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Kansas Profile – Now That’s Rural: Lona DuVall, DFA and milk processing

Production leads to processing which leads to progress. That is the desired path of value-added economic development.  It was true for the Kansas beef industry in the 1980s and 1990s, and it is now coming true in the Kansas dairy industry. Milk production in western Kansas has grown to the point that new milk processing capacity has developed there as well.

Last week we learned about the western Kansas Rural Economic Development Alliance, or wKREDA, which works on various regional issues including growing the dairy industry in western Kansas. Many of the leaders of wKREDA had seen the boom in jobs which resulted from the growth of meatpacking in the region during the 1980s and `90s. It was a long progression. The production of irrigated feed grain led to the creation of concentrated cattle feeding. Then the packing plants wanted to be close to the source of production, and large beef packing facilities were built in southwest Kansas.

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Kansas Profile – Now That’s Rural: Dan Senestraro, Kansas dairyman

“Go East, young man, and grow up with the country.” Actually, that is the opposite of the original saying made famous by editor Horace Greeley, who told his readers to go west in 1865. But in 1994, one entrepreneur found that his path to growth was to go east, and that led him to rural Kansas.

Dan Senestraro

Dan Senestraro is the owner of Eastside Dairy in Stanton County, Kansas. Dan is the westernmost Kansan on the Board of Directors of the Dairy Farmers of America.

Dan grew up on a dairy farm in California. He went to veterinary school at the University of California at Davis. “I was determined not to be in the dairy business,” he said with a smile. He graduated in 1986. By 1989, he found himself in the dairy business again.

“I was in a partnership on 800 dairy cows in rented space in southern California,” Dan said. As California became more crowded and urbanized, he looked to relocate and grow.

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