About Usback

  Welcome to the central high plains of eastern Colorado. This is short-grass country with no trees and very limited and unpredictable rainfall. Our annual precipitation on the ranch will average only 12 inches. I'm convinced it must have been a wet spring when the homesteaders first started settling this area.

  This is the part of Colorado you don't hear much about. Most folks believe Colorado ends somewhere around Limon, which is 75 miles east of Denver and Colorado Springs. Our hometown of Cheyenne Wells is another 80 miles east of Limon. Although we are near the Kansas border, Kansas doesn’t want to claim us either, so we are essentially on our own. All things considered, that’s probably a good thing.

  Deanna and I both grew up in this area and went to school at a little town called Arapahoe, just east of Cheyenne Wells. After I graduated from Colorado State University in 1974 Deanna and I were united in marriage. For the next four or five years I attempted to make a living by being a full-time bull rider and a part-time feedlot cowboy. After God blessed us with two wonderful sons, Trapper and Tyson, my brain began to complete its development. In other words, I ended my rodeo career. I continued to work at the feedlot for a couple more years before opening up our own retail business.

  In 1985 we had an opportunity to get back to the land, as well as our old stomping grounds. Since this was something we had always dreamed about we didn't hesitate to shut down the business, sell the house and move the family. We were able to lease a fairly sizeable chunk of grassland and purchase my dad's commercial cowherd. This was a closed herd of red and black baldy cows with over 30 years of pedigree information and over 20 years of performance records.

  Although this was a very functional cowherd with few problems, we wanted to make our own genetic contribution to it. Being a university graduate and all, my first attempt to improve Dad's cowherd was to do whatever it took to increase weaning weights and production. We were going to show everyone how to wean bigger calves and succeed at ranching. Fortunately, that was a very short-term goal.

  With the help of my dad and a couple of friends, I learned that increasing production wasn't nearly as important as increasing profits. I also learned that there is a very poor correlation between production and profit. In fact, the more I increased my weaning weights, the harder it was to make a profit because with every increase in production we had a resulting increase in expenses. My goal suddenly changed.

  My new goal was twofold. I would do whatever I could to increase production without increasing expenses, as well as doing whatever I could to reduce expenses without reducing production. I wasn't going to ignore production, but I realized that my management decisions needed to be profit driven instead of production driven. Unfortunately, most farmers and ranchers have been programmed to be production driven. They know how to increase production, but they are going broke in the process.

  We became very passionate and excited about this concept. The more we looked, the more possibilities we found to make our ranch more profitable. Early on, we became acquainted with a few ranchers who seemed to be very profitable, even when most ranchers were losing money. I wanted to learn their secrets. The one thing these profitable ranchers seemed to have in common was their ability to keep their costs down by making the most efficient use of their available forage resources.

  Making the most efficient use of their available forage resources seemed to involve three distinctive management practices:

1. Utilizing a cell and/or rotational grazing system, which provides time for the grass to rest and grow back during the growing season.

2. Calving in sync with nature, which matches the cow's highest nutritional requirements to the ranch's highest and best production.

3. Producing cows that can survive strictly on what the ranch produces with minimum or no inputs. Not only must a cow fit her environment, she must also produce a profitable end product that meets the requirements established by the current beef industry.

  We gradually implemented these management practices on our own ranch and were extremely pleased with the results. Profit was not nearly as difficult to attain as we had been led to believe. The biggest problem we encountered, though, was finding a seedstock producer who could provide the genetics we needed to produce environmentally adapted cattle. For the most part, they simply did not exist. Every bull we purchased seemed to take us farther and farther away from our objectives.

  Most seedstock producers think that because they have registered cows and sell high priced bulls, they can justify over feeding and pampering their cows, as well as giving them a second or third chance. Consequently, I realized my seedstock producers didn't have cows as good as my commercial cows. How were they going to be of any help to me?

  Being an opportunist, I promptly decided to take advantage of this situation by entering the seedstock business. In addition to the composite cattle we had formed by mating Dad's red and black baldy cows to some thick, moderate sized Tarentaise bulls, we began a diligent search for Red and Black Angus cattle that could survive and prosper in our program. Progress was slow at first, but it gradually gained momentum once we began using our own bulls back on our own cows. Now we had something to offer to other commercial ranchers.

  We sold seven bulls in our first production sale in 1990, and we haven't slowed down since. With the help of a few really good cooperative producers, our program has continued to grow every year. We currently sell 200 to 300 bulls every year. Demand for our bulls has been almost unbelievable. We continue to have a corner on the market for our type of genetics. Although many of our bulls will stay within thirty miles of where they were born, others have been shipped as far away as Florida and Montana. It's not hard to make the right kind of cattle work in a variety of environments.

  In 1994 we began mailing out a simple newsletter to some of our customers and friends. We used these newsletters to share our ranching and cattle philosophies, thinking it would be much easier to sell a bull to people who understood why we do the things we do. There were around 300 names on our original mailing list. By the turn of the century we were mailing out over 11,000 eight-page newsletters every other month. The overwhelming popularity of our newsletters caused our mailing list to grow faster than the rest of our program.

  In the meantime, we were kept quite busy with the extracurricular activities of our two boys, Trapper and Tyson. They loved nearly every aspect of growing up on a working ranch. We all loved it. God had blessed us with much and we had much to be thankful for. When Trapper and Tyson were nearly raised we adopted a couple of youngsters who were growing up in the foster care system. Jody and his sister, Jessica, came to us in 1994 when they were five and three, respectively. This added a whole new dimension to our lives.

  While attending college our son, Trapper took advantage of an opportunity to purchase a small ranch that adjoined ours. He was fulfilling his dream of becoming a rancher just like his dad. He was also fulfilling his dad's dream of having a son follow in his footsteps. His ranch became an extension of Pharo Cattle Company and produced bulls for our annual bull sale.

  Life was good and everything seemed to be going our way. Then tragedy struck. On October 31, 1999 Trapper took his own life at the age of 24. We had no idea at the time, but Trapper had been suffering from a very common illness known as depression. I'm convinced that Trapper didn't even know what he was dealing with because it is something that is very seldom, if ever, discussed in rural America.

  Never before had we experienced so much pain and heartache. I wondered if we would be able to survive this tragedy. My faith in God had been seriously shaken and my desire to go on living was nearly gone. We eventually realized that we would probably never completely understand why things happened the way they did, and that the only thing that could possibly sustain us through those difficult times was our faith in God. When we finally turned back to God, He provided us with a comfort and a reassurance that we were unable to find anywhere else.

  Since that tragic event, we have used our newsletters as a means to share what we have learned about depression. Among other things, we have discovered that this illness is very common in rural America, but the good news is it's very easy to treat and control once it has been diagnosed. We also like to use our newsletters to share our faith in God because without God nothing else matters much. Of course we continue to discuss cows, bulls and ranching philosophies in each and every newsletter.

  In the spring of 2000 Deanna and I met with our son, Tyson, to discuss some potential possibilities for the future of Pharo Cattle Company. Much to our delight, Tyson expressed a sincere interest in becoming a part of that future. He was already contemplating a career change, so the timing was right. With the expansion of our seedstock business, Deanna and I had become more and more confined to the office, which made it possible for us to turn over much of the day-to-day ranch management responsibilities to Tyson. What a joy it is to see the next generation working and buying it’s way into the family business.

  About that same time we put together a management team, comprised of eight people, to help us create a business with a real future and a management succession plan. We didn't want all our efforts and accomplishments to cease to exist when we died. Pharo Cattle Company is now a corporation with plans and goals that extend well into the future. You can count on us to continue to be a driving force within the beef industry for several decades.