Getting Into the Business

Getting Into the Business. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

I worked on a few farms when I was a teenager for summer money. My other part-time job was as a pressman for our local paper and I also wrote a weekly column on high school happenings so I gravitated towards the media industry. New rancher Tommy Allen got into the cattle business in much the same way.

ALLEN: I’ve always had a passion to try and dabble in the cattle industry but like many others didn’t grow up on a big ranch, didn’t have land in the family, don’t have cattle but I’ve always had a passion and it kind of started out with my grandpa. He was a cattle buyer in the Pendleton area.

Passion is key but there are also some real hurdles to jump.

ALLEN: So I happened to stumble across some land through here-say and kind of pursued it and got to thinking I don’t have any winter pasture, what do you do in the winter? Right now with cattle prices that is danged near impossible to find. So I kind of did my research and this was over last winter and put some numbers down and basically I ran everything on a spreadsheet.

Allen says he ran into something that made sense for his plan.

ALLEN: I found a program with Agri-Beef that works out great. It’s a tremendous program. What I’m doing is running yearlings. I’m buying them at a certain weight say 600 pounds and I’m running them for 5 to 6 months depending on the feed and how long I have them on this property and then I’m selling them so I’m not having to go out there and feed cows all winter. And then I took advantage of that USDA beginning farmer loan program.

And we’ll talk more tomorrow about that with rancher Tommy Allen.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.