Bossie's Best

Home, Kansas

Organic farming is a way of life that dates back 150 years in Nancy Vogelsberg-Busch’s family. Her great-grandfather homesteaded on the north central farm where Nancy was born. When Nancy’s father inherited the farm from her grandfather in the 1950s, it was on the condition of a promise never to use chemicals on the land or livestock. Today, Nancy’s brother Joe farms the home place, still honoring that land ethic.

Ten miles down the road, Nancy rotationally grazes 100 certified organic cows and calves on 160 acres of native grass pasture. She makes alfalfa, red clover and oat hay to feed in the winter, and finishes the cattle on ears of organic corn grown by a neighbor. For many years she raised a rotation of certified organic alfalfa, corn and soybeans, selling the soybeans to Japan for tofu production. She’s now transitioning out of row crops as her beef business grows.

Nancy’s four-year old “Bossie’s Best” USDA-certified organic beef label is making waves, even scoring an article in the ubiquitous Gourmet Magazine. It’s been a long time coming.


While Nancy loved growing up on the farm, it took leaving the land for her to realize just how much she cared for that way of life. An aspiring social worker after graduating from college in the mid-1970s, Nancy interned on a Navajo Reservation and witnessed there the heartbreaking erosion of a traditional way of life.

No sooner had she made that discovery, however, than Nancy thought about her own elders. And, moved by their commitment to caring for the land in an age of huge pressures on farmers to concentrate animals in feedlots and write off toxic waterways and habitat destruction as externalities, she returned home. She farmed with her dad for a few years, studying in earnest the ways of managing a successful, unconventional, environmentally sound cattle operation. Soon she bought her own land, married, had three kids and eventually became a single mom.

“I raise my kids,” she says, emphasizing her first priority in farming. To Nancy, that means giving her children a safe place to play, good food to eat, a healthy work ethic and connection to the land.

“As more people have left the countryside and moved to the town, all kids have to play on is pavement,” she laments. Nancy made sure her kids grew up with woods, a creek, and open prairie to explore. It has been no small feat. While raising organic crops and cattle during the day, Nancy works a factory job at night to afford health insurance and pay the mortgage. Her kids pulled their own weight with the farm work, and the family has managed to keep the land.

Working on an assembly line, missing her kids, gave Nancy plenty of time to think creatively about how to farm more and fold envelopes at the factory less. About five years ago, thinking at once like mom and a business woman, the perfect idea hit her. Nancy conceived of organic hotdogs. For a single parent working two jobs, fast food is more realistic than elaborate home-cooked meals. Moreover, like it or not, fast food is the American way.

“A hot dog is the most American beef there is,” Nancy professes. “They are just easy. And people feed them to their kids, so they should be healthy.” Why not embrace the tradition of the hot dog, Nancy’s unique enterprise suggests, and turn it on its head at the same time.
Instead of factory-made precooked wieners chock full of preservatives, hormones and antibiotics, Bossie’s Best franks are all natural, USDA-certified organic and downright healthy. Also, they are a way for Kansas consumers to support a local family farm and devoted steward of the land. Nancy has no plans to ship the meat out of state and intrude upon other organic beef farmers marketing to a local crowd.

In addition to the five-pack, vacuum-sealed frozen hotdogs packages, she sells hamburger meat in stores throughout Kansas. Besides being a successful product, the frozen meat also serves as an advertising campaign for her on-farm fresh meat business. Every spring, at least 40 faithful customers drive from all over the state to VB Farms to pick up a quarter animal each of various cuts of fresh beef from oxtail to steak. It’s the opportunity for people who eat to build a relationship of trust with the grower of their food.

“I become their farmer,” Nancy explains. “It has to be a real mutual respect that they are going to come to the farm and get to know me and pay the price that I ask.” In return, through her thoughtful agricultural practices, the beef farmer helps keep her customers’ children and the prairie land of their home state healthy.