Young professionals learning they can "come home again"

Editor’s note: This is the first article in a series about young professionals in the Jackson County community who returned to their hometowns after college to build successful careers.

By Brian Sanders

After earning his master’s degree in business administration from Benedictine College in 2017, Bryce Barnett found himself in Omaha, Neb., working as a human resources intern for the Omaha Storm Chasers, the triple-A affiliate for the Kansas City Royals baseball team, for four months.

“As soon as I got done with that,” Barnett said, “I realized the thing I wanted to do was be in Atchison and Jackson County and do something in agriculture. I didn’t like being away from home for that long.”

Barnett, son of Alan and Kathy Barnett, returned to Jackson County and joined the staff at The Farmers State Bank, quickly working his way to a full-time agricultural lender’s position and doing his part to help grow the area’s agricultural industry.

He’s one of several local residents who have graduated from Jackson County’s schools and gone off to college with dreams of a successful career — then came back to his home town to find that success.

“It’s a topic that needs to be at the top of this community’s mind,” Barnett said. “I know it’s starting to be a topic for some people in this community — how do we retain and keep young talent and young people in this community? How do we keep them coming back and keep it going?”

For Barnett, the answer lies in the people he works with on a daily basis.

“The thing that drove me back home was maybe not so much the business or the financial aspect of things as it was the people in and around this community,” he said. “That’s the main reason why I love doing my job today.”

As FSB’s full-time ag loan officer, Barnett helps bank customers with operating lines of credit and loans for farm equipment, real estate and livestock. Outside the bank, he’s a fourth-generation farmer, raising Angus cattle on the family farm with his wife, the former Hanah Suarez, and their two sons, Colt, who’s almost 3, and Carston, 1.

Even while his years at HHS were coming to an end, Barnett said he knew that he was “kind of up in the air between something in agriculture and something in the sports management realm.” Eventually, he majored in both business management and physical education while at Benedictine, where he continued to play football, and earned an undergraduate degree in both fields in 2015. Two years later, he earned his MBA at Benedictine and interned for the Storm Chasers, but he knew he wanted to come home after his internship was over.

In late 2017, Barnett joined the FSB staff as a junior ag lender.

“I transitioned pretty quick,” he said. “Within months, I took over the big bulk of the ag customers, and then I became a full-time ag lender.”

Barnett credits Julie Bahret with helping him to understand his job better in his early days at FSB.

“She helped me in ways I didn’t know as much about,” he said of Bahret. “I knew everything about ag, but when it came to things like credit analysis, different scenarios and thinking outside the box, she definitely helped me a lot.”

One of the biggest factors in knowing he did the right thing to come home are his customers, many of whom have known him “ever since I was a little kid.” Today, they also know him through his work with the Jackson County Livestock Association, of which he is a past president, and the Jackson County Community Foundation.

Barnett is also still active with the Kansas Livestock Association and the American Angus Association, recently attending a national conference with the latter organization in Ohio, where he enjoyed learning more about the ag industry and meeting “different people from different walks of life.” He is also a board member of Jackson County Farm Bureau and a member of the Holton Rotary Club.

“Agriculture is definitely one of the most important things in our world and our life, if not the most important thing,” he said. “Sometimes I think that’s easily forgotten, just with the stresses that it can cause. But it’s important to remember it and to remind everybody that what we’re doing in ag is definitely important and helping to feed the world.”

Barnett said a good time for young people to start thinking about their home towns as the place to grow a successful career is in middle and high school, where they have the opportunity to join student civic groups.

“Being involved in that social realm definitely helps you grow as a person but it also helps you get to places you never thought you’d be,” he said. “People say that it’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know, and when you know a lot of people and surround yourself with a lot of good people, good things tend to happen.”

And once they get into their preferred industry or field, he said, finding a good mentor or two is essential to help them become successful.

“There are a lot of good positions in the community and in Jackson County — in the whole scope of the working and business industry, from the financial aspect to the consumer aspect to engineering,” Barnett said. “There’s no shortage of good people to look up to.

“I would not be where I am today without mentors and leaders of this community and family at home helping shape me and supporting me the whole way,” he added.