Sowing Resilience: Rural communities across the country are grappling with food insecurity. Schoolchildren, seniors, grocers and even farmers face a food crisis compounded by government cuts and soaring costs. These nine stories reveal how communities are navigating — and reimagining — the systems that have left them hungry.
GREENBUSH — Thick-cut ham, pickle wraps, fresh fruit mixes.
To loyal customer Susan Lieberg, these food items show how responsive her rural grocery store is to its patrons.
KC’s Country Market in Greenbush, a northwestern Minnesota city of about 680 residents, has what she calls “Marty-style” ham, which the store started offering after learning of her husband’s preference for it. Pickle wraps are a local delicacy retained by popular demand across an ownership transition. Fruit cut and packaged in house is a welcome, more affordable alternative to the brand name option.
Lieberg, a local school teacher, doesn’t take her grocer for granted. Before Corey Christianson and his wife, Ket, stepped in as owners in 2018, the possibility of losing the store worried her and others.
“There was much relief in town,” she said of the ownership transfer. “We just didn’t want to see this grocery store close.”
More than the loss of those personal touches, a shuttered storefront would cut Greenbush off from a vital source of food, forcing residents to venture as far as 50 miles round trip for other options. Worries like this are common in rural Minnesota when succession questions arise, giving way to relief upon a successful transition or anguish upon a closure.
Despite how vital grocery stores are to rural areas, sustaining them isn’t getting easier. Corporate competition grows, profit margins shrink and the risk of costly equipment failures hangs over day-to-day operations.
‘Much less wiggle’ for the small grocery store
In a 2020 survey of rural grocers conducted through the University of Minnesota Extension, 49% of respondents reported concerns that their stores would go out of business within five years.
It’s unclear exactly how many stores ended up going under, but Zachary Paige knows it’s happening. Paige, a program coordinator at the university’s extension office in Moorhead, helps connect grocery store owners around the state to resources, from available state funds for new equipment to educational courses.
Grocery stores are often the “heart of a small town,” Paige said.
“If that store went away, how many fewer people would be going to the downtown area?” he said. “You could see a domino effect of that.”
This scenario is what Greenbush avoided in 2018. The city’s grocery store is the second KC’s Country Market; the first opened in late 2011 in Badger, the area where Christianson’s family is from.
Both cities are in Roseau County along Minnesota’s northern border with Canada. The county’s food insecurity rate of 10.6% is similar to Minnesota’s rate of 12.3%. About 1,630 people were food insecure in the county in 2023, according to an Associated Press analysis of U.S. Census Bureau and Feeding America data.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will stop collecting and releasing statistics on food insecurity after October 2025, saying the numbers had become "overly politicized." The decision comes in the wake of federal funding cuts for food and nutrition safety net programs nationwide.
Any layoffs at Roseau County's major manufacturers would make food insecurity rates jump, Christianson said. The area is highly dependent on jobs at Marvin Windows in Warroad, Polaris in Roseau and Central Boiler/Altoz in Greenbush.
He anticipates applications for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) would spike, as well, although tighter restrictions on who qualifies for SNAP are projected to cut and keep people out of the program. The federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act brought these changes into law.
Grocer associations warned against tinkering with SNAP, arguing it could put a dent in revenue for grocery stores that rely on income from the program.
Reliance on SNAP revenue varies greatly by store, said Steve Barthel, a lobbyist for the Minnesota Grocers Association. Some stores see as much as half of their daily revenue tied to SNAP.
“That’s what we’re worried about,” he said of the SNAP impacts on grocery stores. “Small-town grocers have much less wiggle.”
Nationally, about 12% of grocery sales come from SNAP. Christianson crunched the numbers for his store and came up with a range of only 2%-8% this year, but said it would be uncharted territory for stores when SNAP gets cut. Stores will need to be on the lookout for theft more than ever as people resort to desperate measures to get food.
“If there wasn’t a safety net, theft would surely increase,” he said.
Sense of responsibility
In the Red River Basin of northwest Minnesota, golden wheat, soybean and other farm fields give way to forested, marshy stretches beside single-lane roads that connect communities. It can be miles before a motorist going from one to another encounters anyone going in the opposite direction in this flat part of the state.
“We can almost say we live at the end of the road,” Christianson said.
His aunt and uncle owned the Badger store from the early 1970s to 1983. His parents bought it from them and ran it through 2000.
Family ties to the industry gave him no illusions about the challenges of running a grocery store.
That isn’t to say he planned to be a grocer all along. His career path preceding his grocery ownership belies the idea.
Christianson went to the University of Minnesota for college before earning a master’s degree in public administration in Singapore. At age 34, he moved back to Minnesota with Ket, who is from Thailand.
Before acquiring the Badger store, he asked his wife if she was 100% sure about the move. Running the business would take up the bulk of their time, he remembers telling her.
Ket was on board. They turned a shopping cart into a crib for their son, which Christianson thinks endeared them early on to customers. From the jump, the couple worked to update the store in Badger, followed by acquiring the store in Greenbush seven years later.
A state fund known as the Good Food Access Program helped them upgrade refrigeration equipment to more efficient systems, the cost of which has continued to increase. Getting up and going, not to mention maintaining equipment, would’ve been a far cry otherwise.
“It’s really important that a new or aspiring grocer has access to funds to upgrade,” Christianson said. “We’ve taken advantage of that.”
Funds are generally used to increase sales of nutritious and culturally appropriate foods. This could mean buying or replacing coolers or freezers, installation costs and renovations to accommodate new equipment.
Stores can receive as little as $5,000 to as much as $75,000. The money goes fast when compressors and refrigerators come in at multiple thousands of dollars, or inflation causes construction costs to balloon.
For example, when one of the KC’s Country Market stores needed new roofing and siding, an initial estimate came in at $47,500. It ended up costing more than $112,000, Christianson said.
As helpful as the Good Food Access Program is, it isn’t keeping up with demands around the state. In 2025 the fund had $935,000 available, compared with multiple times that total in requests, Paige said.
Increasing the fund, in Paige’s view, would be one “easy way to support grocery stores” for the state to consider.
In the university’s grocery store survey from 2020, 96% of respondents reported feeling a sense of responsibility to the wider community.
In Minnesota’s north woods about a three-hour drive to the east, a rural grocer felt that responsibility even after a fire devastated his business. Zup’s Market in Cook, population of about 500, burned down in 2018.
Before reopening the store in 2020, owner Matt Zupancich said he set up a temporary site to serve locals in the interim. “It was a grocery store I’ve never seen before, about a tenth of the size of this,” Zupancich said.
The temporary site kept people in town, helping to retain customers and support the rest of the city’s business community. Locals would’ve needed to go to the next closest population center, Virginia, for groceries, potentially taking their gas money and other spending with them.
“It doesn’t seem like a whole lot, especially being on the highway, but 20 miles for some people that just don’t have access to it, that’s a tough go,” Zupancich said.
The grocery store survey came out before Cheyenne Irlbeck started as owner at the Grygla General Store, also in remote northwestern Minnesota. It’s safe to say she’d agree with the 96% who feel a duty to their communities.
The difference for her is how young she is to be shouldering that responsibility. At age 24, she could be the youngest grocery store owner in the state.
Like Greenbush one county over, no bright lights greet a weary traveler approaching Grygla, population of about 180. The Marshall County city, nicknamed the “Biggest Town of its Size,” got its name from a postal inspector named Count Gryglavitch. No one could decide what to call the place, so he signed his name on a request form and the shorthand version of it stuck.
Irlbeck is from Grygla. The youngest of six siblings worked as a teenager in the grocery store she now owns.
She returned to buy it after graduating from college in 2022. Walking through the store, she sees familiar faces, some belonging to family members, coming through on a daily basis.
One of those shoppers, on an August day leading up to the city’s fall festival, was Laurie Polansky, who works at a bank across the street. Polansky lives in the Gatzke area about 17 miles out of town, where there is no grocery store.
Having the Grygla store so close to her job is a massive convenience. She knows residents who can’t drive who rely on it. The local school, church, Lion’s Club and other service organizations need it just as much, she said.
“To have a local person who wanted to take over the store was just wonderful,” Polansky said. “She knows the community.”
Thief River Falls, about 40 miles away, would be one of the next nearest places to get groceries if not for Irlbeck’s store. Knowing what a focal point the store is for the community, Irlbeck is used to taking calls to open the store whenever needs arise.
“It’s definitely a small town thing,” she said with a laugh. “Everyone has my number.”
The grocery store succession question
Meeting a community’s needs is just part of the job description of a rural grocer. It’s one of the reasons the Greenbush store opened up on Sundays, rolling out a new item for sale, brats, to coincide with it.
The whim to barbecue on a sunny Sunday afternoon would be done in by having to drive 40 minutes to pick up brats, Christianson said. Moreover, during Minnesota’s harsh winters, venturing far for groceries in a blizzard is dangerous.
“We marketed that as ‘we want to keep you in your backyards in the summer and off the dangerous roads in the winter,’” he said.
As Christianson’s children get older, retirement and succession are entering his mind. Any interested parties should know how rewarding it is to run a rural grocery store, but also the challenges, he said.
“It takes a community of knowledgeable people to make this go,” he said.
Grygla secured its succession when Irlbeck took over. Returning to Grygla was never a question to her.
What was up in the air was whether she could see her business aspirations bloom there. The pieces all fit together when the grocery store she grew up working in went up for sale.
“It was hard to fit my entrepreneurial, big dreams into such a small town, so when this opened up and this was an opportunity I said this is too good to pass up,” she said.
Associated Press data reporter Kasturi Pananjady contributed to this report.
This reporting is part of a series called Sowing Resilience, a collaboration between the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network and The Associated Press. Nine nonprofit newsrooms were involved: The Beacon, Capital B, Enlace Latino NC, Investigate Midwest, The Jefferson County Beacon, KOSU, Louisville Public Media, The Maine Monitor and MinnPost. The Rural News Network is funded by Google News Initiative and Knight Foundation, among others.
This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
