When avid hunter and outdoorsman Tom Cannon was in his mid-20s, he experimented with no-till and interseeded food plots to attract white-tailed deer and other game on his family’s ranch near the small town of Newkirk in north-central Oklahoma.

What he learned about cover crops, seed placement and interseeding from those experiences is evident on today’s Goodson Ranch, a nearly-10,000-acre family farming and cattle operation with land on both sides of the Arkansas River just south of the Kansas state line. 

Labor for the operation is primarily Cannon and his wife, Laurie, and children Jacob, Reagan, Reese and Rachel. While Jacob handles most of the harvesting and Reagan and Reese run the planter and drill — sometimes around the clock for several days at a time —…