Good grief—how much socialism does a South Dakota rancher need to bring his product to market?
Once-vocal conservative ag-propagandist Troy Hadrick from Faulkton is making a commendable effort to sell his beef to his fellow South Dakotans. But evidently he can’t expand his local market without taking yet another farm-welfare check:
“Starting about five or six years ago we started doing a lot more direct sales of beef, specifically down into the Sioux Falls area with several restaurant partners down there from Vanguard Hospitality,” Troy Hadrick said. “That’s really grown, we’ve grown our footprints on the restaurants. We have restaurants across the state that get some of their beef from us.”
Troy Hadrick says they want to expand on that, though, by opening a storefront for their beef.
In order to make that possible, they applied for USDA’s Value-Added Producer Grant program and was awarded just under $134 thousand.
“Having those dollars to kind of kick it off is really huge. It’d be quite a bit of an investment for us to do it on our own to kind of start that off, so knowing that we got that,” Hadrick said. “And it’s a matching grant so it’s, you know, we have to provide some of the funding ourselves too.”
…Hadrick says they hope to open their Sioux Falls store front next Spring or early Summer… [Lauren Soulek, “Hadrick Ranch Looks to Open Storefront in Sioux Falls,” KELO-TV, 2026.10.03].
This latest redistribution of wealth to support Hadrick’s business follows $2.2 million the USDA awarded him in 2023 and $35,000 that the Biden Administration threw his way before Trump came a-hacking. But obviously Trump isn’t following through on his taxpayer-advertised promise to defeat socialism. Let’s just hope Trump doesn’t hear that Hadrick expressed disagreement with Trump’s foreign-beef-import plan and decide to punish the ranch by yanking Hadrick’s latest business-welfare check.
Related Goose-Gander: In 2021, Hadrick tweeted his annoyance at the fakery of Democratic Senator Michael Bennet’s getting incongruously dressed up for a farmy photo op:
Yet for his own marketing, Hadrick has his family get all gussied up for some even more incongruous ranch pix:
Just another typical South Dakota ranch family, hauling its nice dining set and white tablecloth out to the pasture to eat supper and promote government-assisted capitalism. I’m glad we could all help pay for Troy’s wine and fancy jacket