- So in 1910, my
great-grandfather came right down the Republican River about 250 miles. Off he came to Colorado and
he rode the train to Yuma. He got off, he walks out
eight and a half miles, saw this land, and went
back and filed a claim on it as a homestead. When I was a little kid,
my grandparents had cows, my parents had cows,
my neighbors had cows. I mean if you'd ask me
when I was six years old, what do you wanna be when you grow up, I wanna be a cow guy. I want to be runnin' cows,
that's what I wanna do. In the late 90s, early
2000s, we had a chance to buy quite a bit of land. I was really surprised,
their ranch was paid for. And I said, are you sure you
want to get back into debt to expand this place? And they said, absolutely,
we've been waitin' 20 years to have this opportunity. So we took the chance
and never looked back and just been rollin' ever since. That was very exciting, but then also it brought a lot of pressure because I knew they were
gonna rely heavily on me to help steer the ship. When I was a kid, we ran about 150 head of cows on this place. And right now we got capacity
for about 1300 head of cows. Our philosophy in the last
several years has changed, and we try to be a business first family. Our business philosophy is
we're gonna say what we do and then we do what we say. And we treat everybody
like we want to be treated. We're gonna always look to expand and grow if it's the right opportunity,
if it makes sense. And everything on this ranch really needs to pull its own weight. It has to make a profit. You know, there's no subsidizing
anything on this ranch. We are a cattle ranch, period. There's no other money
coming in from anywhere else. I had a friend of mine from college, I got to see him go
through a transformation into the Angus breed. I watched as he got more
Angus and more Angus, and the cattle just got better and better. We've been buying bulls
since 2001 from Basin Angus from Doug and Sharon Stevenson in Montana. We just love the Angus cattle. The genetics are rock solid. She'll go out, she'll make a living in a semi-arid environment. She's expected to graze
350 to 365 days a year. So you know, she's gotta
be an efficient low quality forage harvesting machine. And then she needs to bring
back a calf in the fall that has some value to him. He's gotta have some growth, he's gotta have some carcass merit. So you know, the Angus breed
for us really gets a lot of these bases covered. We don't like to leave a
lot of things to chance, so let's bet on the sure thing and let's bet on the best thing. And right now, that's Angus cattle, and probably always will be. We just try to build these
cattle to be in the upper 25% and that eliminates all of our bottom end. We don't trade chasing
particular trade down a rat hole or down a different direction because that might paint
us into a corner some day. We're just trying to get better with each successive generation. The heifer calves, we retain
ownership on all of those and develop probably about 90, 95% of them into breeding females. And then we usually keep
those, calve them out, and we'll sell them as
bred cows or pairs. Sometimes we'll sell five and sometimes we'll sell up to 250, but we like the relationships. One of the biggest things
that I think we offer that a lot of other places
don't is we'll background these cattle pretty much
to your specifications. If you put all these cows together, between the eight or 10 cowherds, it's about 6000, 6500 head of cows. And it's really fun to
bring all these genetics from Wyoming, Montana, Nebraska, Colorado. They can send their heifers to us, they'll maintain their genetics, they'll get some carcass information.. They'll actually have some other cattle, their contemporaries from different herds to compare them against
in Chappell Feedlot, and I think it really helps them to streamline their operations too. Certified Angus Beef has
always stood for quality and doing the right thing
every chance you get which kind of mirrors
what we're trying to do out here on the ranch. When we started looking at
these cattle and how they scored with their GeneMax, their
DNA test, we decided maybe we were letting a little
bit of money get away and we needed to start
feeding these cattle just to see what happened. I just got back a cutout
on our 2018 crop of steers and we crowded 70% Certified Angus Beef. They yielded about 63%. We were almost 30% Choice
and there was zero Select in the whole pen of steers, and that's on 14-month-old calves. Pay weight was around 1340 pounds. I think we're doin' okay. With our continuing education
of Ranching for Profit, we sit down at least quarterly,
figure out our gross margins which really gives us
the economic snapshot of current enterprises and
maybe future enterprises that we need to look at. Basically almost every
enterprise that we have is in the top two or three economically, most viable enterprises
that we can do or wanna do. You know, it can be tough,
but what else are you gonna do that you can have so many
moments with your children? That is pretty big, you know. We play together, we work
together, we build together. Probably the greatest
reward is now I'll look out and I'll see my dad working with my kids. And I have very fond memories of myself working with my grandparents. And you know, the circle
is completed again. - My Grandpa and I like to work and we joke around sometimes. And it's just a lot of fun. I like Angus cattle because
they have a good disposition and they're not crazy,
and they taste good. - When I grow up, I want
to be a veterinarian because I like animals and
I like being around them. And I just like to spend time with them. I feed my heifer and
Will's heifer and then I do the horse's water and the heifer's water. - Growing up in this environment, I hope the kids have learned many things, how to be self sufficient,
how to respect nature, sense of pride in what we do here. I think Ryan's best trait
is how much he cares. He cares so much about
how we do as a family and how other people do with our product. That makes him really proud of our beef and it makes him work hard to
raise quality Angus cattle. - So I guess everything
in the beef industry and life in general is
all about relationships. If you hold your end of the bargain up, and the other person does too, you will have a fantastic relationship and it'll work every time. It's all about the people.
