Cuatro and Addie are home-schooled, their education taking place in a one-room schoolhouse built on the ranch.
A successful horse show background equips Jody with experiences to teach and support the children in their showring endeavors. Cuatro and Addie are now bringing home buckles won at horse shows and playdays. Cuatro entered his first 4-H district horse show in 2012, placing in the top five in all performance events. Now old enough for 4-H shows, Addie is eager to join her brother.
“We don’t have a show horse,” Jody says. “We have great ranch horses that you can do anything on, then you can take them to town and the kids can be competitive.”
Drought, high feed costs, and a less-than-robust national economy have challenged the ranching business. So, when Jody says they don’t have show horses it underscores the fact that everything on Brown Ranches is utilized to benefit the bottom line. There are few frivolities and nothing goes to waste—not even a yearling heifer recently killed in a freak accident. She was butchered on the ranch.
Austin and Jody’s determination to control costs, enhance productivity and adapt to an ever-evolving economic dynamic is what drives them toward a goal shared by many ranch families— passing on a viable operation to their children.
Striking a balance between where their hearts lie and adapting to change is the challenge.
“We may be cow-calf people, but we’re diversifying and breaking tradition a little bit,” Austin says. “The backgrounding operation is not where I saw us going 20 years ago, but it saved us. We’ve always been huge traditionalists, but also understand that, sometimes, tradition will kill you.
“The ranch may look different in 10 years, but we’ll make it and be fine. We just want folks, 50 years from now, to look at the Brown family and not necessarily say we were great ranchers or great horsemen, but say, ‘Those are God-fearing folks that are the definition of honesty and integrity.’ And that’s what ranching is about.”
MATT BROCKMAN is a Texas-based writer. Send comments on this story to [email protected].
