As Missouri Governor Mike Kehoe tells it, his experience in the agricultural industry as a cattle farmer is a cornerstone of how he approaches both business and politics. Speaking yesterday to the St. Louis AgriBusiness Club, he acknowledged it’s a rather unusual perspective for someone who grew up in North St. Louis.
But Kehoe says everything changed when he spent time on the farm owned by the man who hired him for an after-school job at age 15: Dave Sinclair. “I thought, this is the world I want to be from, and I quickly transitioned from being a city dweller to eventually acquiring my first farm when I was 19, and then first set of cattle when I was 21,” Kehoe says.
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He explains his time on the farm taught him when something inevitably goes wrong with equipment, such as a flat tire, a busted hydraulic hose, or dead battery, there’s no time to delay responding to it.
“That’s what has helped me so much in small business, is that you don’t just lay around and cry about the problem. Find a solution and implement it, because that’s what agriculture does,” Kehoe says. He now hopes the agricultural industry can help hook more city kids with its values and the opportunities it presents.
Go Deeper: The governor touted agriculture’s $93 billion impact on Missouri’s economy when fielding questions from members of the local agribusiness community, including both family farmers and members of large ag companies, such as Bunge and Bayer. Kehoe shared how St. Louis’ prowess in plant science is an important selling point for the state.
“We have one of the largest, if not the largest, concentrations of scientists in the plant science business,” he says. “This is the mecca. This is where people want to come to be part of that. We sell on that as hard as we can.”
Kehoe also addressed some of the simmering concerns over crop commodity markets given President Trump’s ongoing trade war, which he says he has faith will be resolved.
“The president… seems to find a way to negotiate a deal that’s best,” Kehoe says. “I believe he has the farmers’ best interest in mind. It’s been a little unnerving, I get it, but I think you’ll see some results that end up actually putting us in an even more winning position.”
Last week the U.S. and Chinese governments reached an agreement where the latter will purchase 12 million metric tons of U.S. soybeans for the rest of the year, and 25 metric tons for the next three years, around what it had been purchasing before the trade war.
What’s Next: Kehoe says he’s also focused on the longevity of Missouri’s agricultural industry given the average age of farmers in the state is near 60. He says agriculture is “who we are, who we’re always going to be,” and an industry that needs to be invested in for the future.
“We’ve got to get more urban, younger people involved in the labor market, especially when it comes to agriculture,” he says, adding he knows there is interest from younger people based on what he see when they visit his farm. “It’s like me when I was 15; they are just incredibly enamored that there’s a place that has cattle. They want to take pictures as fast as they can.”
He sees the future of the state’s agriculture industry tied to helping more people understand what exactly it entails.
“This is not a Democrat or Republican statement; this is an urban versus rural statement. There’s a lot of people in our legislative building that have never been on a farm. Have no idea how a farm works, what it takes to put something to market,” Kehoe says. “Our future relies on us continuing to get the population that consumes a lot of our product understand what it takes to get that product to the table.”
