with a degree in Economics, Dakota worked in the farm credit industry for ten years. He owns a working regenerative farm in partnership with a southeast Kansas neighbor.
Jeff Durski: Principal AdVentures
Jeff will advise production unit landowners and farmers on direct-to-consumer and retail marketing. His focus is on building farmer-owned retail food brands for local and regional grocery markets.
He holds an MBA from Indiana University and possesses over 30 years of marketing and communications experience. He has held senior positions at both advertising agencies and Fortune 100 companies. Jeff has experience growing some of the best-known brands in the US including Cracker Jack, Butterball turkey and Equal sweetener. The communication campaigns he created have won national recognition (e.g., American Medical Association, Best of Category, Best of Show, Microflex Medical, 1998) but more importantly generated incremental brand sales and profits. His new product experience includes successful launches for RJ Reynolds Tobacco, Owens Corning Fiberglass, Microflex Medical, Borden, Inc., and others.
Sabastian Hunt: Agrihood Design
Sabastian leads our Bennington Agrihood project.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, with coursework focused on sustainable systems, innovation theory, economic history, and urban economics. His skills include data analysis, project management, urban development, quality management, strategic planning, systems thinking and innovation.
In the decade since graduating college, he held various positions across nonprofits, large corporations, and entrepreneurial ventures. He managed teams and worked as an individual contributor in both technical roles and client-facing positions. Each role is centered on leveraging existing skills and developing new ones, with the ultimate goal of solving problems and creating new possibilities for individuals and communities.
Sabastian’s professional roles include work as a Business Intelligence Analyst, where he implemented data-driven strategies that improved operational efficiencies. He founded Year of the Startup, creating a residential community and a new funding model for early-stage founders.
He gained direct experience in sustainable agriculture through an internship with Growing Power, a Milwaukee-based urban agriculture group specializing in vertical and controlled environment agriculture as well as aquaponics. He volunteered with WWOOF on organic farms in Texas and Puerto Rico, gaining experience which ranged from starting an organic farm from scratch to preparing and selling produce at local markets. He also served as an Agricultural Economist Intern at Omaha based nonprofit, No More Empty Pots, where his team planned a culinary incubator, conducted market research and assisted in grant writing.
Sabastian has volunteered on boards and gained a deep understanding of community dynamics and local food systems. Notably, he is a board member at Gross National Happiness USA. As part of the GNHUSA team, he conducted and analyzed a large US wellbeing study, which was presented at an international wellbeing conference in 2023. He also served as Chair of the Urban Core Committee for Omaha Mayor’s Millennial Advisory Committee and board member of a local nonprofit urban farm.
In his personal life, Sabastian loves being in nature, playing sports, music, podcasts, RAGBRAI and writing. As someone in their first year of fatherhood, he is more motivated now than ever to devote energy to creating stable, comprehensive and compelling communities where his son and other children can thrive.
Steffen Family History
The ideas on this website start with my parents, Robert and Clara (Sund) Steffen. Dad was the farm manager for Father Flanagan at Boys Town for thirty years and a leader in developing commercial-scale organic farming methods in the Midwest. For more information, readers are encouraged to search the Internet for “Bob Steffen and organic farming” or “Bob Steffen and Center for Rural Affairs”.
My mother’s contribution to our farming history is just as important. She convinced my grandfather, Henry Sund, to invest in our farms. To help secure this investment, Mom taught school in Omaha.
Contributions from a third family have allowed us to continue our work. My wife, Karen (Holbach) Steffen (deceased) is from a family of North Dakota wheat and dairy farmers. Her parents, Frank and Ruth Holbach were also partners in a livestock auction and active in local politics, their church, high school sports, and bowling. Their home place, located on the Souris River just south of Minot was homesteaded by Karen’s grandparents. This beautiful farm was finally destroyed after a series of floods caused by Global warming and urban sprawl. The floods wiped out over a hundred years of low-input diversified crop and livestock production. Despite drought, depression, floods, and conventional agriculture, Frank and Ruth raised and educated five strong women.
For more information, please contact:
Jim Steffen, President
Massena Corporation
402-317-2639
jim@massenafarms.com
Posted 08-23-2025