In 1967 George and Gertrude Meiwes came to Allen County to find land.
Living in the famed Llano Estacado — flatland on the High Plains of west Texas that an early Spanish explorer once said “is unending as is the ocean” — Gertrude’s only requirement was that if the family moved to Kansas, the land had to be flat enough “so I can see a long ways.”
The Meiwes family found such a place northwest of Moran.
Son Gene, 5 at the time, had been born in Hereford, Texas, and didn’t have a say, but fit right in with the family’s farming, just as his son, Seth, has in more recent times.
Gene and Seth, and their families, were selected this year as soil and water conservation winners, annual recognition promoted by the banks of Allen County through the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The Meiweses of the ’60s settled on 800 acres. Cattle, once as many 3,000 yearlings, were a favorite of George’s. He attended livestock sales to build the herd each year. Never was there a day when a large number of cattle weren’t wherein sight of the Meiwes headquarters.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Gene and Seth have a herd of 800 cows and 600 offspring in the process of gaining weight on grass and supplement. At 800 to 900 pounds, the youngers are transferred to a feedyard in Nebraska for intensive weight gain.
“Usually, we have 650 cows, but with good crops and cheaper cattle we bought another 150 this year,” said Seth, whose nature it is to study a question before he replies, a trait he picked up from his affable father. “We also have two families to support,” which requires decisions predicated on what pays out better, said Gene, 54. That’s why wheat hasn’t been a part of the crop rotation in recent years; “It just didn’t figure out.”
The cow-calf operation works this way for the Meiweses:
They turn in bulls with cows twice a year to have two sets of calves, spring and fall. The strategy has new calves taking their first taste of mother’s milk during times when weather usually is not too cold and debilitating. Grass also is better, first for cows carrying calves and then when the youngsters accept grass as an alternative.
First-calf heifers are prepped for their dates with motherhood on Flint Hills pastures controlled by a brother-in-law. Grass there is better than found hereabouts. Calves also are moved to the Flint Hills to fatten naturally before being moved to Nebraska and an eventual date with processors.
TO SUPPORT their beef enterprise the Meiweses own and rent 3,300 acres of grass — pasture and hayland — and 2,000 acres of cropland.
Taking care of their herd and all that land isn’t a task for the faint of heart.
“They work from before daylight to after dark,” said Gene’s wife, Karen. And it’s just the two of them; no hired hands.
Seth settled on a career when he was in kindergarten, Karen recalled. “He told me one day there was no need for us to think about him going to college, he was going to farm.”
He had an early start.
Seth, 29, attended school in Moran. He’d go to his grandparents’ home early each day to hoe dandelions in his grandmother’s garden before catching the school bus. In high school, “I didn’t do sports because I wanted to get home and get to work on the farm.”
Nothing changed after high school graduation, although he did take time to court and marry wife Brittany in 2011. They built a home on the homeplace.
Dad’s story is much the same. Never was there a time when farming didn’t occupy his thoughts for the future. “I always did chores before going to school in the morning and I always enjoyed working on the farm,” doing all that goes into ensuring a successful venture.
The father-son team is optimistic, but realistic.
“Crops were good this year (theirs being corn and soybeans) and they were good in 2015,” Seth said. “We may be due for a bad year, but you always hope not.”
Their approach to crops tends to the traditional; they haven’t engaged in no-till.
They start working ground in January, applying fertilizer and ripping into stubble and dirt with equipment large enough to make cultivation of 2,000 acres doable.
Time spent on crops does have limits, measured in weeks during planting, harvesting and preparing again for another season. Beef is another story.
Though not as labor-intensive as a dairy, riding herd on a cow-calf operation is a daily affair.
They’ve implemented frost-free watering tanks in several ponds to guarantee supply, no matter the weather. Whenever they’ve cleaned out an older pond, five so far, the Meiweses have added fencing to keep cattle at bay. Downstream from each are concrete water stations.
An aside is goldfish have been dropped into the tanks to keep algae and many other impurities to a minimum.
“We had one goldfish that got this big,” said Gene, holding his hands a foot apart. It disappeared one day — or probably night. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what became to the fish, with coon tracks around.
The Meiweses are firmly entrenched in the belief that soil and water conservation practices don’t cost, rather pay dividends over time in keeping topsoil in place and water, so important for cattle, available.
They have 28,250 feet — that’s better than five miles — of terraces on their land and 31.75 acres of grass waterways. Terraces curb erosion on uneven fields by capturing runoff from rains and then channeling it to waterways.
