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BISMARCK — Like most good businesses, Jeremy
Allen’s farm continues evolving. Since purchasing his first herd of
cattle in 1995, at the age of 14, he’s changed the scope and focus of
his operation multiple times. He’s kept his assets diverse and his
enterprise flexible and nimble; traits that have helped him weather bad
markets and plant his foot in emerging ones.
“We’re into everything,” Allen says. “I mean you can’t just
do one thing anymore. You’ve got to have cattle, chickens, the whole
nine yards. The only way we can make it work is to diversify.”
When Allen, now 30, purchased those first cows, he was
starting from scratch. That herd helped him establish credit, which
later helped him buy his first home and, of course, more cows. In 2005,
two years after he and his wife, Magen, were married, he decided to
try his hand at poultry and bought a two-house laying hen farm. That
first year, the couple grew 3.5 million eggs under a contract for the
Keith Smith Company.
Frustrated with the high cost of cattle feed in 2007,
Allen’s thoughts turned to gin trash, a waste by-product of the cotton
ginning process. Working on a hunch, he acquired some of this refuse
and sent it off for nutrition testing.
“Ordinarily, the trash is just spread back over the cotton
fields,” he says. “But, because it contained some seeds, hulls and
cotton, I hoped the tests would prove it had benefit as feed.”
The tests proved him right, so shortly afterward, he bought a
tractor-trailer and started hauling the “trash” from several central
Arkansas cotton gins to his own farm. Allen, pleased with the effect on
his herd, started marketing this newfound bargain feed to other
ranchers. After some initial skepticism, it took off.
Today, Allen runs a large-scale feed business, mixing and
hauling all sorts of things other people throw away: rice hulls, dust
and bran; distillers’ grains; soy hulls; even leftover product from a
breakfast cereal mill in Memphis. They’ve got a whole fleet of trucks
and trailers; a 13,000 square-foot storage barn; mixing, loading and
bagging equipment; and a pellet mill. The operation services more than
300 regular customers with millions of pounds of feed changing hands
each year. In May, Magen left her job with Summit Bank in Arkadelphia,
so she could help Jeremy keep up with the steadily increasing demand.
“The feed business has become the life blood of our
operation,” Allen says. “Without it, we would’ve struggled to survive
hard times in the cattle and poultry industry.”
In addition to saving his farm, Allen’s innovative ideas and
commitment to adaptability garnered some outside attention. This year,
he and Magen are one of the three finalist-families in Arkansas Farm
Bureau’s Young Farmers & Ranchers (YF&R) Achievement Award
competition. The other finalists are Josh and Melissa Cureton of Cash
(Craighead County), who produce rice and soybeans; and Brian and
Elizabeth Walker of Horatio (Sevier County), who run cow-calf, feeder
calves and broiler operations.
The YF&R Achievement Award honors young farmers and
ranchers across the state for their hard work, innovation, progress and
the general excellence of their operations. The winner of the award
will be announced at the 76th Arkansas Farm Bureau Convention, which
takes place Dec. 1-3 in Hot Springs. The winning couple will take home a
Chevrolet 1500 quad cab truck and an expenses-paid trip to the
American Farm Bureau Convention in January in Atlanta to compete for the
national award.
Jeremy and Magen have both been extremely active in Farm
Bureau and its YF&R program. Jeremy has been on the Hot Spring
County Farm Bureau Board of Directors since 2005 and has led the county
organization’s YF&R committee since 2004. He and Magen served as
chairmen of the statewide YF&R committee from 2007-2008, a position
which gave Jeremy an ex-officio seat on the ArFB board. He is
currently a member of that board’s Trade Advisory Committee.
“We’ve benefitted a great deal from our involvement in Farm
Bureau,” Magen says. “If we hadn’t started it years ago, I don’t think
we’d be as far along as we are now. We’ve met so many great people;
people who’ve helped us grow as leaders.”
The Allens have two sons: Lane, 5, and Brody, 2.
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