Julie Stahly grabbed a bag of home-ground wheat flour. It couldn’t get much fresher than this: wheat grains straight from her farm to the mill in her kitchen.

The bag bore a new name: Homestead Grains. This was it. The first store. Julie strode toward the doors of Hills Family Foods in Imperial, Nebraska. Soon she would have the answer to her question: Would there be space on the store's shelves, and would customers make room in their carts for her locally grown flour?

As rising input costs and falling commodity prices challenge producers across southwest Nebraska, Julie Stahly keeps searching for better answers, convinced the next experiment may uncover something that could also help other producers.

As a kid growing up near Hooper, NE, Tom Hoegemeyer amassed a collection of tree leaves, each from a different species he found around his family’s small farm. “I was just fascinated by all the different kinds of plants. I actually preferred crops to livestock. I didn’t ever get stepped on or pooped on by a plant.”

Jordan knelt beside his homemade interseeder, a planter that threads between young corn rows to sow cover crops. He built the machine himself by modifying an old grain drill. “Nobody’s driving around a 50-year-old car. Why am I farming with a 50-year-old tractor?” Jordan asked.