KU News Release

KU conference to focus on getting food from farm to market to table

LAWRENCE — Two Lawrence grocers, a Larned area farmer and an award-winning historian of business and agriculture will join faculty at the University of Kansas on Thursday, April 12, for a half-day conference titled “Selling Our Daily Bread: Farmers, Consumers and the American Grocery System.”

The conference opens with a panel discussion at 2:30 p.m. and includes a 7 p.m. public lecture by Shane Hamilton, agricultural and business historian at the University of Georgia. Both events are free and open to the public and take place in the Courtside Room of the Burge Union.

Hamilton will speak on “Supermarkets and Farm Policy in the Agribusiness Era.”

During the afternoon, Hamilton will join a panel of experts in grocery markets, farming and food manufacturing to discuss the legacies, opportunities and challenges of producing, manufacturing and marketing food. The panelists are:

— Jeanie Wells, Lawrence Community Mercantile general manager
— Jim Lewis, Checker’s Food Stores of Lawrence general manager
— William Nelson, CHS Foundation, agricultural co-operative expert, Inver Grove Heights, Minn.
— Tom Giessel, Kansas grain-grower from Pawnee County
— Dennis Karney, Fleming professor of business, KU

Karl Brooks, KU associate professor of environmental history, will moderate the panel discussion at 3:45 p.m., which will include question and answers from the audience. A representative from one of the Midwest’s largest food manufacturers will also join the panel.

Hamilton is the author of “Trucking Country: Food Politics and the Transformation of Rural Life in Postwar America,” a book soon to be released by Princeton University Press. He is the winner of the 2006 Business History Conference’s Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History and the 2006 Agricultural History Society’s Gilbert C. Fite Award for Best Dissertation in Agricultural History.

Hamilton also received a National Endowment for the Humanities summer stipend in 2006. He won the 2003 Edward E. Everetts Award bestowed by the Agricultural History Society for his journal article “Cold Capitalism: The Political Ecology of Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.”

“Selling Our Daily Bread” is the second biennial conference on Food, Farmers and the American Way of Agriculture co-sponsored by KU’s Department of History and the Kansas branch of the National Farmers Union.

The CHS Foundation is a major underwriter for the conference. Based in Inver Grove Heights, Minn., the CHS Foundation was created in 1998 when two foundations, Cenex and the Harvest States, combined.

The concept for a public discussion of topics in agriculture and marketing food grew out of a course on the history of world agriculture, from its origins to modern global farming, taught by Donald Worster, the Joyce and Elizabeth Hall professor of U.S. history at KU. Worster will introduce the afternoon panel and Hamilton's evening lecture.

More information about the conference is online at KU’s history department Web site.

Visitor parking is available in the Allen Fieldhouse Parking Garage; charges are $1 an hour. Some metered parking is also available in the parking lot west of the Burge Union. More parking information is available online.

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