Drexel Atkisson
Family: Wife Tami, son Wyatt and daughter Amelia.
In Town: Drexel is the supervisor in the Greenfield, Mo., (Dade County) office of the National Resources Conservation Service and is responsible for those five employees plus 13 others in offices in Cedar, Hickory and St. Clair counties.
“NRCS’s primary concern is land resource conservation. Anybody that comes in with a resource concern on their property, we will try to help them with that or point them in the right direction.”
“Our primary resource concerns here might be grasslands and cropland. Erosion on cropland would be a situation we would normally deal with and implement conservation practices such as no-till, cover crops, terraces, waterways. Those are the type of practices we would recommend on a majority of issues.”
“Grasslands are the same way. People come in and we address the degrading grass base, forage base by implementing grazing systems, fences, pipelines …
“Generally we try to identify the issue and what caused the issue, ‘Why do you have this gully?’
“In a nutshell, what I do here is more of a management position. I mostly oversee the counties and staff to make sure we are getting done what needs to get done in a timely fashion.”
In the Country: “We run about 100 commercial momma cows. We background our own calves. We wean and background until they are about a year old.”
Drexel does this on 500 owned acres.
“We’ve been using registered Red Angus bulls. We calve half in the fall and half in the spring. This limits the numbers of bulls we need. This allows us to have only two really good bulls. We try to use top-notch bulls in the herd.”
Drexel has marketed primarily to individuals for the last five or six years. “I know some folks that will feed them out. We do rotational grazing. We have established warm season grasses so we are not suing fescue all the time. I try very hard to practice what I preach here at work.”
