Missouri Neighbors

Environmental sustainability is the driving force behind the changes in diesel implement technology with the increasing number of agricultural machines being used in the field each year.

Many young people have things they think they would like to be – astronauts, big league ball players or a circus clown. But there are a few exceptional young men who know exactly what they want to do.

Dan Bigbee prefers to communicate with nature more than with strangers, but when you get him talking about urban farming, he has plenty to say.

Winemaking has been around for perhaps as long as 6,000 years. Winemaking in Missouri dates back to the mid-1800s when Germans populated the Hermann, Mo., area, bringing grape varieties with them. For a time, Missouri ranked among the top states for wine production.

Back in 1926, Larry Cleveland’s grandfather, Lawrence Bailliere, moved to Richland, Mo., from Oklahoma to start a trout hatchery, buying 97 acres with a natural spring.

Life in Southwest Missouri provides many opportunities to be part of the local agriculture.

Ronald Entlicher of rural Polk County, outside of Bolivar, Mo., can look out his living room window to the 80-acre field across the way that his grandmother farmed.

The magnificent fall-drenched Ozarks countryside that surrounds Jeff and Charlyce Ruth’s Rogersville, Mo., home serves as the perfect backdrop for Jeff’s backyard collection of vintage tractors that he marveled over as a youth.

In 1999, Wendy Dickens, now Childers, attended a cattle sale that included an essay contest on the attributes of Shorthorn cattle.

While some young livestock producers are born into the business, others have to find their own path into their chosen industry; and 16-year-old Linsey Lowrance-Rogers is one of those young producers.