Valley Feed & Supply

Valley Feed & Supply is a working feed mill and farm-supply store in downtown Bonner Springs that has milled animal feed on the same Kansas River bottom site for roughly a century, and manufactures its own Kawmix brand of small-batch feeds.

Description

Valley Feed & Supply occupies a mill and storefront at 600 W 2nd Street in Bonner Springs, a few blocks off the historic downtown commercial strip and within sight of the Kansas River bottoms that made the site a feed-and-coal location in the first place.¹ The business is both a manufacturer and a retailer: it grinds and mixes feed on site under its own Kawmix label, and sells that feed, along with general farm and ranch supply, directly to customers over the counter.²¹

The company describes itself as a full-service mill producing more than eighty distinct feed formulations, covering livestock, equine, poultry, and small and specialty animals, milled in small batches from grain sourced locally rather than bought in as finished bagged product from a national manufacturer.¹ Its own account puts annual throughput at roughly 6,000 tons of feed.²

That combination — an operating mill that is also a walk-in retail store — is increasingly rare in the metro. Most feed sold in Wyandotte and Johnson counties now arrives pre-bagged from regional or national manufacturers; Valley Feed is one of the few places inside the county line where the feed is made in the building it is sold from. It sits at the western edge of Wyandotte County, serving the small-acreage and hobby-farm belt that runs west from Bonner Springs into Leavenworth and Douglas counties, as well as urban customers keeping chickens, rabbits and horses.

Ownership and history

The company’s own published history traces the business to September 1923, when it was founded as Consumer Coal and Feed Co. by F.E. Stubbs — described in that history as a former Pony Express rider — with his wife, a daughter of the pioneer Jeremiah H. Murphy, involved in the operation.² (The Pony Express claim comes from the company’s own account and has not been independently corroborated here.) ³

After F.E. Stubbs died in 1942, his widow Estelle managed the business until 1946, when their son John Stubbs returned from service in the Second World War and took over. The company was incorporated as Valley Feed and Supply Company in January 1956. The Kawmix feed brand dates from 1965. Third-generation Neal Stubbs joined in 1978 and took control of the company in 1982.²

In 2018, after roughly ninety-five years and three generations of Stubbs family ownership, Matt and Lynette Laipple purchased Valley Feed and Supply from the Stubbs family. The company’s history page describes Matt Laipple as bringing an engineering background together with hands-on farming experience.²

The specific date in 1923, the exact terms of the 2018 sale, and any intervening ownership changes are drawn entirely from the company’s own history page and would benefit from corroboration in Kansas Secretary of State filings or Bonner Springs newspaper archives. ³

What they sell

Confirmed from first-party sources:²¹

• Kawmix brand feeds, milled on site — 80-plus formulations
• Livestock feed (cattle, swine, sheep, goat)
• Equine feed
• Poultry feed
• Feed for rabbits, rodents and small/specialty animals
• General farm and ranch supply

Links

• Website: https://valleyfeedsupply.com/
• Company history: https://valleyfeedsupply.com/history/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/valleyfeedandsupply/

Sources

Footnotes

1. “Valley Feed & Supply,” Shop Kansas Farms directory, Kansas Farm Bureau. URL ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. “Experience the Inspiring Kawmix Journey at Valley Feed and Supply” (company history page), Valley Feed & Supply. URL ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. “ — founding date, Pony Express claim, and 2018 ownership transfer are first-party claims only; no independent press or state filing located. The Bonner Springs Chieftain published a 2014 profile of the business (“Bonner Springs’ Valley Feed finds niche with smaller farms”), but the bonnersprings.com domain no longer resolves and the article could not be verified. ↩ ↩²