When the economy down-turned and my husband’s thirty year career as a builder was heading south quickly and I don’t mean Florida it was time to change directions.  We can all enjoy our pity party for a night or two or three but then we must get up one morning and move in a different direction in order to survive.  You can sit around for the rest of your life and whine and feel sorry for yourself as you quickly go broke, and we did whine for a while but then we got on with things.  Luckily we had an easy time figuring out what we wanted to do in act 2 because it was something we have talked about for a long time.  Horses and ranching were a given and after several years of working and building and working and building we are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  The light I said, not the money…yet, but in order to get started you must have the land, infrastructure and the animals and that is where this leads, animals and the dark side of nature.

We have two sides to our operation; our stocker operation and our cow/calf operation.  The cow/calf part of the operation is the one that I love because of the babies!  Waiting patiently for months for those cute, little, jet black babies running, bucking and farting across the pastures has created endless fantasies in my mind as I watch their mommas bellies growing larger by the day.  Finally, as Spring begins to show its green little head with warmer weather and light breezes I watch in anticipation of the day when I notice a new, tiny little being in the field.

Suddenly my long wait is rewarded with babies the size of my dog running and scampering about bringing sheer joy to my being, until..the dark side of nature steps in.  Thanks to the sloppy, don’t give a shit hunters this year leaving carcasses strewn carelessly about without disposing of them properly, their selfish actions brought in a deadly threat to my babies; gigantic, nasty, looming predators waiting to kill.  I am talking about gigantic buzzards that sit in the trees waiting, thinking about death, swiftly ready to pounce as soon as a young calf is born.  They smell the blood and afterbirth and swoop on the harmless baby while they are still newly emerged from their mother’s womb before they can stand and defend themselves.  As small defenseless creatures with a mother that is no match for them they torpedo in and annihilate the newborn calves eyes and anus until they are dead.

Sunday morning we found two pitiful lumps in our field with their mother’s standing watch over their poor dead babies.  For the safety of the other newborn calves and the ones to come I had to carry off these two poor unlucky calves.  One at a time I carried the calves away blood dripping slowly down my boots, soaking into my gloves, staring at the vacuous, empty eyes.  The whole episode made me horribly sad and angry.  I know this is the cycle of nature but I couldn’t find any comfort in that knowledge.  I hope I don’t have to witness this often.  This is the hard part of farming and ranching.  This is the part that you don’t really understand unless you are experiencing it yourself.  You can see pictures on TV of hardships that farmers and ranchers endure whether it be floods, fires, disease or death but it is hard to really feel their pain unless you feel it yourself.  I have felt it myself and I now understand what it is like.  

Life goes on as always but there is a picture left in my mind as I watch my healthy, happy, live calves running and playing, the picture includes the others that are absent.  My tribute to them is that I won’t forget.  As in all things there is a bright side and a dark side, in order to appreciate the bright side of things you must respect the fact that there is always a dark side looming, hidden, lurking in the shadows waiting for helplessness to appear for the predator, that is how I appreciate the beauty in nature, it can be fleeting.

The grueling work I am referring to is the rebuilding of a farm that my husband and I decided to take on last year during what has to have been a moment of insanity!  In order to properly secure this farm we have had to rebuild 5 miles of fence to secure our cattle.  It is a centennial farm, in the same family for over 100 years, which made me proud to think we were putting something so special back together UNTIL we hit day after day of 150 degree weather last June that never let up until maybe October!  Last spring, summer, fall and winter have been made up of long, hellish days with endless rolls of high tensile wire snaking in and out of nasty ravines and thorny vine covered hideaways coupled with some pretty high tensile tempers to boot!  In order to fully appreciate my plight you must understand that my husband does not do anything half way, in fact, all summer long I accused him of building fences to hold rabbits not cows!  This is no exaggeration, take five miles of fence and multiply that by 6 and that will tell you how much ground we have covered over and over and over again!

In a few weeks we will be finished just shy of a year and 12 hour days with very few days off.  My body cannot wait.  During this time we have suffered cuts, bruises, pulled muscles, ripped clothes and the coup de gra, my husband nearly ripped his nose off on father’s day by a piece of uncoiling rebar that decided to unhinge his nose.  I learned that day that I am no good in an emergency!  Do you have any idea how much blood is involved in a nose injury?  I hope you never have to find out.  A long day in the emergency room, plastic surgery and a nose back in place was our father’s day celebration this year.

I have to say that the best part of this story is the response from the cattle rancher that leased the land before us as to why they never fixed fence one.  “Oh we didn’t need to fix the fences we had our cattle trained to know where the fence lines were!  I can’t believe he was actually able to say that with a straight face because I happened to witness those cattle trying to take an afternoon swim in my ex-husband’s very expensive pool on numerous occasions, actually too many to count!  In a fit of laughter I just said well we were in a different business because we happened to be raising beef cattle not circus animals, but hey, good luck with that one!

With the worst of the work behind us I can gaze out across our beautiful, highly-contained pastures and watch the sunset on our Mama cows and their newly born babies and smile.  Every part of my body aches with the long miles of summer, fall and winter days of grueling work but nothing can possibly top the sense of pride I have in a job well done.  My husband might be a fence Nazi but he knows his stuff and he has put up with my learning curve and whining until I became a true ranch hand and not a concrete jungle queen!

2012 should prove to be an interesting year on all fronts; economically, politically and in the world in general.  Hopefully Washington will begin to get a grip on itself in a way that will begin to address its myriad of problems for all of our sakes.  If not, let us hope that each and every one of us can at least influence our own world in a productive, positive way even if Washington can’t.  I wish everyone a happy, safe 2012.  I personally look forward to an interesting, challenging year ahead as we move into the new year!

Today my husband and I put that same quality into our beef cattle and our horses.  Our cattle are raised natural with no hormones or implants.  We raise them on grass and supply them with the proper minerals for optimization of their forage, supplement with sea kelp from Ireland and ensure that they live a stress-free, quality life in a natural setting.  When we work with young horses or horses that have issues we use the same attention to detail when it comes to their training and feed.  We use Bach Flower remedies, massage, aromatherapy and we take the time to understand the animal and its specific fears and issues because like humans every horse is different, with a distinct personality and unique set of fears and things that make them uncomfortable.  In order to effectively train an animal you must take the time to understand that particular animal.  We never rush the process and we let the animal tell us when they are comfortable and ready to move on in their training.  We also tell our customers that if they aren’t willing to take the time to let their animal progress at their animals unique pace they will be asking for more trouble down the road.  Our desire as a society for quick fixes or a pill to take care of something in place of hard work is a premise that works against us in the long run because we aren’t willing to do what it takes sometimes.  Quick fixes don’t work with horses and we must begin to have the patience to understand how long the process really can be in order to get lasting results.  The owner must then be willing to carry the process further in order to keep the horse where it is once he or she returns home.

If you look around you more often than not small business equals quality.  Small shops focus on unique items that are not mass produced in a box store mentality.  In our quest for “stuff” we moved away from the small business into the box store because prices there allowed us to have more “stuff”.  If we begin to get our expectations back in line and focus on quality that mind set will bring us back around to small business and then our economy will grow and jobs will be created.  If we begin to desire a “less is more” mentality with a focus on quality our lives will begin to take on new meaning and  I do believe that the small farmer, locally grown movement is the start of that.  Producing food with your hands, quality food with no pesticides and a lot of love and care, working the earth in a natural way and focusing on quality will all be things that bring us back around.  There is a lot of satisfaction to be derived from digging in the dirt and working with animals but even if you live in a city and have no desire to get your fingernails dirty you can support this movement by focusing on quality, small businesses and your locally grown food markets.  Small businesses, quality, neighbors helping neighbors built this country and today it can rebuild this country.

When you work with clients horses you are dealing with their expectations, their dreams and in our case more often than not, their disappointments and their fear.  It is our responsibility to accurately assess the animal and give them a chance but at the same time understand if in the long run we can keep the owner safe on their particular animal.  It is something that has kept me up more than once at night.  On the other side of the coin when we raise our beef cattle we have a responsibility to our animals to keep them healthy, happy and safe.  We also have a mission to keep everyone involved with our animals safe especially the American public who will be eventually consuming our animals.  With all that being said lets go back to Wall Street and how we eventually got there and eventually left.

We started out as a small buying and marketing group that went to the National Restaurant Show completely unrecognizable.  No one knew who this small Virginia company was nor did they care until we made everyone care.  In a tough economy people become more curious about success stories because at times like this success seems more elusive.  Most successful CEO’s will say that you have to be a forward thinker in order to create something that is sustainable, meaning you have to give the consumer what they want before they know they want it and then you have to create the desire to have it.  That is essentially what we did and we rolled it out in a huge marketing and advertising campaign that evolved over several years time span.  We became a forward thinking company that focused on quality, quality and then more quality.  At the same time we were focusing on quality we were educating our associates and creating incentives and a family atmosphere that said all day long we will take care of you.  Sign on to this endeavor and embrace it wholeheartedly and you will succeed as we succeed and it worked.  As in all things the cream rose to the top and flourished as the company flourished.  This lack of security in many companies is what is killing our spirit today.  If you study very strong, successful companies they are still taking care of their people.  If all you focus on is your stock price and getting rich you will kill all of the desire in your associates to succeed that you worked so hard to create.  That is what happened in our case when a board of directors and a stock ticker price began to call the shots.  Think about it.  More later…

The food industry changed overnight when Wall Street decided that food was an industry also ripe for the taking.  It started during the leveraged buy out fever of the 1980′s.  When the hostile takeover of Nabisco took place the rest fell like a house of cards.  Investment bankers started going after anything food, promising high gains and stock prices and the mad dash began.  Local food distributors, family started and run businesses that were large on sales but short on cash started to become fair game.  For us, a medium size buying and marketing group, this was going to be instant death for us if we didn’t do something to stop it.  Our competitors were beginning to approach our largest distributors with fistfuls of cash waving it in their faces to sell.  Suddenly family-run and owned businesses that were very successful, but short on cash were looking at offers in the 10′s of millions and more for their businesses.  Sheer madness!  We somehow had to stop the defection of our largest customers or our own business would be in jeopardy but how could we compete with giants in the industry that had all of the clout and money behind them that we would never have? Simple we jumped into the fray.  

It took months of work, talk, begging in some ways to convince a few of our largest distributors to stay with us, create our own family and take the whole thing public in order to compete and give our customers what our competitors were offering but stay at the helm of their family run businesses.  The best of both worlds you might think.

It was the American Dream!  It is what so many of us aspire to when we enter the business world.  Anything is possible in this country and we achieved it.  Sitting in New York at the top of the twin towers attending a lavish party to celebrate the fact that we were going to be a public company was the culmination of the ultimate goal, or so I thought, but like the towers things can come tumbling down.  Sometimes you must be careful what you wish for, it just may happen and big is not always better.  Wanting it all does seem to have its price but more on that later.  This night was about a long road to success and we were able to bask in it and all of our hard work.

During this time frozen food was barely on the scene and generally looked at as less than quality and nothing on taste.  It took a huge amount of change and education to develop the products that are widely accepted and used today.  The concept that frozen was fresher than fresh because of how it is generally processed was a stretch for most foodservice managers to buy into.  It took huge effort on the part of the Frozen Food Association and manufacturers such as myself to educate buyers on the benefits of frozen food.  This concept is widely accepted today and lent huge variety to menus across the country because of it and many of the products both frozen and otherwise that we see today on grocery store shelves were created for foodservice originally.  What I find fascinating in all of this is the movement today back to locally grown, fresh foods prepared daily based on what is available.  Personally I love this change in mindset not because I have a problem with frozen food but because it is beginning to put the money back into the hands of the rancher and the farmer locally, hard working people that put their hearts, souls and hands into the dirt to make a living whether they are large or small scale makes no difference, we are beginning to go back to the concept of taking care of our communities and the people who live in them.  This drive back to fresh is also creating innovation in the restaurants to figure out menu ideas based on what is seasonally available in their local area nudging chefs to create interesting dishes that may have gone unnoticed otherwise.  All of this benefits the consumer and strengthens our communities at a time when most people are skeptical that our government can.  We are taking back our power one community at a time helping people in our local areas survive and thrive!  We are riding a huge wave of innovation and creativity relating to food that I am excited to follow and personally experience.

During this early time in my life three generations of women taught me how to cook, told me stories about our ancestors and the interesting characters that made our family who they are and instilled a sense of self as my own woman that I carry to this day.  I was very lucky to have this cocoon in which to grow up in and that experience cemented my place as a woman and also taught me to create the food that has always been the glue in our family.  Over the years I have worked to pass along as much of this history and knowledge to my daughters as I can because our unique family history and our recipes are something that you can’t buy, they are gifts that are given, they make us who we are as women in a family that has been dominated by them.

During the course of my adolescent years my father worked in a large commercial bakery designing and building the large ovens and equipment that runs 24 hours a day churning out rolls and bread for restaurant businesses across Illinois and Indiana.  His career spans a lifetime and he is still at it to this day.  My brothers and I were indoctrinating into the bakery at an early age and were expected to work there during the summers.  My tenure there taught me to understand the beginnings of the foodservice system as it is today.  When I graduated from college and started in the business the foodservice industry was very young and immature.  The early development of the industry happened during my career.  The evolution of how food is produced, product development and the distribution of it has been a fascinating journey for me and has helped shape how we view our own beef operation at Painted Horse Ranch & Cattle Company.

My food journey has been a wild ride and an interesting time in history which I will continue to examine as we develop our cattle and horse operation.

There is a subtle movement in this country back to the land, a deep desire for a simple, self-sustaining life in which we learn to take care of our own basic needs because we no longer trust our economy or the stability of our jobs to do that for us.  The locally grown movement is an example of each town learning to take care of its own by growing local and selling local.  This idea started out as a whisper and is now a roar!  Small farms are cropping up everywhere as people find their way back to the dirt!

I spent half of my life running from my ancestor’s genes.  The primordial flow from my gene pool pulsing through my veins said farmer, rancher, not city girl!  As my mother always used to say much to my chagrin; “You are from hearty peasant stock, you can’t escape it!”  I didn’t want hearty peasant stock, I was certain my blood must have something much more exciting running through it.  I was not interested in digging in the dirt, picking up manure or chasing animals all day!  My life was going to have a better wardrobe than boots, jeans and dirty fingernails!

Always be careful what you wish for, you may just get it and it always has a hefty price tag!  There is no free lunch!  More on that later…