After speaking with one of my role models, Bobby Goble, I learned a few things about what it means to be a real cattle jock. Bobby owns a cow/calf production just like myself, but his is about three times the size of mine. Their farm, Ridgeview Farms, is located only a few miles from mine and is one of the top Hereford productions in the state of Michigan.
Bobby told me a lot about management and how he promotes his farm. Management includes a lot of gathering of information, record keeping, and manual labor. He does the same things that I do on my farm. As far as promotion goes, Bobby does a fair amount of ads, newsletters, and catalog articles in order to help his farm. He typically uses a lot of numbers, weights, birth dates, EPD numbers, as well as names of dams and sires that are used at Ridgeview. His style is typically very formal and infromational. Nothing too clever, he just simply needs to get the information about the farm out there. People who are interested in farms and cattle normally are drawn to numbers and names of sires and dams.
Bobby really helped me to learn what I will need in order to be successful in promoting my own farm. It needs to be simple and full of information about my cattle and what is for sale. It does not really need a whole lot of flowery words and style to it. Plain, simple, and to the point will do someone wonders in the cattle industry, unlike what we have read in class. Articles that we have read in class tend to be very personal and have a moral to the story. For what Bobby writes, it is short and informational, not long and full of a flowery, specific, and special style that will keep the readers attention for a long time.
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