Shepherd Farms

Dan Shepherd helped plant the first 15 acres of pecan trees at Shepherd Farms near Clifton Hill in North Central Missouri when he was 14 years old. The pecan orchard was just the first of many alternative crops that Jerrell Shepherd, the farm’s founder and Dan’s father, put into place on the 1,900-acre corn, soybean, and wheat farm he purchased in the late 1960s. Dan continued his father’s tradition when he took on full-time management of Shepherd Farms in 1985. He added buffalo and gamma grass to the annual grains and pecans grown on the farm. Dan integrated all the crops and livestock through an agroforestry system featuring alley cropping and management-intensive grazing.