Marty Brown's great-grandfather homesteaded just a few miles from Marty's current home in Diamond, Mo. His grandfather farmed the same land with horses and mules, and close by his father ran a Grade A dairy farm and raised registered black Angus cattle. With this long succession of agriculture in the family, much of the land in Newton county is bordered by, or is itself 'Brown soil.' Marty Brown, who says he's related to nearly everyone in the county, is no exception. He's a fourth-generation farmer and is even exceeding the family tradition of being close to the land with his successful operation.
Marty was in FFA in high school, and after high school he began raising Quarter Horses. Marty said, "I was always interested in cattle and farming, but I had to make a living, so we got into construction and just kept a commercial herd on the side."
"Dad eventually sold out the dairy and went straight out from there and bought 13 registered Angus cattle," added Marty. In the late 70s and early 80s the father-son pair began crossing their Angus herd with Limousin cattle. "I was always interested in the thickness and quality of the Limousin," Marty said, "We were pretty impressed with what they could do for the cattle."
In 1981 Marty married his wife, Cheryl. She is from a farming family in Kansas who grew wheat and Herefords. A few years into their marriage, Marty and Cheryl started a family and now have two sons and two daughters. It was their first son who bought the first registered Limousin of the family for his high school FFA project. "It was our first son's freshman year of high school when we decided to buy our first registered Limousin," added Marty. "Shortly after that time we were running about 35 to 40 registered Limousin and we continued to grow from there."
Today the Brown family has about 100 pure bred Limousin and about 25 'recip' cows that are strictly used for embryo transplants from the registered cows. "Some of our best calves come out of the embryo transfers from the 'recip' cows, who basically serve as a surrogate mother for the calves," Marty said. The embryo transfer program has been very successful for the Brown's Limousin operation. But, the process has to be very concise and is "very labor intensive" according to Marty.
He described the process. "We have to take the donor Limousin cows to the vet who specializes in embryo transfer, he artificially inseminates the cows and flushes the eggs after a week and determines those eggs that were fertilized and have developed into an embryo. While he's doing that, we're at home synchronizing the recip-cows onto the same cycle as the donor cows through a series of shots and other mechanisms that control their cycles. As soon as the donor cows are flushed, we take our recips to the vet's office and he immediately transfers the fertilized eggs into the recip cows."
The viable embryo's that aren't used can be frozen for later transferals into recip cattle. The Browns usually do this in the spring and fall because that's when the rest of their Limousin are breeding. This ensures that the full herd is calving at the same times during the year. The success rate for the Limousin to recip cattle has been about 70 percent for the Browns' operation.
Marty has two herd bulls and they do some artificial insemination on their own. Their 400 acres is divided up into paddocks for an intensive rotational grazing system. Each of the small fields has an automatic waterer. Marty's fields are all fescue and he, like most farmers, supplement with hay in the winter months and grain during the year.
As far as marketing this breed, the family sells about 15 to 20 bulls per year that sell to pretty much a 10-mile radius of their farm. "We're trying to grow into a seed stock company," added Marty, "We want to sell our heifers in pure bred Limousin sales throughout Missouri and the Midwest. In the future we want to get more into the pure bred markets. These new bulls we've got can really produce good calves."
The new bulls Marty is referring to are AUTO Dollar General, the Yearling Bull Calf Champion at the National Western Stock-show in Denver, which is the Limousin breed's largest show of the year; and Savage is another young bull who's closely following in Dollar Generals' footsteps. "Dollar General is one of the best, if not the best, Limousin bulls in the country," said Cheryl.
The Brown's have taken their time building up a really good herd. "We've waited for something truly fitting for the sales to start going public, and we believe we've hit that nail on the head with Dollar General," said Cheryl.
"We just enjoy this, with the kids and all, they love to show. Hopefully we can just leave the breed in a better place than where we started," concluded Marty, "We just love Limousin cattle… our cattle!"
