The Future of Meat: My Small Research Ranch Near Kansas City

I'm pushing every front of ranching as far as I can stand to push it, with an army of AI agents working for me.

The robots are coming to the pasture. I'm building some of them myself. Agents do the research, the records, the planning and the paperwork; I make the calls and do the learning.

I have a small place of about 20 acres in the Kansas City area, a few cattle on the way, and one goal: raise the healthiest beef I can for myself, my friends, and my family, while finding out how far a small ranch can go: fences, water, health monitoring, grass, marketing, all of it. That's ambition and approach, not results. I haven't run a single season yet, and the people who've done this for generations know things I don't. This is where I'm documenting all of it: the vision, the build, the wins, and the stuff that breaks.

If you're new here, start with our mission and why go hard-core carnivore. This section is about where the meat comes from next.

What I'm building

• Virtual fences instead of wire. GPS collars (Nofence) that let me draw paddocks on my phone and move the herd without pulling polywire. Early commercial: a real product on the market today. → Virtual fencing
• Water that follows the herd. A self-cleaning French trough (La Buvette CLEAN-FLOW 350) on a robot I'm designing myself, so the cattle never camp around a fixed tank. My own build (robot) · Early commercial (trough). → Mobile clean water
• Chickens that follow the cows. Mobile and eventually robotic coops that move in behind the herd. Proven (the practice) · Early commercial (self-moving coops) · My own build (my robotic coop). → Chickens that follow the herd
• Soil you can see from the road. Everything above serves one thing: grass and soil that look good across the whole place, not just in patches. → Soil and pasture health
• Beef for the people I care about. → Pasture to plate · Processors near KC

First big milestone: 2027

Buy stocker cattle in spring, graze them all season, and in fall sell at the sale barn or have a couple custom-processed for friends and family. Proven (the method) · My own build (doing it with collars and robots). → Milestone 2027 · Selling at the sale barn

Where this could go

• Robots that watch how cattle walk. Gait video from my own robots, scored against a stockman's eye. Early commercial (dairy) · My own build · Speculative (the dataset). → Lameness vision

• A marketplace for neighbors. Buying and selling cattle directly, with the trust a sale barn provides. Proven (private treaty) · Speculative (agent-run). → Cattle marketplace

• A network of stored grass. Stockpiled fescue, bale grazing, hay banks with neighbors. Proven · Speculative (the agent). → Hay network

• Agents organize, robots labor. Software handles the ranch office; machines handle the heavy lifting; I keep the judgment. Speculative. → Agents and robots

• Open range, agent-organized. Neighbors sharing grass, with herds rotating across properties and no new wire. Speculative. → Open range

• The whole beef industry. How AI could change every link from pasture to plate. Speculative. → Beef industry and AI

• Respect first. What I'm learning from the people who've done this for generations. → Learning the traditions

Follow along

• The vision: why a research ranch, and why a small place
• The roadmap: now, next, later, and when the robots show up
• Research and sources: every claim on these pages, with links

Honesty policy: I label everything as Proven, Early commercial, My own build, or Speculative. Speculative means a vision I'm thinking about, not something that exists or that I'm building yet. When I don't know a number, I say so.