Farming the Countryside with Andrew McCreaBecky McCray is a rancher in northwestern Oklahoma. She is one of the founders of SaveYour.Town, a website and movement to help others in rural and agricultural America save their town and help it thrive. Learn the keys she shares to help revitalize the place you live, based on her experiences working with towns all across America.
this edition of farming the countryside is brought to you by pivot bio proven turn to a better nitrogen, learn more at pivot bio dot com.
Yeah.
Mhm,
mm hmm.
Welcome to farming the countryside. I'm Andrew Mcrae.
Becky McCray is a rancher in northwestern Oklahoma and is one of the founders of Save your dot town website and a movement to help others in rural and agricultural America save their town and help it thrive,
learn the keys to helping revitalize the place you live based on her experiences working with towns all across America. It's our topic for this week's farm in the countryside brought to you by pivot bio.
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Becky McCray has a love for small town America. Not only is it her residents, but it's also become part of her mission for life helping places in rural and agricultural America find solutions to their challenges will tackle some of the common problems faced in small towns such as finding ways to start and attract businesses saving, deteriorating buildings
solving childcare and housing shortages and more.
You'll find that Becky's ideas are real life examples that she's experienced in her travels. She shares her advice with towns via her internet site and in person visits you'll probably find yourself thinking of ideas for the place you live as you listen to her.
Becky. McCray is my guest and Becky and I share the same last name but it's not spelled quite the same. Although Becky. I have a feeling maybe centuries ago maybe we were part of the same Mcrae clan coming out of Scotland or something. I don't know. Where do you trace your history back to
the Mcrae name comes from my husband and his family does trace their history back to Scotland and Ireland all the way back to
Ellen Donen or Eileen Donnan Castle in Scotland. The McCray's
theoretically I haven't traced all that but I think we must be cousins. That's
that's right. There is a McCray castle I've just never visited and I don't think I have any claim to it but I've always wanted to go. I think it would be fun.
It's really cool and you should go
Alright, good good. So tell folks where you're at because you're out in
northwestern Oklahoma and you are on a ranch out there, correct.
I'm not on the ranch but we do have a ranch. I'm in the tiny Hamlet of hoped in Oklahoma population. I think 30. I like walked up the street and counted people, we don't have a town. We're just a place name in the bank. Um and then about eight or 9 miles south of us is our ranch land.
Um and about eight or nine miles north of us is the town of Alva Oklahoma which is a population of
almost 5000. So um we're near a larger town um and then when we say northwestern Oklahoma we have to specify that's just in the body, not in the panhandle,
the panhandle has the ultimate claim on Northwestern Oklahoma
And you have cattle out there, correct?
We do my husband and Ira and black angus cattle.
Alright so we're gonna mostly talk about small towns and helping them because that's besides you know being on the farm and ranch. That's a lot of what you do and in fact I want you to be sure to talk about where people can find you and connect with you and so forth. But tell me how did you get started in in,
we all care about our towns but maybe really being thoughtful about towns and helping a lot of towns in rural America succeed.
I had started with several professional positions, one in workforce development and then other things like youth development with the girl scouts and so I've always been involved in my community, I had belonged to organizations and served on boards and kind of the traditional things that people do as part of their small towns
and then my husband and I bought a retail store in the town of Alva Oklahoma. And
That gave me a little more time than my previous job, which was city manager of the town of Wanaka Oklahoma population 993. So I actually had a little bit more time on my hands and I started sharing online
some of the cool newsletters I was subscribed to and stories I would read from other people. And at that time Jack Schultz was doing his boom town usa tour. And
so I shared a lot of his stories as well.
And I thought originally that there would be like 10 or 12 of my friends that I could share this stuff with. And I thought if I email all 12 of my friends, every one of these stories they're gonna and subscribe. I think they're gonna block my email, I'll never hear from them again. So I started putting it online on a site called small biz survival dot com.
And that was all about running a business in a small town. And that was in 2006. It's still going today. I still published there
And fast forward all the way to about 2015.
Um and I reached out to a friend of mine named Deb Brown in Iowa who was working as a Chamber of Commerce director and I said we should do a small town thing together. And that's when we started save your dot town, which is the website address and also the name of it for convenience sake. But it's what you're going to do, you're going to save your town with the resources you have, the people you have
and with your own ideas, you know what you want to do in your communities and you don't need some expert to show up with a briefcase and tell you what to do. You just need people that will help take barriers out of your way and help you solve the small problems that are in your way or the big problems that are in your way.
So you can do the things that you know, you really want for your town and that you know would make a huge difference
for everyone's lives together.
A lot of people visiting with our listening to us right now will be farmers and ranchers and I think all of us care about the place that we live, but give us a good reason about why should I be more intentional about this? Are truly caring or at some way give a little bit of my time to to care about this because
you know, Yeah, it's nice when some of those things are close, but it's hard for me to take away my time to do that sometimes. What would you tell people
now? We all have kind of the luxury of being living in the middle of everywhere, right? Like we are a short drive compared to say our parents and grandparents, my great grandparents said that it took all day if they wanted to go to town on saturday and do a little shopping and then go home that was all day to go
12 mi. And we have such a luxury of being able to reach so many more communities.
But the community that's closest to us or the one where our heart is is the one where we can make a difference and that's where we're looking ahead to people. You can remember what it was like when you were a kid and maybe you have nostalgia of wow, it will never go back like that. But there are people who are kids now
and this is how their life is right now. You care about these kids in the community now
and you care about the kids that are coming in the future
because we all have hope and positivity for our own kids and grandkids or our nieces and nephews or the community at large, there somebody's kids and grandkids and we care about that.
The the other thing that really matters to us in terms of our local community and why we want to be part of it
is that it just adds richness to our lives if you want to be able to go into town and attend something that's artistic or be part of something creative or have a beautiful active downtown, full of people that are walking around shopping, connecting with each other. If you want to be able to go to a festival,
enjoy some music and be able to do that in your own local community. If you want to be able to rely on your neighbors and this is who we are as rural people. We feel interconnected. We rely on each other to get through the hard times. And part of the reason that that works is those connections that we build ahead of time
and
those connections are the essence of community.
So people listening to this may be from a variety of towns and maybe some towns have done some of this work, but let's start with the town that we feel like that, you know maybe hasn't done a lot of this and and has some struggles.
If I'm one person, where do I start? How do I begin? Is it finding some other people like mine to do? I just start myself or how do you recommend people get started?
Well, the good news is that like 99% of the best things you can do for your community. Don't require anyone's permission. So don't let that hold you up of thinking, oh, I've I can never get the town council to agree to this. The chamber will never do this for me. Um I can't get the community foundation to to come around then
you can do something yourself and you start with the gifts that you have for your community.
And
if it's as simple as you know how to cook then you can make pancakes and feed your neighbors and
that is the starting of community because community happens when people talk to each other.
So anything that you can do that's going to put you out there in the forefront and kind of become a movement that people can get behind you kind of want to be
and doing it and doing it in such a way that people will notice. So doing a public pancake feed on your front yard or down in the church driveway, then that's going to get noticed in another town pullman Washington.
They had a problem with dirty sidewalks in the downtown and the way they solved it was one business owner named Willow said I'll sweep my own sidewalk. And she said that into in a public meeting and then she started doing it every Wednesday. She sweeps the sidewalk in front of her business. Now that's noticeable and other businesses joined her.
And so now most all of the downtown businesses sweep their sidewalks on Wednesdays, the city noticed that. And they said, oh well we can change our street sweeper schedule and send that around on thursday morning and then that'll take care of all the trash that they sweep off. So now it's a coordinated thing but it started because Willow swept her sidewalk?
Mm hmm
do you think that we go from sidewalks to maybe even talking about buildings and vacant buildings? Does it begin that way too? I mean does it, is it one person saying, well I want to begin a business or maybe it's not even begin a business. Just say I want to invest in a building
just to rehab it and keep it from falling down. How does those, those bigger things that we may see going beyond the sweeping the sidewalks because we obviously want these things to grow
now buildings are a question that every single small town has. We all have buildings that are falling down there in tough shape of repair. They need a lot of work. They're not up to code. The code is seemingly, you know, there's millions of dollars worth of work to come up to code. So I like to take kind of an incremental, take small steps approach to this, which is
almost like
I hate to say it. You can sweep the sidewalk first, you can clean the outside Windows 1st. So if this is your building,
it doesn't even have to be your building. Let's be honest for you to sweep the sidewalk and wash the windows on the outside, right? Like ninjas could do that at night and that would help improve the look of your downtown. Um but if it is your building or you have access to it or you can borrow it or you can say to the building owner,
I'd love to do you a favor, I want to clean out the part of the building that we can see from inside your windows.
So we're gonna sweep the first six ft or something and then put a display in there for another building, another business in town or um some kids artwork that we want to hang up, that's from the school or anything you can think of, let's let's set up a little tiny business right in the first six ft and just open the doors and let people in that far.
And even if the back of the building is not up to code, let's
Just use the 1st 6 ft to start with, use that to generate a little revenue, invest that money back into it
And you can build from there and use that as seed money. Take that to the community foundation, say, look, we've established that a business would work in this building, we've got the seed money from our own activity, would you match what we've just earned and then you can take that to another source or you can start more businesses or you can start to pop up there and have like 10 buildings involved.
So there's lots of ways you can start from a really small seed
and grow to something much larger, but it takes, it starts with taking those first small steps,
you know, for each one of us, it may be different because of our background where we start maybe we aren't natural entrepreneurs, but how do people begin to think about? Okay, I could start a business, even if it's going to be the first six ft of a building, How do I begin to do that? And what resources are there for people out there? Maybe it's somebody a farm family, but
I have a brother or sister, I have, you know, somebody else connect to the family and that'd be a great way to have a little
side business. How do you help them? Think about, how do I get started with something like that?
The rural secret weapon for entrepreneurs is your extension office, which has a ton of information about starting a business. They have all kinds of things about starting micro businesses. Um, they have things about starting a little bit larger business. They have a ton of stuff on agritourism, ag related businesses, food related businesses.
Your extension office can really help you get started there. And if not,
just think about what would it take to be in business if I just got a card table
and I was going to rent a booth at the uh, at the Blues Festival, Bluegrass Festival downtown.
So I'm going to rip my booth set up my card table. What would I put on the top of my card table
to be in business. There's something you make or something you do or you have a service, you know, so figure out how you could be in a card table size business for a weekend. And what would you learn
and what would that let you do as your next step? There's a young woman who's an entrepreneur in Alva Oklahoma making headbands and she started with one square foot of retail space on the counter
in a beauty salon and she put her head bands there
That she makes sold them for $10. That was the start of her business. You really only need one square foot, what could you do to get started as small as possible?
Need need, we may want to talk some more about businesses and storefronts, but I want to make sure that we get to a few other topics here. And one of them I hear about a lot about
are things like childcare and having housing in small towns. I'm betting you hear about these things as well.
So number one, maybe I should ask is how important that is that. And number two, how our town is beginning to tackle some of that because if a young family, that's not always young family, but any family wants to be a part of that town. Sometimes they need those resources or it just makes it hard for them to even live there.
Absolutely. Um, I hear about both of these issues from lots of towns. Um, and there's uh, lots of interesting experiments going on in various communities. Um, there's a town that I spoke to in Nebraska where they actually had a city owned buildings
and using that city owned building that used that as leverage
to find someone that had previous daycare experience and brought them in to run the center. That woman did not have the financial resources to buy a building, bring it up to code, make it safe and, and good for Children.
But the city did because the city already had that building. And so they were able to leverage that. So by working in a private and public partnership, they were able to generate, I don't remember six or eight new daycare slots in their town, which was in a town of under 1000 people. So you've got a few 100 people, six or eight daycare slots is a lot of slots and makes a big difference.
Um, the most interesting things I hear about housing
are really that it's about bringing together the people who already care about this and who could play a role in it, whether that's an organization, a funding source, someone with connections to different organizations, somebody that knows a builder, all of these connections, bringing them together because
each one of them thinks, well, I know one thing, but I couldn't possibly do the whole thing. So it's convening the group of people.
The, that could actually come together and say, oh, well, I know someone at the governor's office and they have the governor's housing program in South Dakota. All right. So that's one program that you should connect with. Um, or I know, you know, my sister in law used to do daycare. Maybe she'd be interested in starting again, right? Or you know, oh, we have a building and we would be willing to let it out for a low rent because so, but you have to find those people
by starting, you have to start that conversation. You bring people together. Community happens when people talk to each other. We want them to build those connections. Um, so finding the unique set of solutions to housing to your unique set of challenges to housing in your community, involves bringing the people together to take immediate action. One of the most interesting cool stories I heard.
Um Andrew laeddis law from Canton in pennsylvania works for the city. And what he did is he walked down the street of different neighborhoods in their small town and he would just grade each house and say, well, all right, so it's in
one, on its condition right now and 1-5 in terms of how much effort it would take to fix it.
Um, whether that's, you know, it needs a coat of paint to, we need to knock it down using that information. He was able to talk to the different agencies and groups that are doing work to help people who own homes fix them up. So like weatherization grants, the utility, the electric utility provides and
you know, a grant for people to fix uh, improve the weatherization of their house. Right? You need to bring those groups together
so that they can go, oh well if we all focus on this neighborhood first, we're going to make a huge difference in people's lives. And this is the place where we can make the biggest difference for for our dollar in this neighborhood. And using that. They've been able to leverage a huge change all across catatonic because they took the time to figure out where should we focus our effort?
Some people listening this may be saying, well, that's all great if you have the city council or the city manager that wants to do this or you have people that care about this. So give us some hope about, okay, what if I run into, you know, sometimes have people that don't uh that are tough to get along with. I've never can imagine that. Huh? So what do we do in those situations to try to get people
maybe onboard or how do we dare I say work around them. Just don't make some of these things happen. I'm sure you have some thoughts
You work around them, right? I said that 99% of the best things you can do don't require anyone's permission. So let the committee of negativity go ahead, let them meet at the coffee shop because they're going to meet at the coffee shop anyway and discuss old business, which is what that committee has to discuss.
Um, but don't worry about it, right. People tell me all the time, oh, but you know, I don't like the way that this foundation spends their money, thereby, they're investing in the wrong things. I'm like, well then don't worry about that. Like if that's not you then don't worry about that. And then
um they said, oh, well, we wanted to do an entrepreneurship thing, but we couldn't get the teacher at the school to do it. I'm like, and kids are out of school the rest of the day. And so you could do something after school for a youth entrepreneurship.
You know, it's like, it's like Willow and her sidewalk. If if Willow had tried to convince everybody in town that they should sweep their own sidewalk and that they should all think it was a great idea if she tried to convince them.
They have all resisted. Instead she just got out her broom and started sweeping and then it's like she is a movement that you can get behind and a force of nature, so you just might as well join in.
But don't worry so much about it's ok if somebody else wants to do a cleanup day, I'll be sweeping my sidewalk.
I think that ultimately many of us do these things because we care about not only our generation, but especially the next generation, we have kids or grandkids
ideas on how we help tie that generation into our town. So hopefully they enjoy it and maybe consider coming back home, whether it's today or someday, How do you see towns helping connect with that, that next generation,
the most successful towns I'm seeing that are connecting their youth to to their community are doing it through helping kids run their own business. So if they start their own business, even a little tiny business even over the summer, then they are building connections within the community. They're building community ties.
They are getting outside of just the closed network of school activities, after school family, then they're getting out into the community, they're meeting a much broader range of people. One of the interesting and really, honestly, very low tech uh youth entrepreneurship programs I heard about is from Norfolk County in Ontario,
where they do a student startup project
and this one happens to be run through the county, which is, it's a single tier municipality, they're also the city, but they're the county, so they cover all the cities as one government. Um and so this is a government run, it doesn't have to be like to farmers could get together and start this themselves, which is um
that they say, all right, well, you just write down what your business is going to be and kind of run us a little one page outline of what it is you're gonna do. I'm gonna make headbands, I'm gonna buy
Uh use or you know scrap fabric from the fabric store, I'm gonna buy the bands from this place online and then I'm gonna sell them in the beauty salon. They're gonna sell for 10 bucks, right? Like that's your one page outline of how your business is going to work. You turn that in, they'll give you $50 to start your business. And then at the end of the summer
um during the summer they run a big festival. Now they didn't used to do this, they started doing it of all the you know the kids come together and they set up booths and they like to sell to the public, there's like a business fair of kid businesses, it's so awesome. And then at the end of the summer if you'll turn into one page, here's how my business did report which looks a lot like your P. And L. Your profit and loss statement. Like I spent this much, I'm sold this much, here's how much I made um if you'll turn that in, they give them a small cash bonus at the end of the summer for having done it
and those kids go out and they just cover the county and businesses there, there a big agricultural county so there's all kinds of uh food and produce selling and people are selling eggs and um there's an apple seller and somebody's growing organic goods and then we have people that take those products and, and make things. There's a gal making organic skincare and lip balm and cool stuff like that. It's such a cool program. It wouldn't be that hard for any organization to do. You don't have to have anyone's permission to do it. No one can tell you, oh, you shouldn't help kids start their own business. And it does a great job of bringing kids into contact with more adults in the community and building those ties
need idea. You know, at the time we have left, I'm interested because you mentioned, you know, it could be to farmers that do this
For those that maybe are on the farm and ranch and so we don't live in town, you know, for myself, I live 10 or 12 miles from my, what I'm gonna call my hometown. What can we do? Maybe I'm not going to have a storefront. I'm not going to do those things. But how can farmers and ranchers tie in to help their small town? You've mentioned some ways. But what are some other things you think that they can help do?
You may not realize this, but you can click like and share on all the cool posts that your town has going on. If there's an event in your town, you can be the cheerleader online. Um, if you're, if you're sitting in that tractor and it's driving itself until you make the turn then you have some time on your hands. You can click like and share on a lot of stuff. You can be a positive voice for your town.
We have enough people being a negative voice against everything in town. You could be positive even part of the time.
That's something all of us can do with the smartphone we have available to us all all the time.
Another thing that you can do is like
attend an event when it interests you. You can tell people good things, you can spend your money in town with your local businesses when they have the stuff you want, at least give them a shot. And the other thing is just um,
be a good neighbor, right? Like you know how to be a good neighbor, we all are not near as good neighbors as we would like to be. So maybe go just a little bit out of your way to connect with your neighbors. Start there
Becky. Great. I wish that we had more time. But before we do in make sure that people know how to connect with you because you have a lot of resources where they can
find online and connect with you
online. You can find me at save your dot town. That's save your dot town T o W N
instead of dot com. And then you can also find me at smallbiz survival dot com. And if you search Becky McCray on any of the social networks, I think you'll find
me Becky. Thanks so much for the time.
Thanks kevin.
Thank you.
Becky jokes about us being cousins. Her last name is spelled M C C R A Y.
A little different than my own, but she'll easily find her on social media outlets and her website. I really liked Becky's ideas and appreciated her thoughts and how you can attract a new generation. Consider beginning a business and make their small town or farm their home.
Becky mentioned her website that is full of great ideas. And remember if you're hearing this program on the radio and want to share it with others, you can find it along with all of our shows at farming the countryside dot com and you can follow farm in the countryside on facebook as well.
I appreciate you listening. I'm Andrew mccrae. I'll catch you next time on a farm in the countryside.
This edition of farm in the countryside has been brought to you by pivot bio proven, turned to a better nitrogen. Learn more at pivot bio dot com
