Neighbors

Chad Lepley wants to take his new farm in a lot of different directions.

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.

Brian Palmer is the fifth-generation of his family on their farmstead, east of Miami, Okla.

On a Monday in early October, 40 people met at the Pauline Whitaker Center in Fayetteville, Ark., for the seventh Moms on the Farm Tour.

Northwest Arkansas is growing and becoming more metropolitan each year. Part of this phenomenon is smaller towns surrounding the Fayetteville-Springdale, Ark., area becoming more urban, rather like suburbs, unlike the completely rural towns they once were.

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.