OCA Commercial Cattleman of the Year Partnerships keep Shugert Farms running and growing Story & Photos by Amy Beth Graves For Bob Shugert, a new land purchase is like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Map in hand, he likes to ride through a new piece of property, figuring out the lay of the land and how to divide it up. He’s got a lot of puzzle pieces to put in place – which spot is best for building working facilities, which areas are prime for adding springs, which sections need brush hogged to remove invasive plants and where to place the fences so the cattle flow into the corral with minimal effort. “I love taking a bare piece of ground that has nothing on it and figuring out how to make it work with you and not against you. I really enjoy going into a new piece of land and seeing it develop from start to finish. You get bored doing the same old thing and you’ve got to find something new,” said Bob who runs a large cattle operation in eastern Ohio and Nebraska that is the 2021 recipient of the Ohio Cattleman’s Commercial Cattleman of the Year award. Bob is a man of motion, stopping rarely except for the occasional meal and always looking for the next opportunity to expand. He’s been doing this ever since he graduated from college and returned to the family farm in Guernsey County, determined to be 10 | Ohio Cattleman | Winter Issue 2021
his own boss and start his own cattle operation. Today, the size of Shugert Farms is impressive – about 3,000 cows spread out over thousands of acres in eastern Ohio counties and Nebraska. The cattle are mostly Leachman Stabilizer and primarily a Simmental-Angus cross. Bob’s partners in the cattle operation are Steve and Stephanie Harris, his brother Dwight and Jake and Janice Wolfinger who run the Nebraska side of the business. Running such a large cattle operation can be challenging but Bob wouldn’t have it any other way. “My parents were both self-employed farmers and never had off-thethe farm jobs and I never had interest in anything else,” he said. Bob knew from the get-to that he only wanted to work for one person – himself. While at Ohio State University pursuing an animal science degree, he skipped all internship and job opportunities and headed straight back to the 800-acre family farm after getting his degree. He started buying or renting nearby land and purchasing cattle and in just six to seven years, he was running about 200 head of cows. “I had about 200 cows on seven different places and was trying to do
artificial insemination on all those cows and it was really, really labor intensive. It was time consuming to get to those basically small farms that had maybe 30 cows on them and try to get all that done,” he said. “I was looking for something to run a lot more cows.” Bob found those large tracts of property in Belmont and Harrison counties and started purchasing stripmined land from coal companies about 24 years ago. Today Shugert Farms owns about 1,200 acres each in Belmont and Harrison counties. “Basically you can’t go anywhere in Belmont and Harrison counties without crossing our ground because we own so much property,” he said. Installing or repairing fences and improving the land for pastures has been a never-ending chore. Bob calculates he’s put in more than 250 miles of high tensile fence over the years, fencing out streams and woodlands and dividing the land up into 100acre pasture fields so the cows can be rotated about once a week. He’s had biosolids added to the land to improve the grass and ultimately the cows’ fertility in order to get more production from them. Driving along a swatch of property in Belmont County, Bob points out a patch of the Autumn ol-
