Smith Farms has seen many changes over the generations
BUTLER, MO. – Since 1856 Jim Smith’s family have been in the same location. From the time they arrived in what is now Butler, Missouri and began homesteading, they have been living and working on the same parcels of land.
“It’s changed generation by generation. My parents row-cropped and had hogs and then kind of got into the cattle business in the fifties and went more towards cattle,” Smith said. “We do some row crops mainly just for feed for our livestock operation. We’re mostly cattle now.”
Along with his two children Zephaniah and Casi, Smith owns and operates Smith Farms. The 2,000-acre ranch is located in Butler Missouri.
Smith Farms specializes in backgrounding calves.
“We handle several thousand backgrounder calves a year, and that’s kind of our niche right now,” Smith said. “We’re buying a 300 to 400-pound calf and we’re trying to make him weigh 850 or 900 pounds and we sell them to feed lots. That’s our philosophy. Buy him little and make him big”
Smith chose the backgrounding calf operation because he felt it fit their family operation better than other situations.
“We come from a cow herd family, and the price of real estate has kind of run us out of the cow-calf operation a little bit,” Smith said. “Just because it takes so much land and that land cost so much whether we were leasing it or purchasing it. We just saw a better return on our investment with the background operation. And right now the cow-calf deal is good, but we just don’t have the available real estate to run a very large cow herd anymore.”
But that doesn’t mean Smith and his family aren’t working just as hard.
“We’re probably putting in as much work now, but we’re kind of intensively using the ground we have now,” Smith said. “We own about 2000 acres and rent a few other small parcels, and then we rent some summer grass in the Flint Hills in Kansas for the summer to graze some cattle. We just do a lot of different things. But when we were all cows it was just different, but probably the workloads about the same.”
Smith Farm is just one of the business ventures he and his family have a hand in to try to make a living for everybody. Unlike his forefathers, they have diversified and do not count on just one source of income.
That diversification includes the Appleton City Feed Service, which they own. Smith also works for Fort Scott Livestock as a field representative for the livestock market.
“My daughter (Casi), she’s involved in our operations. She’s an ag teacher in Adrian, Missouri, and my son (Zep), when he came back from college, he joined the operation. He works full-time at the farm and does the nutritionist work at the feed mill. So it is kind of all hands on deck. My daughter runs a feed truck during the summer and on the weekends and does what she can when her school schedule allows. It’s a family business.”
Even though Smith has watched the family business change over the past six decades, he can’t imagine what his kids will be doing to keep the farm going after he is gone. The speed at which technology has changed ranching and farming from when he was a kid has him afraid to even hazard a guess at what it will look like.
“My parents raised oats to sell for horse feed. There are not enough horses in the world now to survive that,” Smith said. “That was their main thing was to grow oats and have cattle and hogs and stuff. And the scale and what people do now is so much different. Just look at the technology that is in agriculture in the last 10 years. My father traded in a team of mules to buy one of the first tractors in our neighborhood. That was less than 100 years ago. Now we’ve got auto-steer tractors and GPS. Agriculture’s seen a tremendous change in the last 100 years.”
Yet, Smith hopes he sets his kids up to be in possession to be prepared for those changes and ready to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves.
But more importantly, he wants them to remember something his father passed down to him that is more important than even the land.
“He told me that true wealth was not measured in dollars and cents,” Smith said. “When I started to where we are today, I would’ve never dreamed that we would be where we’re at today,” Smith said. “Or think we would’ve changed as much. I never envisioned that. I probably had my sight set too low as a young man, and it turned out way better than I could have ever anticipated. I hope my children have that same opportunity.”
