Mike Housh
Family: Wife, Cammie; daughter, Chaney, age 17; and son, Brayden, age 13
Hometown: El Dorado Springs, Mo.
In Town: Mike and his wife, Cammie, share the Housh Family Dentistry practice in El Dorado Springs, Mo., in Cedar County and have done so for nearly 20 years.
“We are fairly small but we provide a wide variety of general dentistry services including root canals, extractions, orthodontics and cosmetic dentistry. While so many practices are now corporate-owned, we think it is important to continue with a family-owned and operated dental practice. We certainly do enjoy working and living in this community and we are happy to be able to share that with our clients.”
In the Country: “We run a cow-calf operation with just over 90 Angus cows and their calves,” Mike explained. “We have 500 acres and live on our farm, which is in St. Clair County, Mo. With teenagers and the dental practice, we don’t have a lot of extra time so we have a commercial herd, using registered Angus bulls.
“My father-in-law, James Bourland, has his own operation, BHB Cattle Company, in which he does Red and Black registered Angus. In all honesty, we rely a great deal on his expertise and that has worked out well for us. We stick with the Black Angus and also use some farm hand help.”
“We use the high-end EPDs, which makes for quick growth and smaller calves so we don’t have to get into pulling calves. We have also been using rotational grazing and we really like that. When we started, we had pretty small paddocks and we found we needed to increase the size because we just didn’t have the time to move the cattle so often but now with the bigger paddocks, it’s working well.
“I’m originally from north Missouri, but I never was into farming growing up. We acquired some land after we moved here and at first, we were just renting out the pasture but then we decided we wanted to take better care of the land, so we took it over ourselves.”
In recent years, Mike and his family have built their own hunting lodge on a portion of their land.
“We really enjoy the archery hunting, as do the kids, so we use it for hunting deer and turkey and can rent it out as well. We met another family from Colorado, through the dental practice and they come down too, so it has been a fun experience for all of us, a place to meet up and enjoy the outdoors together.”
