Using Animal Protein to Combat Food Insecurity
Shelby Padget 00:00
But as we've worked in these communities, it's really opened my eyes further to that, to the problems and to the lack of especially protein that some of these food pantries receive. We were at a food pantry in Iowa a few weeks ago. And they actually made a comment to us as we were dropping off ground beef, that they hadn't had ground beef in their freezer for almost seven years. And so we're thrilled to be able to supply them that consistent access now, but it is a problem. It's a problem across across the country and these small rural food pantries.
Shaye Koester 00:33
Hey, hey, it’s Shaye Koester and I’m your host for the Casual Cattle Conversations podcast where we connect you to ranchers and beef industry enthusiasts who can help you build a more profitable operation and improve your lifestyle. Are you looking for a community of ranchers who support and challenge you to be more profitable and proactive? Then sign-up for our monthly RancherMind events. RancherMinds are mastermind events for ranchers to come together once a month and find solutions for their own and the industry's challenges. Do you want ranch management advice, RIGHT NOW? Sign up for my weekly newsletter and I’ll send you a pdf with 22 Ranch Management Tips from the ranching gurus who have been on my show. Follow @cattleconvos on Facebook and Instagram and message me what topics you want to hear more about and book me as a speaker for your next event. With that let’s see who our guest is today and connect you to a new resource to improve your own operation and lifestyle.
Shaye Koester 01:23
Well, good morning, Wayne, and Shelby, I'm excited to have you on the show. So to start off, I mean, for the audience's sake, we're going to be talking about Cactus Cares and a little bit about how you're tackling food insecurity in America, which I think is amazing. So to start off, would one of you or both of you talk about what Cactus Cares is and kind of your roles within the company?
Wayne Craig 01:51
Well, first off, thank you very much for having us, we appreciate the opportunity to tell the story about Cactus Cares. And we look forward to your listeners hearing about this and maybe joining us in that fight to address food insecurity in the United States. So I'll begin and then I'll kick it over to Shelby. My name is Wayne Craig, and I'm the Executive Director of Cactus Cares. I've been with Cactus Feeders for 12 years now. My original role was Vice President of Technology and then a few years ago, I moved over to this nonprofit role that we call Cactus Cares.
Shelby Padget 02:36
My name is Shelby Padgett and I'm the director of programming for Cactus Cares. My time with Cactus actually started in 2017, when I served as a summer intern, working then on what was called the hunger fund project. So Cactus Feeders has always been very generous in their communities. And they really wanted me as an intern to do some research on how they could make that giving a little bit more uniform across all of their business divisions. And then I was excited to come back in 2019 and join Wayne in working with what is now Cactus Cares. We are a 501 C 3 public charity, and nonprofit, and we are focused on four different pillars of support. So those pillars would be community renewal, scholarships, and education, leadership. And then the largest pillar and the one we're really going to spend the most time talking about today would be our hunger relief efforts.
Shaye Koester 03:29
So with all that Cactus Cares is really doing a lot to make a big impact. Would you talk a little bit more about the origin of Cactus Cares and how it is tied to Cactus Feeders, but separate? So talk about the origin of that and the original founding purpose.
Wayne Craig 03:49
Well, and in order to talk about the origin of Cactus Cares, I think it's important to talk about the origin of Cactus Feeders. Cactus Feeders was founded in 1975. We're a beef and pork production company, and both Shelby and now I even today, we work for the for-profit side, we have responsibilities on the internal and external communication. And everything that we do and the support of us comes from the Cactus Feeders from the for-profit side. Cactus Feeders has always been important to be part of our community. In 1975, Paul Engler founded Cactus Feeders, one of the first feed yards he had is in Cactus, Texas and then that grew to over 10 feed yards, and we produce 1.1 million head of cattle. In 2014, we got into the pork business and we founded another company of ours called Cactus Family Farms, and we produce about 900,000 market hogs every year. All of our production fixed facilities occur in Texas, Kansas, South Carolina, Georgia, in Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota. All those locations make up where our employee-owners are at. Here is an interesting thing about employee-owners. Paul Engler decided that he wanted his company that he founded to be employee owned. So over a course of a series of years, the employees purchased more and more of the company. And in 2010, we became 100% employee-owned. But along with making sure that we had beef and pork available to all who wanted to purchase it to feed a hungry world. Paul was always working in the community. The Engler family has been very, very active in serving their community. In 2018, the board of directors of Cactus Feeders challenged Shelby and I, to create a nonprofit on behalf of the employee-owners, and that is Cactus Cares. And so Cactus Cares was founded based on the fact that we want to feed a hungry world. But we know that these communities across the seven states that we have our employee-owners working in, it's important that we take care of our communities as well.
Shelby Padget 06:27
With our origins, being in a beef and pork company, that's really why we focused on hunger relief, and especially making sure that protein is available to food pantries and other groups in our local communities that are working to feed a hungry world. And over the last four years, it's been a joy to really expand the tent, if you will, and bring in other organizations and other partners to Cactus Cares as we work to achieve that mission.
Shaye Koester 06:50
Well, how amazing. So with that, you know, you talk about a hungry world and taking care of your community. So are you working just in the United States? Or are you branching out to the world? What does that impact look like for Cactus Cares?
Wayne Craig 07:06
You know, that's a great question. Our focus is in the United States, and specifically in the communities we live and work in. Shelby talked a little bit about the most important pillar, or the one that we have spent a lot of time on, and that's hunger relief. What we have found in our research is that these small agricultural communities, they're very underserved, okay? They don't have resources that happens in the larger cities. But in these specific communities, you have things that are working for us. Number one, our employees work in these and live in these communities, that we have our farms and our feed yards, and our location. The second thing is our partners. Those vendors that help us and join us in feeding a hungry world, they live and work in these communities. And we think it's important that we also take care of our friends and our families around these communities, because this is where we're at. And we want to take care of that first.
Shelby Padget 08:16
Yeah, Shaye I think that's a great question. A lot of times when people hear the term food insecurity, their mind goes to third world countries and places internationally. But the truth is that there's food insecurity here in the United States as well. And it just varies depending on that community what the numbers look like. But for example, Texas, where we're located, will run at about 13%, the population qualifies as food insecure, and Nebraska, a familiar area for you would run out about 10% of the population being food insecure. And so we really want to address those problems here taking care of of our family, friends and neighbors. And then maybe one day expand internationally, but really taking care of those problems here nationally first.
Shaye Koester 08:58
Well, I think it's really important that you're doing that because I know, food insecurity immediately. I mean, I'm guilty of my mind first goes to third world countries. But yet you look at the amount of backpack programs, you look at even local food pantries, how much there how often they're asking for donations, it is a huge problem in our own country that we need to take care of our own people too. So with that, do you want to talk a little bit more about the process of how you're getting protein to these communities to the food insecure and what that looks like?
Wayne Craig 09:34
Yeah, one of the important things to understand about food insecurity and understanding that and I think it's important to talk a little bit about what that means. So the USDA defines food insecurity as lack of resources in order to secure a consistent supply of nutrition in order to live a healthy lifestyle. Okay, Shelby talked about international, but that looks much different. We think it's important to focus on food insecurity in the United States. And being a beef pork production company, we also think it's important that we secure and provide resources as it relates to animal protein, specifically to beef and pork. So what that looks like is a series of programs that we have in place, we want to make sure that we provide that to those organizations that are right there in the community that know the community that knows those individuals and how to serve them best.
Shelby Padget 10:37
Yeah, like Wayne talked about, we really want to be present in those rural agricultural communities where we have operations and other people in agriculture have operations as well, those small communities where the food pantry is maybe serving 50 to 100 people every month, but it's truly making an impact in that community. And so one of the ways we really worked to build as supply for those food pantries is through our Power Program. And power is an acronym. It stands for protein outreach, with educational resources. And it started with actually a local organization asking us to supplies hamburger patties. And so we started looking at different places that we could source that meat from. And previously, we had given them dollars, and they take those dollars and have to try and source that food from a store and get it at a price that made sense for them. And in quantities that made sense for them. So if you look at price options, typically those five pound chubs around you, for example, are going to be the most economical, but then you have to deal with separating the five pounds out which can create food safety issues, or it limits you to giving the five pounds chunk to a family that utilize it in a couple of meals worth versus those one pound chubs that are very efficient for senior citizens and smaller families that normally utilize these types of food pantries. So this group made the request for us to get those hamburger patties and we started looking at different options. And one of our employee owners here said, why don't you go to West Texas A&M University, they're long on beef right now. So you'd be helping them out as well. So we went ahead and did that. And then we started thinking that this made a lot of sense. And so we started a partnership with West Texas A&M University, where we would provide a food pantry, a voucher for, for example 200 pounds of ground beef. They'd take that voucher over to West Texas A&M's meat lab and pick up that 200 pounds all in those one pound packages. They take it back and can just distribute it in the community as they saw fit. This really allowed us to multiply the impact of our dollars. So now $1, they will support agricultural education, those animal science and meat science programs that are so critical to our operations, and also to support that local food pantry and providing them with the routine that they need to serve the under resource here in our community. So what started with West Texas A&M, has now expanded to eight different universities across the country. And we're excited to continue to grow the programs and continue to expand those.
Wayne Craig 13:02
We think it's very important to make sure that animal protein is in the diet. Because what surveys have shown in the smaller rural, food pantries, it is the most difficult item to get to put in that food basket. Whether they're sourcing that from a food bank, or regional food bank, or even obtaining that through purchasing that grocery stores. It is the most difficult thing to bank. And we all know that beef and pork protein is very important and very critical to a balanced diet to allow individuals to grow and be healthy, and to continue to prosper.
Wayne Craig 13:46
And I felt like I had some experience coming into this. My mom had been a food pantry volunteer growing up. But as we've worked in these communities, it's really opened my eyes further to that, to the problems and to the lack of especially protein that some of these food pantries receive. We were at a food pantry in Iowa a few weeks ago. And they actually made a comment to us as we were dropping off ground beef that they hadn't had ground beef in their freezer for almost seven years. And so we're thrilled to be able to supply them that consistent access now but it is a problem. It's a problem across across the country and these small rural food pantries.
Shaye Koester 14:20
Seven years is a long time, especially when I guess I get to the point where I have ground beef almost every day.
Shelby Padget 14:31
Absolutely.
Shaye Koester 14:37
You have talked about how you've partnered with eight universities at this point. Well, you started serving in Texas, in Nebraska in those other areas where you've had other employee-owned businesses. If someone listening to the show is on the coast and they want to get involved, can they contact you and get involved?
Shelby Padget 15:01
Absolutely, I think a great example would be North Dakota State University, they have recently joined our POWER program. Cactus does not have any operations in the North Dakota area. But we made that connection with the university and they've been a great partner, they sponsored a 5k and were able to raise some money. We match the money in there now purchasing protein from the North Dakota State on campus meat lab, to provide for the North Dakota State on campus food pantry to service those college students in that area. So no matter where you're located, we'd love to hear from you and work with you to see what we could do to best serve your community.
Wayne Craig 15:34
Yeah, one of the things that's very important to Shelby and I, because it's just Shelby and I, managing Cactus Cares, is that network of individuals, out of the agricultural community, whether you're a producer, whether you are a supplier, whether you're a university student, whether you're interested in agriculture, and being able to provide for your community, it doesn't even matter. It's important that we have those network of individuals that want to reach out and say, Hey, I've got this organization is doing a good job, and they're struggling to provide protein, this may be an opportunity to work with you.
Shaye Koester 16:14
So when you look at sources where you're getting protein from, you know, you talked a lot about the university side, are there opportunities to make partnerships elsewhere where you don't have to source the protein from the universities? I mean, what do you need available when you're looking at where they can purchase this protein from or obtain it, I should say?
Shelby Padget 16:35
Great question, we've found that university is a great fit for us, because it allows us to multiply the impact of that dollar and support animal science and meat science and also that food pantry. We also know that every community is different, and that what works in some communities, and some states may not work in all of them. And so our approach is very flexible. And like Wayne said, it's the two of us managing it. So we stay very nimble and are able then to work with that community to see what would work best for them specifically, and make sure that we're doing it in the most efficient way for them and all the members of their community.
Shaye Koester 17:10
Awesome. So when you look at helping tackle this food insecurity issue, what impact is that making for small communities from their economic standpoint? What is the impact of improving this issue in a small community? What does that look like?
Wayne Craig 17:29
That particular question really gets to some of the basis of what we form Cactus Cares is about. So back in 2018, when Shelby and I started working together, and we used all of her research as an intern in 2017, to develop what we would call the building blocks of what Cactus Cares is all about, okay. One of the things that we wanted to make sure of is that Cactus Cares was something that everyone could rally around. And in food insecurity today, the modern approach is much like a soup kitchen. You have an individual that's food insecure, you provide that one meal for them, and that allows him to eat for that given day. And a lot of research points to making sure that it's a little bit different. And maybe the approach instead of like a soup kitchen, it needs to be like a potluck. If you think about a potluck dinner, okay? You have a lot of individuals bringing certain items, you may have individuals that bring cups and forks and somebody brings it somebody brings in hamburger patties, somebody may bring in that jello salad with marshmallows, everyone brings in something different. But at the end of the day, when you put that all together, and everyone gathers around the table, you're sharing in the same meal, shelter, and I want Cactus Cares to be just like that. We want everybody to contribute different things in the community. So some organizations, they may be able to provide that contact. Another group they may provide certainly those individuals that are food insecure, someone like Cactus Cares, we may provide either leadership, guidance, connections, or even provide resources like money and ground beef and ground pork. Regardless, you have all these individuals coming together. And at the end of the day, what happens is we all share in the same positive results. And that is we're all certainly in our community.
Shelby Padget 19:42
When you look at the direct impacts that we've had in our communities, really over the last three years, we'll have provided about 140,000 pounds of ground beef and ground pork to those small rural food pantries, which would be the equivalent of about 560,000 servings that have impacted our family, friends and neighbors here and those were all communities. And like I said earlier, we're looking to continue to expand that grow that and increase that impact even further.
Wayne Craig 20:06
And that particular impact that Shelby talks about we're very proud that we're able to provide that and provide those resources to that. But that would not be possible without the network of individuals, partners, and people out these communities in order to make sure that that happens.
Shaye Koester 20:26
Well, it does take a team. So that is amazing to hear. And that's, that's a lot of servings, wow, that that's a lot of servings. So Shelby, you touched on it earlier. But how else are you showing up for communities and organizations and people in need, outside of the hunger relief side of things?
Shelby Padget 20:50
Yes, so hunger relief is our primary target. Our Cactus Feeders overall mission has always been feeding a hungry world, family, friends and neighbors. And that ties right into our hunger relief efforts. Like we mentioned earlier, there are three other pillars that Cactus Cares focuses on. So leadership, we know that sometimes there are groups in the community that have a really good heart and want to serve, but maybe something in their organization just isn't clicking. And so we've actually connected them with leaders or provided trainings ourselves that have allowed those organizations to continue to grow and flourish. A great example of that is an organization in South Carolina, there was a small church that was putting together a backpack program. And they were putting together about 20 backpacks a week, which is fantastic. But the issue was that the need in that area was really about 250 backpacks every week. So those kids were on a waiting list, and they would rotate. So you may get a bag on week, and then you'd have to wait five or six weeks to get your next bag. And so we actually partnered with that organization, brought them out to Amarillo, and provided them some training from snack pack for kids, which is a large backpack organization here in the Panhandle about how they could continue to grow their efforts. And we'll fly them. And we also provided resources like I talked about, and now that church has grown and is servicing all 250 of those students every single week.
Wayne Craig 22:09
Another opportunity is to educate and tell the story about agriculture and what it takes to feed a hungry world. And specifically in serving your communities. Shelby and I've had great opportunities, whether we're speaking to 4-h groups, organizations, but one specifically that we're very proud of is back in 2020, we had an opportunity to participate with Food Prize. So we were able to put together a module that talks about what food insecurity is and what it means to elementary school kids. And also the challenge at the end of the module was that Shelby presented all the ingredients that will be in a weekend food bag and challenged the students to create their own recipes of serving that meal with those items in that list. So not only are we saying, be aware, they're individuals, even your fellow students that could be food insecure. But also there's a level of opportunity to bring dignity and celebrate the fact that individuals are providing that those we can food bags, and it can be more visible.
Shelby Padget 22:09
And that final pillar would be community renewal, we know that every community is different and has its own needs. And so that community renewal can be a catch all, if you will, for some of those needs that maybe don't quite into fit into the other three pillars, but are critical to that community is continuing to grow. It also could be used, for example, if disaster were to hit our communities. So those would be the four pillars.
Wayne Craig 23:45
Yeah, we have one opportunity this summer to participate in a program where some of our weaned pigs were provided for 4-H students. And those weaned pigs were grown by those students. And we sponsored them. And then those animals were shown, and they were marketed, Cactus repurchased the animals and then we donated that meat to the local food pantry. So now you have that complete cycle. And that multiplication of x and now what you're doing is participating Community Renewal because you're growing those young students that want to know more and really develop their ag skills. You're doing an opportunity in which provides an education opportunity, because I learned how to grow those animals. But the other thing is, well as you're still continuing to provide that support for those local food pantries and providing protein.
Shaye Koester 24:41
You have a lot going on, especially with just the two of you managing this right now. Wow. So do you rely a lot on volunteer basis for these projects? Or how else do you make all this happen?
Wayne Craig 24:55
Well, we could always use more volunteers. A lot of our employee owners want to participate, and we do get a lot of participation. We've also started to expand the opportunities for individuals to participate the program to our other producers and to other individuals in the industry, as well as our partners and providing the services and goods that we use in our commercial operations.
Shaye Koester 25:26
Well, amazing. So for those listeners out there, where can they go to get involved to learn more to contact you?
Shelby Padget 25:37
The easiest thing for anyone to do to learn more would be to follow us on social media, we're present on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter under the handle @cactuscares. And that's where we share really the most up-to-date information on our programs. So as we're filling up food pantries, we're taking pictures of deliveries and telling that story. We're promoting upcoming events, golf tournament, anything like that. And so it would really be a great way for them to learn more about us and also see some of the ways that they could get involved.
Wayne Craig 26:06
I would also encourage individuals listening to this podcast, to learn more about what's going on in their community, you're going to have situations in which you have organizations, food, pantries, churches that talk about food drives, talk about those ways that they serve food insecure, I would encourage all your listeners to find out more about that. The other thing is I think it's important for your listeners, whether they have an ag background, or not to learn more about where your food comes from, because one of the most important things is agriculture. Everyone needs it. Okay. It is important that if we're not continuing to do it grow agriculture in a way that we can feed everyone, and feed everyone that wants an opportunity to take advantage of all the goods that is provided by agriculture, then we're going to be a real difficulty in its content, it will continue to be more and more difficult to feed a hungry world.
Shaye Koester 27:08
Well, thank you very much for being on the show today. Do you have any last words or parting thoughts you'd like to share? Before we wrap up,
Shelby Padget 27:16
I just wanted to thank you again Shaye, for this opportunity. And to all your listeners out there, we hope to hear from you and that you continue to learn about Cactus Cares, learn about the food insecurity in your community, and how you can continue to help us fight that battle.
Wayne Craig 27:30
And I would also like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to your listeners related to Cactus Cares and agriculture as a whole. But I would also encourage everyone, especially youth and young people as well, is to continue to take chances and work towards feeding a hungry world. And I hope that many of you that are listening to this will join Shelby and I as we work in our communities and serve the under-resourced.
Shaye Koester 27:59
Well, thank you both for being on the show today and have a great rest of your day. And that's a wrap on that one. Be sure to let me know your thoughts on the episode and if you have any further questions around the topic, take care and have a great day.
