Neighbors

For Mary Beller it was a desire to reach out and grow that led her to the show arena.
“This was an opportunity for me to get out and do something on my own,” said Mary, owner of Rafter B Cutting Horses in Cabool.  “But Robert is my support; I couldn’t do this without him!”

At the ripe old age of “six or seven” Kenneth Phillips had his first cow.  “My dad sold her.  I didn’t get the money out of her,” he said laughing.  “Other than that, I didn’t have any cattle till I was about 17.”
Kenneth has been farming and raising cattle for 54 years.  “I’ve had Limousin ever since ’78, that’s when I got my first bull.”  He liked the looks of the Limousin cattle he’d seen, and liked the looks of the calves.

Don’t expect to get rich, and you have to enjoy it,” was the advice Laura King had for anyone wanting to get into the cattle business.

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.

Eddie Kinzer’s career in the Hereford business started in 1961 when he sold a pony that kept throwing him and bought his first Hereford heifer from Clint Waldon, a longtime Hereford breeder in northwest Arkansas. 

Nestled in the rolling hills of Greenwood, Ark., is the home of Charolais breeders Jim and Reba Bray. The hard work ethic and family morals Mr. Bray learned growing up on a post-depression farmstead have proved to be a blessing to his family. He speaks of the good ole days with fondness. "The dollar went a lot further then, if you could get a dollar. You went to the store once a month, bought your flour and sugar. That was it. Always had a garden, hens and stock." But growth in the Fort Smith/Van Buren, Ark., area has brought many changes to local lifestyles, and the Bray family is making the adjustment. After the Highway 71 bypass changed traffic patterns, and their home burned four years ago, the Brays built a new home farther from the road on a rise that overlooks the creek and their cattle pastures.

Two necessary traits are inherent in every successful Arkansas farmer.  One is the ability to accept change for the better.  The other is knowing when to hold onto something that is uncommonly good.