The Boys of the Dipper Ranch Git Along, Lonesome Ranchers
Cattle ranching has always been a perilous proposition, but a slew of new challenges, from soaring land prices to crippling drought, has kicked the legs out from underneath the state’s most iconic business. Could we be witnessing the end of the ranch as we know it?
Photographs by Wyatt McSpadden and Stuart McSpadden
Johnny Wells says: A big problem of Texas agribusiness is the fact that our ag commisioner is elected by a bunch of city people that are clueless and constitute a "tyranny of the majority". Ala Hightower......what a moron...did his best to destroy ag in this state. (November 26th, 2012 at 11:35pm)
I am standing in a cattle pen on the JA Ranch, near Amarillo, a place of almost mythical dimensions. The outfit’s 130,000 acres sprawl over one of the most dramatic landscapes in the American West: the colorful cliffs, canyons, draws, hoodoos, and bottomlands of Palo Duro, the nation’s second-largest canyon. The history of the ranch is just as impressive. Founded in 1877, the JA was an era-defining enterprise and one of the first big, successful cattle ranches in America. It was born as a partnership between Irish financier John Adair and legendary cowman Charles Goodnight, the first white settler in the Panhandle and one of the pioneers of both the cattle drive and barbpred-wire fencing. But the most remarkable thing about the JA is not its fascinating history, its size, or its physical beauty: it is that, more than a century since it began, the same family still owns it. John Adair’s great-granddaughter by marriage, Cornelia “Ninia” Ritchie, is the current owner, and she has an efficient, profitable operation. On the day of my visit, I’m treated to an example of this. In an upland pasture, amid a small storm of flying mud and manure and saliva, dozens of bellowing cows are waiting to be inserted into a hydraulic squeeze chute in order to be “palpated.” Palpation is an age-old technique to determine if a cow is pregnant. It works like this: a man, who is literally covered with cow manure from head to toe and wearing a lubricated transparent plastic glove, inserts his arm to shoulder depth into the cow’s rectum and feels for the presence of a fetus in the uterus. The process is fast and methodical. The palpater on this particular day is a friendly fellow named Laban Tubbs, who is also the director of the Ranch and Feedlot Operations Program at nearby Clarendon College. He knows what he is doing. I ask him how much money he charges to do this. “Three dollars a cow,” he says with a broad grin, then returns to his messy work. The cows in the pen this morning are almost all bred up, which makes everyone happy; a high rate of fertility is one of the most important components of a ranch’s success.
Some five hundred miles southeast of the JA lies the Brown Ranch. It’s not nearly as big—unconfirmed reports have pegged the size at 16,000 acres—but like the JA, it’s a well-run operation. I’ve driven down to Beeville, about ninety miles south of San Antonio, to see it close-up. In front of me, six cowboys on horseback are driving 40 cows and 33 calves from pasture to pen across a grass prairie. The riders are fun to watch: they scour the brush and root out the outliers. They wheel, canter, and gallop to chase down strays; they keep the animals moving. It’s a nice show, but the really masterful horsemanship comes a few minutes later, at the pens, when the riders separate the calves from the mother cows so that they can be sprayed for flies, lice, and ticks. The task is not easy: the last thing the calves or their mothers want is to be separated from each other. In a small and chaotic enclosure, amid the bawling of powerful, unruly animals—more than half of whom weigh one thousand pounds or more—the riders and their horses execute the job with ballet-like precision.
But just as at the JA, the outfit’s dazzling efficiency is not what makes it truly noteworthy. Even more striking than the expertise of the cowboys is the fact that four out of six of them, representing three generations, are named Brown. The oldest, Austin Brown II, is 68 years old. He’s the grandson and namesake of the ranch’s founder and its current patriarch. His son Austin III, known as A3, is 42 and a strapping six foot six and looks like he could star in cowboy movies. Then there are A3’s kids: Austin IV (he goes by Cuatro), a tall 13-year-old who can operate much of the ranch’s heavy machinery; and 8-year-old Addie, the only female, who not only works cattle on horseback, shoots hogs, and drives the ranch truck but also takes ballet lessons in town one day a week. Since 1924 the Brown Ranch has raised cattle on its big, beautiful, live-oak-strewn pastures. It has prospered even though, unlike many financially successful ranches, it has almost no oil and gas income and little revenue from hunting leases.
These two ranches represent a Texan ideal. Watching the four Browns sweep down from the ridge on their superb, leggy chestnut horses, it’s impossible not to be moved by the timeless scene. The U.S. cattle ranching business was born in this part of Texas in the nineteenth century, when Anglo cowboys adopted Spanish ranching practices and, in doing so, redefined the American West. While the cowboys of the JA and the Brown aren’t exactly driving cattle up the Chisholm Trail, they remain a part of this mythical history just the same. Through them, and the thousands more just like them on ranches all across the state, the glorious enterprise of fabled cattle barons like Goodnight is still alive and well.
Or at least it’s nice to think that. The truth, however, is that the JA and the Brown may be among the last specimens of a breed in decline. “We’re dinosaurs,” says Austin II. “There are very few of us left.”
By “us” he means families who own their ranches, live on them, and support themselves by raising and selling cattle. At the start of the twentieth century, this arrangement described virtually all of the ranches in Texas. No longer. The self-supporting rancher-resident is fast disappearing from the landscape, having been replaced by an assortment of largely absentee owners who, though they may raise some cattle, primarily use the land for other purposes: oil and gas drilling, hunting, conservation, or real estate speculation. No one knows exactly how many rancher-residents are left—maybe 5 percent of the total remaining ranchers. Probably less. The JA and the Brown turn out to be exceptions to the rule: ranching in Texas, as we used to know it, is dying out.
Of course, ranching in Texas has been endangered almost since its inception. Cattlemen have always been subject to disasters beyond their control. The mid-1880’s saw not only the birth of what would become the modern ranch but also devastating drought and winter blizzards that left tens of thousands of cattle dead on the plains and a massive collapse of cattle prices that ruined many new cattle barons. It’s a tough, almost comically cruel business, one that has never had a shortage of land-rich, cash-poor folks who spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about the weather.
But what’s happening now is far more destructive. Put simply, the economic model that has long supported operations like the JA and the Brown is no longer sustainable. There are a handful of reasons for this. All of them date to the past sixty years or so, but recently they have become especially acute. In the fifties, the advent of giant feedlots and large meatpacking houses began to streamline the business, leading to bigger cows, shorter fattening times, and sleeker distribution systems. This was largely good for consumers: prices dropped, and beef became less of a luxury and more of a dinnertime staple. But such efficiencies also meant smaller profits for individual ranchers. In the past decade alone, labor and energy costs have doubled. Where once one hundred cows or fewer could support a family, now it takes five hundred or more, and still there is little room for error.
That is just the beginning. In Texas, family ranches are also the victims of land prices that have risen so much, with an attendant increase in property and inheritance taxes, that they often make it impossible—or just plain crazy—not to sell out. Such prices simultaneously prevent buyers of ranchland from ever getting a return on their investment by raising cattle, meaning that there are no more new ranchers who can actually make a living at it. Meanwhile, other uses of the land abound: urban sprawl has swallowed up some of the best pastures in the state; the commercialization of hunting has led to a large-scale conversion of grazing land to hunting land; and there has been a steady growth in the market for weekend ranches. Since around 1980, passive investors from the cities have been on a prolonged buying binge that now accounts for as much as half of all Texas ranchland and has removed vast swaths of it from cattle production. “In order to stay in the ranching business, you have to have either a mega-operation or another source of income, like oil or gas or wind power,” says land commissioner Jerry Patterson, whose office has a conservation easement program aimed partly at preserving family ranches.
It hasn’t helped that domestic beef consumption itself has declined by more than a billion pounds over the past decade, a casualty of things like competition from leaner meats, such as chicken, and a boom in environmentally conscious vegetarianism. The industry has had to deal with a mad-cow-disease scare in 2003 plus bad PR about everything from cholesterol to the inhumane treatment of animals.
Taken together, these changes transformed an already challenging industry into a perilous one. Then came the worst single-year drought in Texas history, and ranchers hurried to sell off cows they could no longer afford to feed. Ultimately, livestock owners in Texas lost $3.23 billion last year, and more than 80 percent of the state’s ranchers reduced their herds significantly. As of this past January, the number of cattle in the state—some 12 million—is at its lowest point since 1968.
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