Manatee agriculture leaders work to keep cow country tradition alive here

About 15 years ago, Myakka City cattleman Cliff Coddington wanted the University of Florida to hire a livestock agent for Manatee County who could get technical knowledge to people who kept cows and debunk the misperceptions among the surge of newcomers who didn’t.

Christa Carlson wanted to come home.

Carlson had the right credentials — a UF College of Agricultural and Life Sciences degree, a few years working for UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences 4-H Extension in another county, and experience with animals.

Coddington also thought Carlson could play an important part in preserving the heritage of Manatee’s cow country because it was her heritage. Her parents were among those who volunteered at the Manatee County Fair every year. While she was not the girl next door, she was the girl who went to 4-H next door. Coddington’s sister led the Manatee 4-H livestock club back then, and she sometimes hosted meetings at her home next door to Coddington’s.

Coddington wasn’t the only Manatee cattleman who saw potential in Carlson. Jim Strickland of Blackbeard’s Ranch, too, had been a director of the county fair and knew Carlson from her 4-H cow show days.

Having a homegrown agent meant a lot to a sixth-generation Manatee cattleman like Coddington. And she came with an endorsement from her predecessor, who also had been Coddington’s agriculture teacher at Southeast High School, Travis Seawright.

Today, Coddington is president of the Florida Cattlemen’s Association (Strickland is also a former FCA president) and Carlson is now livestock agent Christa Kirby. They continue to work on keeping the sprawl of population growth from contributing to the vanishing of ranchlands in Manatee and to a vanishing awareness of agriculture among the general public.

Kirby established programming geared toward ranchettes, generally the properties of newcomers with little pre-existing cattle knowledge. While it didn’t do much for Coddington’s operation, it did a lot for his industry. Helping hobby ranchers could prevent mistakes and practices that could turn the public against even the professionals. Kirby and Coddington organized events to bring non-cattle people to ranches.

They also helped the pros. Kirby is part of an Extension team of livestock agents that serves South Florida cattlemen and cattlewomen. She assisted in bringing the UF/IFAS Alvin C. Warnick Cattle Reproductive Management School just over the county line in Sarasota County, where Coddington hosted it for several years on the Longino Ranch, where he’s been the general manager for 16 years.

Kirby spent years gathering forage samples at Longino and sending them to the UF/IFAS Range Cattle Research and Education Center for testing. She presented the results in a comprehensible way that has guided Coddington’s decisions on what and when supplementation to his cow herd should occur.

Kirby and Coddington now have 15 more years of shared history, creating agriculture-related memories for the next generation through 4-H, FFA, and fairs. They’re fellow guardians of Manatee cow country heritage.

They prefer cattle to concrete. They accept that the latter comes with growth as long as it doesn’t also come with a community amnesia that leaves agriculture out of the vision of what makes Manatee County special.

J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s vice president for agriculture and natural resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).