Neighbors

Unlike so many people who live here, Philip and Connie Swan have no history of family or previous ties to the Ozarks. Phil said, “I had always heard that the Ozarks was a nice place to retire. Plus we were both ‘country’ to start with and didn’t want to be in the city anymore.” With encouragement from some friends who knew about the area, Connie went online and started looking. They decided to check out the Ozarks prior to their retirement. They ended up in Branson, Mo., and started looking around with the help of a real estate agent. The Lead Hill area of Boone County, Ark., caught their eye. The first piece of property they saw was the 33 acres they bought.

Ricky Jenkins believes that you have to sell quality if you are going to sell anything. He won’t sell any of his livestock that he wouldn’t keep for himself. He is quick to cull out of his herds anything that doesn’t quite meet his standards, and they are pretty high for good reasons.

A beautiful herd of Brangus cattle can be seen north of Monett, Mo., at the Vaughn homeplace.  Their home and farmland are positioned next to the original Vaughn homestead and the family business, Vaughn Trucking Company.

A trade 76 years ago laid the foundation for Steve Greene’s new career. In 1936, Bonebrake Herefords was established in Salem, Mo., after Mr. Bonebrake traded his herd of sheep and a shotgun for Herefords from a man in Illinois. Since then, the farm has expanded from it’s original location to include 400-acres in Greene County.

Many people wish to actually retire around age 55. Not so for Lee and Linda Ragains of Sallisaw, Okla. While it’s true that Lee retired from veterinary practice in Nebraska, he and Linda buy ranches and improve them for resale while running their registered Longhorn operation. They have 200 head made up of 120 momma cows and seven bulls with the rest being calves and yearlings. Two previous spreads were a 1,400-acre ranch in Duncan, Okla., and a 1,780-acre ranch in Lynchburg, Mo.

The Burnetts live way out in the hills of Madison County even though their postal address is Winslow, Ark. Destry and Shannon Burnett homeschool their daughters: Sagely, 11, Sierra, 10 and the youngest Sicily is 5. Shannon and her three daughters consider themselves the four “s’s.”

The Billie Blevins farm in Boone County is a rare place for the Ozarks. His 128-acre cattle farm is almost flat. No hills, no hollers, just good flat ground. Billie was born in the area and has owned the property where they live since 1957. Just a few years later he and his new bride, Dorothy, built a house and moved on the place. They’ve now been married 52 years, raised three children and are still in the same house after all these years.

When Fred and Gay Mason opened their Gay Parita gas station in 1930, the highway it served was the great thoroughfare of the nation.

Jim McDonald has been farming long enough to know pretty much what it will cost to raise a calf to a desired weight.

The Brooks family owns a farm in Webster County near Marshfield, Mo. They also own and operate Brooks Gas Company.