Can the Prairie Generation save rural America?
Outside Unadilla, Hannah Esch walks into her cooler and pulls out packages of rib-eye, brisket, and hamburger. Over the past nine months her new company, Oak Barn Beef, sold out of meat four times and brought in $52,000 in sales. Over the next year, she expects to double those sales numbers.
That will be a milestone. It will also be when she finishes her last year of college.
Some 150 miles northwest, the Brugger twins, Matt and Joe, show off how they’re diversifying from traditional agriculture. They directly market the beef from the cows they raise and they grow hops for local microbreweries. But the most visible sign of their commitment to the rural Plains is the two-story farmhouse they’re renovating on the family homestead.
“We’ve just gotten to a point where we can live here,” says Matt, who moved in with his brother in May. It represents free housing, a key attraction for the budding entrepreneurs who have more ideas than dollars. But it’s more than that. It’s the place their great-grandfather bought when he moved here from Switzerland. It’s where their grandfather was born and where they played as children when the house was later rented by people who kept sheep.
“We always wanted to be back in rural economic development,” says Matt. But it wasn’t clear until college what that would mean, which was going back to
