Blake Allen

I was born and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, however my dad and his brothers still owned the family farm where they were raised about 30 minutes from our house. I spent most of my weekends and summers growing up helping various family members and friends on their farms. I became interested in buying some cattle of my own when I was about 13, so dad and I rebuilt the fences and cleared off the overgrown brush on our farm. When I was a freshman in high school, I bought my first 10 cows with money I had saved over the years. We kept about 60 brood cows between the two of us, made hay all summer, fed hay all winter, and lost money all year like most folks around us did. I graduated from North Carolina State University with a degree in Agricultural Business Management in 2017, a couple of years after losing my father to cancer. Since then I have restructured my operation into one that focuses on buying livestock that will increase in value with good forage and a little management, and have found much more satisfaction through this method than I did with our old ways.