Livestock Management Archives - American Cattlemen

Commitment to Quality from Pasture to Plate

Posted on August 17, 2026 by Cattle- Web-Manager-2

Commitment to Quality from Pasture to Plate

Roger and Nikki Callison are both multi-generational ranchers who have devoted their lives to agriculture and their ranching heritage. They planted roots in southeastern Oklahoma over 20 years ago and have built multiple businesses that keep them both actively engaged in the industry. Each business operates in multiple sectors of the industry to, ultimately, produce an end product of high-quality beef for consumers.

“We love our cattle and the land,” Nikki said. “Growing up, my family’s ranch motto was: ‘Raisin’ kids, cattle and quality horses,’ and that’s exactly the heritage they passed on.”

The Callisons have a deep respect for their herd and their land, which is evidenced by their dedication to the stewardship of both. Roger was raised helping his father and grandfather with their cattle operations; Nikki was raised on a sizable ranch as well. They cherish the ranching lifestyle and understand the accompanying hard work.

“When Roger and I were dating, I would go with him to feed his small herd of heifers every evening,” Nikki said. “We dreamed of building a family and a ranch of our own. Over the last 20-plus years, we have built a life together and have significantly expanded our herd. Roger is known for literally doing anything it takes to meet the needs of our cattle.”

After graduating from Oklahoma State University, Roger took a job in the grain and feed industry in Guthrie, Oklahoma. After seven years, he started an agricultural commodity business in Ada, Oklahoma. The company: connects feed ingredient and fertilizer manufacturers to farmers, ranchers and end users; and provides agricultural commodities to producers and businesses across the Midwest. 

For the Callisons, diversification is a foundational component of their business plan. In addition to the commodity business, the Callisons operate a feed store, their commercial cow-calf herd, a stocker-calf operation and the direct-to-consumer beef business.

Nikki’s grandfather Ray Tucker was an Oklahoma rancher and a state representative. Her grandparents saw the need and benefit of families buying beef directly from the ranch. They called their business “Rancher’s Beef” and sold it directly to consumers as early as 1970. The Callisons continue her grandparents’ legacy today by offering beef directly from their ranch to consumers across the country.

The Callisons’ direct-to-consumer beef business started in 2018. They had a surplus supply of beef in the freezer and multiple local consumers requesting beef by the quarter or half. Initially, they started selling beef to friends and neighbors. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, demand skyrocketed; the Callisons amplified their outreach and the business flourished.

When the Callisons wean their home-raised calves, a portion of them get shipped to the feedyard and another portion are finished on the ranch and butchered locally. They pride themselves on the diligent care of their herd. They don’t take shortcuts. The Callisons produce high-quality, high-marbled beef that is grass fed and grain finished.

Their priority is their customers’ confidence in the origin, care and quality of their product. Callison Ranch ships beef all over the nation, and local customers drive directly to the ranch to buy the beef.

“We diligently care for our cattle and the land they enjoy,” Nikki said. “Our cattle graze wide-open fields and drink fresh water their entire lives. From our pasture to your plate, you can confidently know where your food comes from and how it was cared for.”

Roger understands how important land stewardship is to his livelihood. He emphasizes pasture management, fertility and the relationship to the stocking rates on their operation.

“We’re grass farmers,” Roger said. “We try to produce as much high-quality grass as we can for our cattle.”

Roger knows there are misconceptions when it comes to investing in pasture management and soil fertility. He hears producers question the return on investment, but he knows the value of clean pastures and has seen the return in the form of pounds of beef in his operation.

“You have to get rid of the weeds, so you can grow more forages and add more pounds to your calves,” Roger said. “With the price of cattle in the last few years, you can’t afford not to do it.”

He justifies the input costs by their additional forage availability.

“Our goal is to raise the highest-quality forage we can and have an extra two weeks in the spring to graze, because we have winter annuals and add an extra two weeks in the fall to graze,” Roger said. “We’ve taken good care of our pastures, so we’ve got more grass out there.”

Clean pastures and quality forages support their beef business. Roger relies on GrazonNext® HL herbicide to control weeds like buttercup, cocklebur and ragweed in their pastures. He deploys Remedy® Ultra herbicide to tackle tough brush problems like hedge and hackberry. These herbicides can be tank-mixed to broaden the brush control spectrum and control understory broadleaf weeds.

He also values the time and money saved by using impregnated fertilizer on his pastures with UltiGraz℠ Pasture Weed & Feed with DuraCor® herbicide. He encourages local producers to adopt the practice through his feed store as well. Retailers and custom applicators offering UltiGraz, like Roger, complete extensive education and training to become certified by Corteva Agriscience, committing to the highest standards of blending and application for consistent results. 

“When we started to mix fertilizer with herbicides, it changed the game,” Roger said. “The practice keeps gaining traction every year because of the monetary and time savings.”

The Callisons are immersed in agriculture from all angles. They have developed their businesses from the ground up. Their goal is unwavering: Honor the ranching heritage, be good stewards of the land and produce a high-quality, trusted product for the consumer.

To learn more, visit RangeAndPasture.com/AC.

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Rethinking Your Enterprises

Posted on August 17, 2026September 9, 2026 by Cattle- Web-Manager-2

Profitability in Practice: Rethinking Your Enterprises

The seventh generation on Withers Ranch in Paisley, Oregon, continues the legacy of careful land management in their fragile, arid ecosystem while finding buy–in to reshape the family’s philosophy on recordkeeping and profitability tracking.

At the end of a long day cutting and raking hay in Oregon’s high desert region, ranch hands run some numbers in their heads and pencil them down on a scrap of paper or a well-used NCBA Redbook, if they have one.

Withers Ranch grows and harvests hay to feed its cattle over the winter. And the Withers family relies on a cadre of local help to get the job done, so their full-time ranch staff can continue to care for and move cattle on other parts of the ranch.

But the end of the day doesn’t mean the end of work for everyone. Colleen Withers still needs to track down all of those paper scraps and Redbooks to record hours worked, pounds harvested and bales made to keep track of the season’s hay enterprise.

Colleen, and her husband, Matt, are the seventh generation on the ranch. Like many up-and-comers, they’re looking to make a few changes to the operation. Making their own hay is the way the Withers family has always done things. But they’ve never tracked expenses closely enough to know the profitability of the endeavor year-over-year.

“There are some years where [making hay] probably pays great because we raised so much hay,” says Colleen. “Then there are some years, like probably this type of year, where it won’t pay because we’re going to hire the same amount of people and run the same equipment for not very much hay.”

Keeping track of expenses and income is a challenge on many ranches. Ranching, consulting for a local watershed council and raising kids don’t leave Colleen with much time to do more than get bills paid. While there never seems to be a right time, a strong market and a mindset shift are shaping a new approach to help Colleen pin down enterprise profitability on the ranch.

Reframing Ranch Goals

Profitability is always on the forefront of a rancher’s mind. But being able to track expenses and income to know for sure which years the ranch was in the black is a different story.

“When I first took over the books, I was so excited. I was like, ‘I am going to break out our fuel bill by each enterprise,’” recalls Colleen. “And I’m sure a lot of people do that. But I quickly realized it wasn’t sustainable for me. Sometimes you just have to shove bills out the door and just go log into the bank account to make sure you have enough to cover them.”

But her goal to reorganize the books didn’t end there. It was simply lying in wait for the right opportunity.

In 2025, the time was right to dial in recordkeeping and expenses. The cattle market was, and is still, at an all-time high. Colleen wanted to make the best of a good situation. She and Matt attended the Noble Profitability Essentials course in Pendleton, Oregon.

“Noble really challenges ranchers to recognize that you can survive the tough times, you can thrive even in hard times,” says Colleen. “And that’s the direction we’re trying to go. I want to really have this dialed in. To make good decisions with the quality profit that hopefully a lot of ranchers are experiencing right now. Then look back on it and be really proud and think, ‘Oh, thank goodness we did that.’”

Colleen got started right away when she returned home. Using her current accounting software, she set up a tagging system for bills.

“I’ve worked pretty hard to try to focus on the finances, but it still gets away from us at times,” Colleen admits. “That paradigm of prioritizing your recordkeeping and tracking and setting up sustainable systems that make it really easy to go peek at your profitability when it matters is key.”

She says it’s not perfect, but it is a step toward being able to track expenses and pull reports when needed.

To Make Hay, or Not to Make Hay

The first place Colleen is prioritizing tracking expenses is this season’s hay enterprise. And she’s holding herself accountable for this goal with the help of Steven Smith, a consultant with Noble. The two connected at the Profitability course in Pendleton and continued working together during Colleen’s first consultation session, included with the cost of the course.

“We did a lot of hypothetical things in the course, then ultimately that one-on-one consultation with Steven, where we were working with our real numbers and our stuff and our unique situation and things like that, I just thought, ‘This is exactly what we’ve been needing,’” says Colleen.

This ranch-specific conversation helped Colleen get answers to some questions she had about profitability on the ranch. But it also helped her stick to a plan for her recordkeeping goals and the smaller steps it would take to reach them.

“Steven and I go back and forth all the time about raising our own hay,” says Colleen. “That’s one thing that Noble really challenged us to do, is to look closely at our haying operation. What does it cost for us, as cattle ranchers, to put up our own hay?”

At the time, it was a question she didn’t have an answer to. But she worked with Smith to develop a plan of action. It included finding a way to track expenses by enterprise or even by activity, like making hay. Collecting handwritten slips of paper from the hay crew can feel tedious. But, in the end, she feels it will be worth the effort.

“It’s probably the biggest challenge we had from Noble, and it’s been really eye-opening,” says Colleen. “The next time Steven asks me, ‘What’s your hay costing you?’ I don’t have to spend four days trying to sleuth it out.”

With a new system in place this summer, Colleen is hopeful that she’ll have a much better idea of what hay really costs at Withers Ranch.

“Matt and I want to look back when we’re in our 60s and say, ‘Remember when we got $4 for these calves on the Western Video Market? And then remember when we took that money? That’s when we went to that Noble course and we started tracking things,’” says Colleen. “I want to look back on this time and realize that we did something really good with this good time because it probably won’t stay this way, and we know that.”

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Strong Business in Tough Times

Posted on July 10, 2026August 11, 2026 by Cattle- Web-Manager-2

Strong Business in Tough Times

Livestock producers are built on toughness and grit. Drought, feed costs, cattle prices, labor shortages: every generation of producers has faced hardship and found a way through.

But there’s a more difficult question underneath all of it. What happens to the operation when the person running it steps back? A recent industry poll found only 43% of livestock producers have a succession plan in place.* That number hasn’t moved much in years, even as the pressure on operations has increased.

“The size and complexity of many of today’s farms require leaders with a different skill set than what their traditional mentors can offer,” says Matt Ronken, CEO of UnCommon Farms. “We’re teaching them to be CEOs of multi-generational, high-risk operations in a highly disrupted industry.”

Operations today are bigger than they used to be, which means there’s more at stake every time one changes hands. A cattle operation without a plan doesn’t just risk a rocky transition. It risks the herd, the land base, and the relationships that took decades to build, all changing hands in a way nobody intentionally chose.

That land doesn’t stay empty. It gets absorbed into a neighboring ranch, sold to an investor, or folded into a larger company. None of those outcomes are inherently bad on their own. But they’re outcomes a family ends up with by default, not by choice, when nobody plans far enough ahead to choose something else.

Ben Cather, an UnCommon Farms member from Kansas, sees that shift firsthand. “Farms that are staying in business are not getting smaller,” he says. “They’re getting larger, and that transition to the next generation, as things get larger, can be harder.”

Here’s what tends to happen instead of planning for the future. The daily demands of running the farm take priority, like calving, harvest, markets, weather, and whatever breaks down that morning. All of them are real and urgent. Long-term planning gets pushed to “when things slow down.” For most operations, things never slow down. Years go by. The plan remains a conversation instead of a document.

Rich Bronec, an UnCommon Farms member from Montana, has watched that pattern play out at his own place. “The day-to-day can overtake that long-term planning,” he says. “That’s where so many agriculture operations fall short.” Bronec credits the peer group and coach he works with through UnCommon Farms for keeping succession on the table instead of letting it slide. “You always have in the background this other part of your business that you’re working on,” he says. “It gives the older generation confidence in the younger generation’s management.”

That’s exactly when strong business fundamentals matter most. Not when the margins are good and everything is forgiving. It’s when the margins are thin, and one bad decision costs more than it used to. The operations that hold up in a tough year aren’t always the biggest ones. They’re the ones with a clear plan, a clear read on their numbers, and people who know their roles.

That combination doesn’t happen by accident, and it rarely happens alone. UnCommon Farms, a farmer-owned business coaching and peer network organization, was built around the idea that farms need expert guidance and advice just like any other successful business. Its financial services roots go back to 1967. Its team carries over 1,000 years of combined agriculture experience, real operators and advisors who’ve sat where its members are sitting, and who know what it actually takes to get an operation through a hard stretch.

UnCommon Farms members aren’t handed generic advice built for a different industry. They’re farmers and ranchers working alongside farmers and ranchers, with the kind of coaching and structure most farm businesses never get access to on their own. That’s the peer group Bronec leans on. It’s also the reason Cather doesn’t have to solve every problem alone. “If we see a problem here, there’s somebody in that building (UnCommon Farms) who’s either seen the exact same thing or something similar,” he says. “Or your coach can put you in contact with a farm they’ve run across. All the farms are more than willing to share their experience and what they’ve done.”

“The risk is, if you don’t find somebody or a group you trust, you’re only going to have a limited view, based on what you can see on your own,” Ronken says. “That’s one of the things we bring, and our community brings, in terms of peer learning. It’s such a powerful piece of being part of UnCommon Farms.”

That kind of access changes what a hard year actually costs. A problem that might take months to work through alone gets solved in a phone call, because someone else already figured it out. A decision that might get made on instinct gets made with input from people who’ve seen it play out before. That’s not a small advantage when margins are tight and mistakes are expensive.

That kind of support covers the full operation, not just one part of it. Succession planning that turns a postponed conversation into an actual documented path for ownership. It’s a plan that names who takes over, when, and how, instead of leaving it to whoever’s still standing when the time comes. Financial clarity, strategy, and benchmarking that give members a clear read on where things stand against real peers, not a national average that doesn’t reflect their scale. Decisions get made on real numbers instead of gut feel. Strategic planning and risk management to help plan for what’s ahead rather than reacting to it. HR and people strategy for hiring, training, and retaining good people, a skill that’s separate from running the operation itself. And support for the next generation, because handing over an operation isn’t just a legal transition. It’s about who’s ready to lead.

No operation gets through a hard stretch on toughness alone. It takes peers who’ve faced the same problem and will actually tell you how they solved their challenge. It takes expert advice to provide a picture of the numbers clear enough to guide decisions with confidence instead of guesswork. It takes a real plan for who leads next, built long before anyone’s forced to use it.

The tougher the year, the less an operation can afford to go it alone. Succession, finances, people, risk: whatever’s keeping you up at night, now is the time to get a clear plan in place, not after a bad season forces the issue.

Call Justin Friedrich at (618) 619-2166 or email jfriedrich@uncommonfarms.com to talk about what that looks like for your operation. Learn more at uncommonfarms.com.

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