At the Meat Counter, Roy Cansler Looks for What He Raised

More than fifty years around pigs. And a quiet piece of advice for anyone who’s ever overcooked a pork loin.

When Roy Cansler drives around Oklahoma, he has a habit he can’t quite shake. He’ll stop into a grocery store at whatever town he happens to be passing through, and wander back to the meat counter, just to see.

He is looking for Prairie Fresh. That is the brand of pork he helps raise for Seaboard Foods. When he spots a package on the shelf, something quietly lights up.

“Hey, I helped raise that,” he says.

Roy was born in Oklahoma. He grew up on his family’s pig farm in Gould, a small town in Harmon County, down in the southwest corner of the state. He’s been around pigs since he was four years old.

“Pigs are kind of what I enjoyed,” he says. “I was blessed to just continue that work.”

In high school, he was an FFA kid—he can still pull an FFA scrapbook off the shelf. After Oklahoma State, he went back home to the family farm for about five years while the operation grew. Then, in 1997, he moved up into northwest Oklahoma for a job with a company called PIC. When Seaboard bought the farms in 2000, Roy came along with them, and he’s been with Seaboard Foods ever since.

These days, Roy lives in Seiling with his wife, who teaches Pre-K at the local school. He is in live production, which is the part of Seaboard where the pigs are actually raised, fed, and cared for. His farm raises gilts, the female replacements that go on to sow farms, which in turn produce the pigs that end up at the Seaboard plant in Guymon. Nine people work under him. He is in a management role now, training his team and walking the barns alongside them.

“I still see pigs every day,” he says.

He figures he’ll keep at it for another ten or fifteen years before he retires. It’s not that the work is easy. It’s that it’s what he enjoys, and where he wants to be.

“I visit the big city,” he says. “I don’t want to live in a big city. It’s nice to visit, but I don’t want to stay.”

The rural lifestyle, for Roy, is about pace and people. There is still work to do, plenty of it in fact, but things don’t move at the same frenzy as they do in town. And the definition of “neighbor” stretches much further than a property line.

“We still call each other neighbor when we see each other,” he says, “either in a school activity or at church.”

When a family is going through hard times—a natural disaster, a rough patch, a loss—people show up.

“I’m blessed to be able to help others out,” Roy says. “But I know if I needed it, they would be there for me as well.”

He and his wife raised three kids in Seiling. All three are grown now, with five grandkids between them ranging from six to twelve. His daughter lives on her husband’s family ranch in Buckland, Kansas, southeast of Dodge City. His oldest son lives near Omega, west of Kingfisher—not in agriculture, officially, but the family keeps chickens, ducks, and a big garden. His youngest son teaches high school history and government right there in Seiling.

“They’re all within a couple of hours,” Roy says.

When Roy looks at the future of food in Oklahoma, he isn’t panicking about demand. “People are going to need to eat,” he says. “There’s always going to be that need.”

What he thinks about more is how to grow more food with less. “We’re growing more food on less land with less natural resources than we ever have in history,” he says. 

The biggest inputs for pigs are grain and water, and his industry is paying close attention to how much of both it is using.

What concerns him more is a disconnect. With every generation, he says, people are a little further removed from the farms where their food actually comes from.

His wife has seen it. In her Pre-K classroom in Seiling, when food comes up in conversation, the kids “just think their food comes from the store.”

Roy remembers his own grandparents, who raised most of what they ate because they had to. His parents’ generation still grew a meaningful piece of what showed up on the kitchen table. By the time he had  his own kids and grandkids, what they raise themselves is mostly limited to a garden or a few chickens. One generation more, and many families have no working knowledge of where their food starts.

“The information that they receive,” he says, “may be misleading.”

Ask Roy to bust a myth about food and he doesn’t go somewhere dramatic. He goes to your kitchen.

Most people, he says, overcook pork. They treat it like chicken—all the way up to 165°, dry and tough—when the good eating is at 145° with a three-minute rest.

“Much, much more tender and moist and tastes better,” he says. “Anytime I have an opportunity to share that with someone who’s trying to cook their own pork, that’s what I encourage.”

Ask him to describe Oklahoma food in three words, and he lands on a phrase that does a lot of work in a small space:

Produced Near You.

It sounds like a bumper sticker. Coming from Roy, it’s a fifty-plus-year life summary: a kid in Gould who grew up around pigs, an FFA scrapbook on a shelf, a diploma from Oklahoma State, a job in Seiling, a management role at Seaboard, and a habit of scanning the meat counter in every town he passes through, just to see his work on the label.

That’s what Oklahoma All for Food exists to celebrate—the Oklahomans growing, raising, and producing your food, who never really left home, and who are still proud to sign their name to the package.