Next-Gen Spotlight: Matt Adams Created His Niche By Doing Things No One Else Wanted To Do

While Matt Adams grew up in an ag-friendly family, he considers himself a first-generation farmer. An elderly neighbor taught him the ropes of raising cattle and developed his love for the industry. Following his passing, Adams was able to buy that operation and transitioned to a full-time farmer a few years ago. Today he and his wife, Molly, have a cow-calf operation and farm 900 acres. They also sell direct to consumers through a retail freezer beef business.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
“Work hard but don’t think that you can work your way out of a situation with just manual labor. You need to spend as much time in the office as outside doing the actual farm work.”

What was the hardest part of getting started?
“Our biggest limiting factor is just access to the land. We’re in an area where development is rampant and there are still a lot of active farmers, so land is in high demand here. Another huge challenge was access to capital. As a first-generation farmer we’ve had to build 90% of our infrastructure. We finally were able to build a farm shop three years ago, and last year we built our first grain bin and started our grain storage facility. It’s a challenge overcoming the capital hurdle because you can’t do it all at once.”

What obstacles have you had to overcome?
“There’s always been a lot of negativity in agriculture, whether it’s real apparent or not. As a young guy starting out, you get a lot of people trying to give you advice and a lot of that advice is actually discouragement. I had people tell me that I didn’t need to worry about full-time farming. I should have a few cows, go get a job in town and be happy. I shouldn’t strive for anything more because it was too risky. I really let that hold me back for a long time. I worked as a county Extension agent for about 12 years. I listened to people say I wasn’t farming enough acres, there wasn’t enough opportunity or I couldn’t make enough money. I think hearing those kinds of comments probably kept me from being a full-time farmer sooner.”

What advice would you give to other young farmers?
“Create your own opportunities by finding the things that no one else wants to do. This is how I ended up in the small square hay bale business. In the beginning, it was a labor-intensive enterprise that many didn’t want to mess with. Although we’ve mechanized the bale handling process with the use of a bale accumulator and grapple system, growing high-quality hay is still an extremely time and management intensive enterprise. Because we live in horse country, we do, however, have the potential for a high return per acre on our hay, so we’re rewarded for this management.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received in the cattle business is that it’s not the good ones that make you money, it’s how you manage the bad ones. This was one of the main reasons for starting our retail freezer beef business. We’re take calves that don’t fit in with the rest of a group, either because of color or some type of visual blemish, and add value to them before they leave the farm.

On the row crop side, as a beginning farmer in an area with a lot of competition for land, I’ve had to take whatever land I can get. A lot of what we farm is basically whatever everyone else doesn’t want: marginal, rolling, highly erodible land that’s hard to farm, especially with bigger equipment. While it’s less efficient to farm than large, flat tracts, we’ve developed a system that includes no-till, the use of cover crops and technologies like variable-rate seeding and hydraulic downforce on our planter that helps us be more productive on these acres. Even on marginal land, our yields will consistently be above the county average.”

Favorite way to relax?
My favorite way to relax is probably eating a bowl of ice cream. I’m a big cookies and cream fan if I had to pick a favorite.

Mountains or Beach?
“I am definitely a mountains person. That’s where my wife and I went on our honeymoon while everybody else our age seemed to go to the beach.”

What is your final message to readers?
“We couldn’t do any of this without faith. Too many things have happened that shouldn’t have worked out but did. It just reinforces that no matter how hard you work, you’re not 100% in control. Once I let go of that, things seemed to come easier, and the stress load was way lighter.”