For Dave and Pam White, the farm is their place to be in life, but they didn’t always know it.
Dave moved to the Ozarks with his parents and brother when they bought an 80-acre farm in northern Howell County in 1971. Dave joined 4-H at age 9 and FFA at 15. Dave first began to handle cattle in FFA, and was FFA treasurer during his senior year at Liberty High School.
Although Pam confessed to being a “town girl,” her grandfather raised soybeans, field corn and Tamworth hogs in their hometown of Jacksonville, Ill. “He (her grandfather) was my babysitter and everywhere he went I was right behind him. We plowed fields, showed hogs at fairs and I always got a bottle of orange pop at the (grain) elevator,” she reminisced.
In 1991, after many roads traveled by both, Dave met and fell in love with Pam and her young son, Andrew McClelland. The following year Dave and Pam married and settled on the family farm near Mountain View, Mo.
The couple bought a few calves and Pam made a deal with a local dairyman to bottle feed his calves; she got to keep one calf out of every six that she raised. “When the first one died I just bawled,” Pam said. “The second one, I cried a little; by the third one's death, I thought, ‘that’s too bad’.”
“Anyone who’s going to have cows should start with bottle calves,” Dave added. “Anything that can happen will happen to bottle calves. You’ll learn a lot from them.”
Dave and Pam bought an adjoining 60 acres and in 1999 they bought 14 bred heifers from a local farm and again learned something new. “Be sure when you give a BVD vaccine, it’s the modified version – we lost several calves there.”
Also in 1999, Dave began working for Smith’s Angus Ranch, Inc. For the first six months he fixed fences, then started taking care of the cattle. Dave now manages the ranch; executing the day-to-day business on the farm, including marketing and vaccination programs, and is the farm’s A.I. specialist.
Today, Dave and Pam and their sons, Andrew and Daniel, run 30 head of mostly Angus cow/calf pairs on their 140 acres plus an additional 70 acres of rented pasture. Dave chooses to run a bull with his herd, mainly for convenience due to the amount of time his job requires. Dave buys 40-50 round bales of local hay because of the time and expense of baling his own, and says he only feeds soy hull pellets to young, growing calves.
Last year Pam decided to leave her 10-year career as an Account Executive in the insurance business to focus on her passion for custom designed cakes, an art she has honed since she was a teenager. “I love to see the expression on peoples' faces when I walk through the door with their cake; it’s that feeling when I stack a wedding cake and it all comes together. And it’s the creative aspect of it; the challenge to keep up with the new trends – cake isn’t always the easiest medium to sculpt!”
Pam’s business also allows her to take some of the workload off of Dave. She does much of the feeding and care for their four horses, the lawn care and oversees the house and car maintenance.
The Whites demonstrate that it takes patience, teamwork and perseverance to build a successful farm, business and life.
