If you went up to an elementary school student and asked the young students what their dream job is, many of them might answer with things like veterinarian, doctor or astronaut. Fast forward to high school and those kids have more realistic goals: maybe still a doctor, maybe an engineer. For senior Brendan Kinsley, those typical dream jobs are not on his list.

The business of buying and selling cattle has taken over Kinsley’s life. With an entire folder dedicated to cattle commodity apps on his phone and the hands-on experience of shadowing his father, the senior already has his toes in the water of his future.

“I grew up in southwestern Kansas, in Sublette, which has maybe 1,000 people, and it’s very agricultural based,” Kinsley said. “I love it, I’ve grown up around it and ever since then I’ve wanted to do something in agriculture so I can move back there after college.”

Cattle commodities is just one of the thousands of commodity businesses out there. Everything that you own or consume is a commodity and has gone through the process of being bought, sold and traded.

“A cattle buyer will go to the show and judge and they look at the skin, they look at the chest see if it’s big and round,” Kinsley said. “If we can make money off of them then we get on the computer, do the math and get on the phone, take however much we want from the feedlots and we tell them our price.”

Kinsley spends most of his time learning the ins and outs of the cattle commodity business, either in his father’s office or out doing manual labor and getting to know the area of his interests. Primarily though, Kinsley does most of his own studying through the apps he has on his phone.

“The apps I use are the cattle market, the beef market, Nexus cattle which is showing the price of future cattle and there’s weather and a corn market. There’s even basically Fox news for cattle,” Kinsley said. “The apps tell me how much they are being sold for and how much they might be sold for later. I do the math and find out which one is going to have the better price. We will buy today if the price is better than three months down the road. The other markets show the same thing with different products.”

With such a strong interest in a field that may be considered obscure, Kinsley’s reasoning for the passion is pure.

“I want to work in cattle commodities because cattle have always been a really cool thing. In my future I would want to own a ranch, but ranching isn’t very popular or practical. This is something to do with cattle and it’s something that I love so why not combine the two?”