I am originally from the Piedmont area of Virginia, where I grew up working at a large backgrounding and purebred (Red Angus, Balancer) cattle operation. I also had the opportunity in high school to guide pack trips and work at a ranch in Mammoth Lakes, California. I am currently attending Montana State University where I’m pursuing a B.S. in Animal Science and working for Churchill Cattle Co. in Manhattan, MT. I’m a member of the Virginia Farm Bureau and the Virginia Hunting Dog Alliance, and I’m especially interested in the preservation of both agriculture and the cattle industry in the South and my goal is to continue to promote the beef industry and to keep young people like myself involved.
I want to thank the YPC for giving me an opportunity to write here, and giving so many young producers a place to share their views and hopefully fight the good fight to keep our traditions and way of life going. That being said, I’m excited to be a part of such a great group of writers and people committed to the preservation of, in my opinion, the embodiment of classic Americana, agriculture. I feel like I can also bring a good dose of diversity to this group. Off the bat my family does not own land (Strike One) and in all honesty my immediate family is at least a generation or two removed from production agriculture (Strike Two). And we may have to go to the NCBA archives on this one, but I’m 99 percent sure that I am the first person in my family to actually be a member of the NCBA (Big-Time Strike 3). I know what you’re thinking by now, it can’t get any more ridiculous, right? Well I grew up in Virginia, and started working for a large backgrounding and purebred Red Angus and Balancer operation, and from there spent several summers working for a ranch that cared for lease cattle and guiding pack trips in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. I am currently a sophomore at Montana State University where I’m majoring in Animal Science with a concentration in Livestock Industry Management and I work for a seedstock Hereford operation, Churchill Cattle Company. For all of my traveling though, I still consider Virginia my home and I still have a strong bond to both the cattle industry and producers there.
For all that my upbringing lacked agriculturally, I have started to become more and more involved on a state and national level with groups aligned to preserve traditions that I now identify as a way of life. I am a member of the Virginia Farm Bureau and the Virginia Hunting Dog Alliance, a group dedicated to preserving rural Virginia culture, and I hope to be strongly involved in the preservation of agriculture not only in Virginia and the South, but in the U.S. as a whole. I choose to be involved with YPC because I believe that it gives young producers not only a platform from which to discuss issues and let their opinions be heard, but a unified voice and action against those who don’t support our industry or way of life. Like several others on this blog I have seen first hand the encroachment of development on land that I hope one day to call my own. My hope is that the YPC will allow me to grow both as a producer and member of this industry and as a person, and be a part of a larger voice that continues to preserve our heritage and industry.