Answer: You have to be passionate about raising livestock to be in this industry.
In response to this question we asked ourselves what else would we do? But seriously, as we think about livestock production our response is this: you have to truly love what you do because livestock farming is not for everyone.
It involves early mornings and late nights with hard work in between.
So what’s the reward? It’s a feeling of accomplishment at the end of a long day. Knowing how important of a job you have. Afterall, farmers feed the world!
We are sending about 750 head of cattle to the beef market every year from our feedlot. That’s around 750,000 pounds of premium quality beef processed and sent to grocery stores and restaurants in the United States and around the world.
We also harvest about 480,000 bushels of corn and 40,000 bushels of soybeans per year to feed and grow the livestock and sell the rest to the grain markets.
Usually during the day-to-day chores and work, you don’t even think about the bigger picture and just live in the moment. Such as watching the sunrise as you are filling the feed wagon or watching the sun going down from the cab of the tractor as you pull the plow across the ground
It feels good to know when Great-Grandfather Carey started this farm decades ago, he was enjoying the same simple joys of farming as we
are today. We also want to raise our children to experience these joys, with less screen time and more hands-on life and learning experiences on the farm.
We want our boys to know…
The joy of being on the last round of harvesting a 200-acre field,
The joy of a full grain bin after a long day’s work,
The joy of a 100% positivity rate on our cow’s pregnancy check day,
The joy of having a live calf after a hard labor.
Not every day is a great day, but these are a few of the things that keep you going through the good days and the bad days of livestock farming and we wouldn’t want it any other way.
THE BAENZIGERS – MATT & MINDY RAISE BEEF CATTLE AND GROW CORN AND SOYBEANS IN RURAL KINGSTON