cow

What can other towns learn from Bowdon and its meat processing cooperative?

“It gets back to the basics of the game, the baseball analogy: Too many are shooting for the grand slam when they could be really focusing on these types of base hits,” says Ellen Huber, rural development services director for the North Dakota Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives (NDAREC). “Big things get all the attention, but this is an important incremental small business step a community was known for and made sure they could continue to stake their claim.”

Bowdon meat

What is your town known for?

Jamestown is the buffalo city. Bottineau takes “pride” in its ice cream. It’s hard to beat a steak in St. Anthony. And Stanley has the Sibyl Center, a small-town beacon of arts and culture.

For Bowdon, it was its meat plant and locker.

“There’s been a meat processing plant in Bowdon as long as anyone can remember, probably well over 100 years now,” says community member and local farmer Bob Martin.

Diane Schmidt

A 5-gallon bucket of carrots, “unwashed and dirty,” and three ice cream pails of chokecherries.

“That’s how my business got started,” says Diane Schmidt, recalling her first sales attempt at the Mandan Farmers Market nearly 40 years ago.

Schmidt was a single mom at the time. She’d haul kids and carrots to the farmers market on Saturday mornings. She can still picture her young boys, in 1986, sitting on the curb while Mom made sales.

Marlo Anderson

Marlo Anderson is living proof there’s reason to celebrate every day. As founder of the National Day Calendar – the official, authoritative source for fun, unusual and unique national days – Anderson has built a wildly popular national brand around celebration.

Anderson’s curiosity popped in 2013, as he searched for information on the internet about the national day dedicated to his favorite snack – popcorn (the movie-theater buttered kind, preferably).

caffeine+coal

“Not many people get mad at the guy making coffee,” Travis Helfrich jokes.

It’s hard to imagine anyone being mad at a guy like Helfrich, who not only makes good coffee, but helps make the electricity Americans depend on to power their lives. He’s a coal worker, then a coffee roaster. In that order, for now.

While adjusting to a shiftwork schedule in his mid-20s, Helfrich picked up a coffee-drinking habit.