Neighbors

Kenny Hinkle is not psychic, but he tries to be. While many people don’t know what they are going to have for dinner next weekend, Kenny is working hard to make sure that we can have high quality and reasonably priced beef on our tables – 5 years from now.

It happens at the worst time. Your horse has thrown another shoe right when you are packing up for a ride. Now, you have to call a farrier. What if there was another option? A barefooted option.

"I was a California girl and I can remember that I always wanted to live like the Walton’s,” recalled Stormy Woods. Stormy and her husband Ed, own a farm just north of Hagarville and have been married for about 4 years. “Ed knew that I loved animals,” said Stormy. “So, he took me to a livestock sale, and that’s where I bought a red goat and it’s just grown from there.”

On a crisp fall day in Wyandotte, Okla., Randy and Jeff Parmley take a break from working cattle to explain why their family farm doesn’t play the ‘trend game.’ “We don’t jump on trends,” said Randy Parmley. “We just breed consistent cattle – simple as that.”

Dick Nugent is a Master Gardener and the manager of the Community Garden at the Houston branch of the University of Missouri Extension Service. He is just one spoke in a wheel that has been turning for a long time. The University of Missouri, founded in 1839, was the first publicly supported institution in the Louisiana Territory.  In 1888 the Missouri Agriculture Experiment Station was opened in Columbia, Mo. Later, in 1910, the Missouri Extension Council was established and ready to reach out to all areas of the state. In the past century they have worked, studied, analyzed and recorded successes as well as failures of hundreds of ways to get the most out of Missouri land.

"Ten years ago, it started as a joke,” Katie Stewart, vice president of the Southwest Missouri Goat Producers Association, explained how her family’s involvement with Boer goats began. “Bob (Katie’s husband) brought home three baby goats from the sale barn for our children. He called them 'weed eaters' and from there…” she waved a hand towards the lot full of 40 South African goats known for their meat production.

Houston and Kenda Giles share a dedication to all things natural. They farm 120 acres just north of Carthage, Mo., and raise grass-fed dairy and beef cattle, chickens, pigs and sheep without using steroids, hormones or antibiotics.

A man once said, “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” That man must have known Tim Moore.

Jim and Dixie Robinson purchased nine goats in September 2008, and found themselves in a learning process. During the first week, they lost three. Dixie said that it was quite the education at the beginning and still is.

Land and cattle have tied together the threads of Scott Price’s family for more than 100 years. Scott’s grandfather Claude Wofford bought the original 200-acre ranch in Crawford County, Ark., from Scott’s great-uncle in the 1890s. “My grandfather had three girls, my mother being one of them,” explained Scott. “He was a railroader, and me being the grandkid, I tried to spend every moment I could here.”