In the chicken and pork industries, nearly every aspect of the animals’ raising has long been controlled by just a handful of agriculture conglomerates. But the cattle industry is still populated by mom-and-pop operations, at least at the calf-raising level.
Barbara McIntire Roux likes to say that she was born into the cattle business. Roux, 70, is a third-generation Shorthorn rancher in central Kansas, where the prairie pastures are thick with brome and bluestem grasses.
“We have to record about as much information on those calves when they’re born as what a human baby has to have collected,” Roux says with pride.
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