There’s little Glen Klippenstein loves more than a sunny afternoon spent looking at cattle. These days, he enjoys those afternoons on his son Brian’s place near Maysville, Mo. It’s a scene that’s played out for most of his 89 years, from his grandparents’ Saskatchewan homestead to the showring at the National Western Stock Show to the boardroom of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board.
Klippenstein’s story starts with an orphan calf. He was 5 years old, living on his grandparents’ homestead in northern Saskatchewan, when his dad handed him the calf to raise.
“That made me fall in love with livestock,” Klippenstein recalls. “I think I had it in my genes to begin with. It just fortified it.”
Six years later, the family moved to Pennsylvania so Klippenstein and his three younger siblings could get a better education. The last thing sold at the farm sale before they left was his horse — his only real friend in that sparsely populated stretch of Saskatchewan.
“The auctioneer said $70, and that was the last bid I got,” Klippenstein recalls. “The guy walked off with my horse and my heart.”
That night, his father delivered a lesson Klippenstein has carried the rest of his life: You can’t ever get married to a piece of livestock; they are to make a living with.
In Pennsylvania, Klippenstein was the only kid in his school who came from an ag background — and he made it his business to prove farm kids could compete with anyone. He graduated valedictorian, class president and captain of the wrestling team, then enrolled at Penn State, where his world opened up.
“I worked at the beef barn,” he explains. “I worked for Herman Purdy, who was kind of Mr. Beef Cattleman of the planet, and he taught me so much. I learned more there than I did in the classroom.”
Purdy, who also served as farm adviser to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, arranged for Klippenstein to spend some time with the president at his Gettysburg farm shortly before graduation, talking Pickett’s Charge, D-Day and the value of agriculture.
“For a kid 21 years old to listen to all this and be in that presence, it really fortified my dreams, hopes, ambitions,” he recalls.
He turned down a job managing Eisenhower’s farm. Instead, he borrowed $14,000 from a friend, rented 700 acres and built his own herd, starting with veal calves, Holstein replacement heifers bred to a young bull named Ivanhoe, who would go on to become one of the breed’s most influential sires, and alfalfa hay.
“I’ve almost always valued my bulls for how good their mothers and grandmothers were,” he says.
The Glenkirk Era: Setting a New Standard
In 1966, Klippenstein partnered with Kirk Pendleton and moved to Maysville, Mo., forming Glenkirk Farms.
During the next 28 years, Klippenstein and his team built one of the Hereford breed’s most recognized programs: about 1,200 registered (Hereford, Angus, Simmental and Chianina) cows, more than 7,000 bulls sold and customers in 50 states and 22 countries.
He built the program on two convictions that ran against the grain of the era: performance over pedigree, and lean over fat.
“I hated small cows, and I despised waste fat and guts,” Klippenstein stresses.
With a direct-to-consumer business offering wrapped beef cuts, he trimmed carcasses to the quarter inch — before most anyone else was measuring fat at all — and found leaner cattle paid better. Focusing on calories and other input resources, Klippenstein’s goal was to produce a high-quality eating experience for his consumer.
“Performance was, to me, just a big deal,” he says.
He wrote his college dissertation on performance testing; his professor gave him an A instead of an A-plus because there weren’t enough published references to cite.
“It’s because there weren’t any,” Klippenstein recalls.
From 1979 to 1992, focused on collecting data from conception to consumer — long before most — Klippenstein says they spent about a quarter of a million dollars testing 20-plus steers per sire on 60 herd bulls including feed intake data.
The showring is where the world discovered Glenkirk’s cattle. From 1971 to 1984, the farm had the grand and/or reserve champion Polled Hereford bull at the National Western Stock Show 12 times, and its cattle went on to win 19 national grand or reserve championships.
“Glen Klippenstein is a legend,” says Shane Bedwell, American Hereford Association COO. “You don’t have to look at too many pedigrees in the association’s herdbook, and you can find the GK prefix and the influential bulls that have gone on to contribute a lot to the breed.”
Pioneering the National Beef Checkoff
By the late 1970s, Klippenstein saw a threat bigger than any one herd could fix: American beef demand was sliding, and producers were leaving the business.
“The consumer didn’t have much confidence in us,” Klippenstein recalls. “We were losing producers like crazy.”
He joined a group of producers pushing for a national Beef Checkoff and became an original member of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board (CBB) when it held its first meeting in the fall of 1986.
“We took the bull by the horns,” he says. “We got Congress to help us, which they finally did through legislation. And a whole checkoff program was begun.”
Jo Ann Smith, 1986 to 1987 CBB chair, says, “Glen brought with him a tremendous amount of knowledge and a depth of years of experience with production and with consumers. He absolutely knew the consumer.
Glen had studied it. Glen knew what the trends were.”
As Beef Board chair in 1990 to 1991, Klippenstein helped put in place the financial and auditing standards that still govern how checkoff dollars are spent today — rules that helped the program survive multiple legal challenges, including one that reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
“We made sure our funds were recorded exactly, that every dollar could be accounted for,” he explains.
Cheryl DeVuyst, CBB 2026 chair, adds, “He stepped up when he saw beef demand declining in the 1970s and 1980s. Glen’s ideas and achievements changed our industry for the better in so many ways.”
Klippenstein chaired National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s (NCBA) long-range planning committee in its early years, and remembers that the group’s first list of industry priorities didn’t mention genetics at all. He and fellow board member Jo Ann Smith worked to change that.
“From the second time on, we promoted it, and let all of our peers know what genetics really meant,” Klippenstein says. “It’s been the No. 1 priority for many, many years.”
He doesn’t take today’s stronger beef demand for granted, and he doesn’t think producers should either.
“We’re fat and happy now. But let’s not fall asleep at the wheel. The most dangerous time in a pig’s life is when it’s fat, and we better not be like a pig,” he emphasizes.
From the Showring to the Missouri Senate
Klippenstein sold Glenkirk in 1993 and, that same year, won a Missouri Senate seat as the first Republican to carry his district since the Great Depression.
“We made some sense. We didn’t beat around the bush. We did it for the good of our constituents,” he says.
He later served on the board of the Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation, known as Farmer Mac, by presidential appointment, and returned to the Missouri Legislature as a state representative from 2011 to 2013.
Through it all — the showring, the checkoff, the statehouse — Klippenstein says the throughline has been a belief that promotion matters as much as production.
“Life, business and politics are about one-half motion — doing things — and one-half promotion,” he says. “If you’ve got the best herd of cattle and you don’t promote them, so what?”
In addition to his years spent on the Cattlemen’s Beef Board, Klippenstein’s years of service in the cattle industry include a term as chair of the American Polled Hereford Association, six years as NCBA director and nine years as CEO of the American Chianina Association.
The Next Generation and a Visionary Legacy
Teaching and leading by example has always been a priority for Klippenstein.
Today, Klippenstein and his wife, Linda, split their time between family and cattle near Maysville, where he and son Brian still have a small Hereford herd. The couple has four children, nine grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Asked what advice he’d give a young producer, Klippenstein doesn’t hesitate: get involved, and stay positive.
“Negative is almost like having an anvil on your ankles, and being positive is like having wind underneath your wings,” he says. “This is one of the most exciting, challenging vocations there is — you can be almost anything and still be a really good cattleman that contributes to his community.”
That mindset — and a career built on it — has earned Klippenstein a lifetime of recognition: induction into the American Hereford Association Hall of Fame in 2005, the National Western Stock Show’s Friend of the National Western honor in 2022, and, this July, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board’s Beef Checkoff Visionary Award, presented in Denver — a city where Klippenstein figures he’s spent close to two years of his life doing the business of cattle.
“Glen is a prime example of a true cattleman who saw an opportunity to step up for his industry,” summarizes Cattlemen’s Beef Board CEO Greg Hanes. “He’s been absolutely tireless over the years, between raising great cattle and sharing his love and respect for agriculture.”
Known for his strong, dynamic presence, Klippenstein has spent his lifetime measuring real success in the people who came alongside him.
“I wouldn’t have traded my life — or the people in it — for anything. This has been such a gift,” he summarizes.
GLEN KLIPPENSTEIN, BY THE NUMBERS
▪ 1,200-plus registered Hereford and Angus cows at Glenkirk Farms’ peak
▪ 7,000-plus bulls sold, plus thousands of females and units of semen
▪ 50 states, 22 countries reached by Glenkirk genetics
▪ 12 of 14 years Glenkirk had the grand and/or reserve champion Polled Hereford bull at the National Western Stock Show, 1971-1984
▪ 19 national grand or reserve championships won
▪ 1986 became an original member of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board
▪ 1990-91 served as Cattlemen’s Beef Board chairman
▪ 1993-94 (Senate), 2011-2013 (House of Representatives) served in the Missouri Legislature
▪ 2005 inducted into the American Hereford Association Hall of Fame
▪ 2022 named National Western Stock Show Friend of the National Western
▪ 2026 receives the Cattlemen’s Beef Board’s Beef Checkoff Visionary Award
