Missouri Neighbors

Joe and Karen Prock have tried many breeds of horses, and they can tell you their reasoning for their choices

Marty and Cheryl Brown use embryo transfer to make their registered herd expansion a faster process

Freddie Martin has spent a lifetime watching the cycles of agriculture; and he's still growing his dairy herd today

A few are red, most are black, but they are all Angus at Wallace Cattle Company, where Ernie and Tammy Wallace may have compromised on color, but never on the quality of their registered herd.
Tammy loves the reds she grew up with in Iowa, where her parents were pioneer breeders and have been in the business more than 40 years. Ernie is partial to the blacks, a love he picked up while working as a young man on a purebred ranch in Texas. Together, the two have been raising registered Angus since they were married 18 years ago.

In the rugged terrain and the demanding brutal conditions of rural Scotland a particular breed of cattle has been able to thrive for centuries, the Scottish Highlander.
Highlanders began being imported into the United States during the mid to late 1800’s when a “herd book” or national registry was established in 1884 making them the oldest registered breed of cattle in the country.

In the early 1970s a young man from Wichita named Dan Kinney was in the beginning of what would be a long and storied career with the City of Springfield’s park system. One of his first tasks was to arrange for overflow parking at the Dickerson Park Zoo. He met with Louis Miller, then Director of the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds, the Zoo’s neighbor to the east.

In the cattle business there are big rewards for finding a niche that develops into a national interest.  Rodney Lowrance of Pleasant Hope, Mo. is taking his investment in Gelbvieh cattle and possibly venturing into one of these niches; grass-fed meat production.

After moving to Webster County from Nashville, Tenn., about five years ago, Tom Donkin found the breed of cattle he was looking for at FarmFest. 

Whether you’re marketing petroleum products or raising cattle, the key to success is staying competitive.
That, Jim Woods would tell you, is a matter of knowing what customers want, which product can best fill their needs and how to provide it most efficiently.

Chris Tarter uses farming as a stress-reliever, although sometimes farming in-and-of itself isn’t always problem-free.  Like many farmers, Chris can’t remember a time in his life when farming wasn’t a part of the everyday routine.  “I used to dairy, but I was offered a full-time position with the United State Postal Service, so we relocated and began the beef farm,” said Chris.