CATTLE & BROOKIES

Some 10,000 years ago, glaciers formed during the last Ice Age were retreating from the Upper Midwest. While portions of Wisconsin were scraped into the rolling landscape found across much of the state, a roughly 24,000-square-mile piece of land at the intersection of Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, now called the Driftless Area, was left untouched. Broad ridge tops with shallow soil, river-formed valleys, and steep, craggy ravines make the region a geological anomaly. For millennia, this was fertile brook-trout habitat, but in an evolutionary blink of an eye, its waters became threatened by modern agriculture. More than 6,000 miles of trout water, with roughly 1,300 miles of public access, span this region of sandstone and limestone bedrock, but many of these creeks continue to compete with agriculture to survive.

The Cates Family Farm sits in the heart of the Driftless Area, in Iowa County, between the capitol of Madison to the east, and the Wisconsin-Iowa border to the west. After spending three years in Saudi Arabia in the ’80s managing the world’s largest dairy farm, Richard (Dick) Cates, and his wife, Kim, decided to return home in 1987 to raise their children and grow the family beef business on the land Dick’s father bought in 1967. The farm is a rotational “managed-grazing” beef operation, meaning the cattle—Angus and Jersey—are rotated through a series of pastures, as opposed to continuously grazing a