Will County farm dedicated to making sure veterans don’t go hungry

Will County — For Kevin Van Eekeren, running his Manhattan farm isn’t about business, it’s about “doing something that’s good for my soul.”

Shortly before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Will County native Van Eekeren decided to transition his 60-acre for-profit farm into a charitable venture to provide meals for local veterans.

“My first business was training SWAT teams for police forces nationwide,” Van Eekeren said. “I met a lot of cops who were veterans, and I heard the same thing over and over: they were fine, but they had friends who were struggling to reenter life after the service.”

Van Eekeren said the stories stuck with him, and he wanted to come up with a way to give back to people who had suffered after serving their country.

Several years later, after selling another business he called “profitable but not as enjoyable as I’d hoped,” the venture capitalist came up with the idea to “use his skills to help people” through his farm and began donating all the meat and eggs produced at the facility he’d run for 10 years to veterans’ organizations.

“We started out working with the Volunteers of America because I knew they were reliable,” Van Eekeren said. “But when we first started, I was a little concerned the demand and capacity wouldn’t be there for it, but when we started to hit our goals so quickly, we looked to expand.”

The farm received 501c3 status under the name Farm2Veteran in 2021, a process that VanEekeren noted was slowed by the pandemic. That same year, the organization donated 15,000 meals – defined as a quarter pound of meat and two eggs – for former service members in Illinois.

Farm2Veteran partners with multiple organizations in Illinois. In addition to three northern Illinois Volunteers of America veterans’ housing facilities – including Hope Manor in Joliet – the organization provides meals through the Hines VA Hospital, the Will County Veterans Assistance Commission, Chicago housing organization Veterans New Beginnings, and St. Leo’s, the Catholic Charities branch dedicated to helping veterans.

Seeing that VOA had capacity nationwide, Farm2Veteran began expanding its partnerships. The organization currently provides meat and eggs to VOA facilities in eight states and reached its peak output of 77,000 meals in 2023.

That has not stopped Van Eekeren and his small staff from expanding their goals. In 2024, Farm2Veteran began partnering with other ranches and farms to provide produce and additional meat and eggs for facilities around the country.

“Currently, we partner with four farms,” Van Eekeren said. “We don’t ask for donations from them. We pay market price for their meat and have it sent to the VOA locations. It is completely impractical for a rancher to donate meat because they work on very small margins, but some have offered us discounts which we’ve been happy to accept.”

So far, Illinois is the only state that has a partner farm to provide produce, however, Van Eekeran said he is working to reach a similar agreement soon with a farm in Florida.

Although Van Eekeran originally funded the Farm2Veteran venture himself through savings and profits from a ranch he operates in Texas, after they surpassed 50,000 meals so quickly, he began seeking grant funding and opened the organization up for donations through its website and an Etsy store.

One of the major hurdles the organization has faced is the capacity for organizations to accept fresh food donations.

“It’s a struggle to find people who can take perishable donations,” Van Eekeran said. “So, we agreed to provide refrigerators and freezers to the organizations if they need them.”

Although providing materials to organizations and caring for the 450 farm animals takes funding, Van Eekeran is proud of the efficiency with which the farm operates. Aside from Van Eekeran, the organization only has two full-time employees, a director of community development and administration, and the farm manager, as well as a part-time farmhand and a contracted grant writer.

“We want to make sure we get folks the most food as possible,” Van Eekeran said. “Before we started this when I would donate money to charity, I always looked into how much of the money actually got donated to the cause, and I didn’t like a lot of what I found. It was very important to me to run this efficiently.”

In addition to efficiency, Farm2Veteran is also committed to environmentally sustainable farming, which is part of the reason the farm is moving away from pork farming to provide beef and eggs exclusively.

“More people prefer beef to pork, there are less dietary restrictions on beef, plus pigs are more destructive to the land and fences, so they’re hard to keep up,” Van Eekeran said. “All the farming we do, we try to use wholesome, eco-friendly methods to benefit the environment and provide a good life for the animals.”

Farm2Veteran is on pace to provide 150,000 meals for veterans by the end of 2024, with plans to continue expanding their partnerships in the coming years.

“It’s been very rewarding to see it grow so quickly, and it gives a warm fuzzy feeling knowing what we’re doing is helping people. We’ve gotten letters from the families at Hope Manor thanking us and it gives me drive and ambition to do even more.”