Women on the farm: An Early Start, A Strong Finish

Amanda DeGroat’s fam­ily farm rises from ashes stronger than ever

By PAT LAWRENCE

patlawrence@cinci.rr.com

Amanda and Rita DeGroat, shown at their home, and the whole DeGroat fam­ily enjoy liv­ing under one roof.

Like any suc­cess­ful stock bro­ker, Amanda DeGroat lives by her phone, starts the day by study­ing the mar­kets, con­tacts buy­ers and sell­ers and makes edu­cated bets on com­mod­ity futures. How­ever, Amanda is a cat­tle woman, not a Wall Street trader and the stock she trades is eat­ing and sleep­ing not far from her back door. She says, “We always have about 350 head on the prop­erty and we feed about a thou­sand cat­tle here every year.”

The DeGroat fam­ily owns and oper­ates Hid­den Acres Farm, a beef feed­lot that con­tracts directly with pack­ers to pro­duce and pur­chase beef feeder-cattle until they are “fin­ished,” ready to become high qual­ity, well-marbled cuts of meat for the table. Amanda man­ages most of the finan­cial side of their enter­prise, buy­ing and sell­ing, and assists with a vari­ety of the farm respon­si­bil­i­ties, like vac­ci­na­tions, tag­ging and trans­port. She says, “We have a 30’ stock trailer that I haul. It holds 15–18 head of 800 pound cat­tle. For a big­ger load, we use a dou­ble decker with a semi.”

Amanda grew up in Farm­ersville, where her par­ents still live, show­ing cat­tle and hogs. Back then, Jason’s fam­ily had dairy cat­tle. Amanda says, “He and I intended to get mar­ried after I grad­u­ated from high school, but I post­poned the wed­ding until after the Fair just so I could show my cat­tle!” Although Amanda con­tin­ued her edu­ca­tion and worked for 15 years man­ag­ing doctor’s offices, she remained an active part­ner in the fam­ily farm. “I milked until the day I deliv­ered and was back milk­ing three days afterward!”

She says, “When dairy prices began drop­ping, we started look­ing at busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties. We’d always had freezer beef, and when we real­ized how prof­itable our pro­duc­tion of about 50 head had been, we began the tran­si­tion to beef cat­tle. We decided on the feed­lot because of the way our prop­erty is laid out.” Jason and Amanda have been mar­ried 18 years and have a 16 year old son and 13 year old daugh­ter who still enjoy show­ing cat­tle competitively.

Hid­den Acres is one of about 450 beef cat­tle feed­lots in Ohio, and like most, it’s also a fam­ily farm. Rita, Amanda’s mother-in-law, lost her hus­band Clarence, three years ago, but she has been an inte­gral part of the fam­ily enter­prise for over 40 years. Accord­ing to Amanda, “She used to do all the milk­ing!” Rita has been farm­ing in part­ner­ship with Amanda and Jason for over twenty years. She still pro­vides insight and advice, han­dles book­keep­ing and receiv­ables and makes a home-cooked lunch for every­one on the farm each work­day. Amanda’s hus­band, Jason, man­ages the crops and farm­ing oper­a­tions with the assis­tance of Amanda’s brother Steven Ward, their full time Farm Manager.

Dustin Barnes is the Feed­yard Man­ager. Amanda says, “Every busi­ness deci­sion, we make as a group.”

Accord­ing to the USDA, cat­tle and beef pro­duc­tion rep­re­sent the largest sin­gle seg­ment of Amer­i­can agri­cul­ture. Of the 2.2 mil­lion farms in the US, 31 per­cent are clas­si­fied as beef cat­tle oper­a­tions, more than any other type of farm. The indus­try is roughly divided into two pro­duc­tion sec­tors: cow-calf oper­a­tions or cat­tle feed­ing, like Hid­den Acres.

Amanda says, “We feed twice a day. It can take 90 to 300 days, depend­ing on the animal’s weight at place­ment, feed­ing con­di­tions and desired fin­ish. We try to raise the kind of beef that we would serve on our own table.” She says cat­tle own­ers choose cus­tom feed­ing to main­tain or expand their cat­tle pro­duc­tion as well as other rea­sons. “If the mar­ket is high, peo­ple often send their cat­tle to the stock yard; when it’s low, they often con­tact us.

Cat­tle can only be on a trailer 14–16 hours and an owner may not be near a stock­yard or have the facil­i­ties or haul­ing capac­ity needed for fin­ish­ing cat­tle. This year’s drought was prob­lem­atic for many. We pro­vide feed, facil­i­ties and labor while own­ers save the expense of cus­tom feed­ing and take advan­tage of favor­able mar­ket sit­u­a­tions. We raise fresh, hor­mone and antibi­otic– free beef so when the home­mak­ers pur­chase it from the gro­cery, they can see and taste the quality!”

Amanda says they buy cat­tle in groups of 10 or more directly from farms they have vis­ited in Ohio, Indi­ana, West Vir­ginia and Ken­tucky. “Haul­ing is included in our bid price. And, I drive over to Union Stock­yards in Hills­boro about once a week to ful­fill our needs. The cat­tle in that area per­form very well. We buy from sell­ers that oper­ate with humane ani­mal stan­dards and pro­mote health. We get cat­tle in at least three times a week. Every ani­mal is kept under shel­ter, about 40 per build­ing, with ade­quate ven­ti­la­tion and space so the cat­tle and their bed­ding stays dry. Each ani­mal is tagged and recorded in a com­puter pro­gram for trac­ing them. If there’s ever a prob­lem, we know where each ani­mal came from and where it went.”

Amanda spends the first part of every day on the com­puter, check­ing the mar­kets, look­ing at cat­tle and feeder prices and grain trades. “I watch the agri­cul­tural mar­ket on Rural TV to see how prices ended yes­ter­day and where they’re pre­dicted to go. When we’re ready to sell, we’re look­ing at the future price. We guar­an­tee the price of our cat­tle a month, or even a year, ahead. For 800-pound ani­mals, a penny per pound is a major change. It’s always a gam­ble but that’s what farm­ers do every day – gam­ble! Life is full of deci­sions.” Amanda seems to have han­dled them with a cool head. She has con­tracts for every month till Octo­ber 2013, two loads for some months. Each load is 49,000 pounds or 40 head of fin­ished cat­tle. She says, “You must be com­fort­able with what you can buy them at and what you can sell them at. You can’t be greedy.”

The fam­ily also farms 1100 acres of corn, soy­beans and wheat, kept well fer­til­ized. “Waste is gath­ered with a bob­cat. We have a manure stor­age facil­ity, so when the weather is good in sum­mer and fall, we have it ready to spread.” With­out a breeze, the mal­odor­ous side effect of fresh waste is sur­pris­ingly local­ized to the build­ings which actu­ally hold cattle.

Neatly placed grain bins, trac­tors and grain carts among the eight build­ings make Hid­den Acres look like any fam­ily farm. And, the ani­mals them­selves are so quiet as to be barely notice­able. Amanda says, “Con­fined cat­tle are very dif­fer­ent from range cat­tle. They’re accus­tomed to peo­ple, some, but their thought processes are dif­fer­ent. They do require a spe­cial way of han­dling. You must always move slowly, qui­etly, calmly, not to rile them up.”

The com­fort­ably famil­iar pat­tern of the DeGroat’s life went up in flames three years ago. Amanda says, “We were show­ing cat­tle at the Fair when our home caught fire. We lost every­thing. The home­stead was so old, it only took about 45 min­utes for it to go. We were devastated.”

The young fam­ily moved in with Rita to start rebuild­ing. Amanda says, “We real­ized liv­ing together worked very well for us, so we stayed and added space here, just across the road from the old house. There’s room for all of us — plus six dogs and four cats. It still works very well for us.” Rita works mostly out of the office in the cen­ter of the house, Amanda works by phone from wher­ever she needs to be that day. “I always keep an extra charger!”

Amanda says the fire taught them that, “Stuff is just stuff. It’s not what mat­ters. The hard­est part for the kids was los­ing all their tro­phies. For me, it was los­ing our fam­ily pictures.”

For fun, she says, “We show cat­tle in the win­ter and go boat­ing in Ten­nessee in the sum­mer. We don’t have prob­lems, really. What we’ve done so far has been prof­itable and after eight years, things run pretty smoothly. We stay busy with the farm and the kids but every­thing we do, we do as a family.”

(Pat Lawrence is a con­trib­u­tor to Acres of South­west Ohio.)

Posted by Tina Murdock on Dec 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.