THE EDUCATION OF A CATTLEMAN

BY NOLAN RYAN, WITH RUTH, WENDY, REESE & REID RYAN

On a warm and windy day in April in my hometown of Alvin, Texas, a very special place for my family and me, I announced to my parents—at the age of ten—that I was ready to get into the cattle business.

I talked my parents into taking me to visit a dairy farmer who was a member of our church, and I bought a day-old calf from him and started bottle-feeding it. I went back the next week to buy another calf, and that was the first time I learned about price increases, because the first calf cost a dollar fifty and the second (only ten days later) cost two dollars.

I built up my small herd to about seven heifers, but once I got into junior high school and started playing football, basketball, and baseball, I decided to sell the heifers. That was the right thing to do at the time, but a serious commitment to ranching was in my future.

I had spent my summers helping out on my uncle’s dairy farm, and then, as I got older, I’d go over and help him with milking. After a while I knew I didn’t want to be in the dairy business, but I think that it is where my love of land and my love of cattle started.

Once I met Ruth, my high-school sweetheart, I was focused on playing sports, doing my best in school, and spending as much time with her as possible. She is a wonderful person and has been tremendously supportive of everything I’ve strived to achieve. She always enjoyed the cattle business, and has appreciated how much pleasure I get from being on ranches and spending time around livestock.

With all the factors that are out of your control in ranching and agriculture, I can honestly say that if you don’t have passion and dedication, I don’t see how you can stay with it. I have applied many of the same principles that guided me in baseball—focus, determination, and discipline—to my cattle operation.

In fact, I got back into the cattle business while I was pitching for the California Angels in 1973. I had been taking classes at Alvin Community College during the off-season, studying and reading up on cattle breeding and genetics. I was still living in Alvin, about an hour outside of Houston, and finally decided it was time to start a herd. George Pugh Sr., the father of a good friend, was retiring from working in the oil fields, and I knew that I could hire him to look after my cattle operation while I was pitching for the Angels.

Alvin used to be a big dairy farming community, but a lot of those dairy farmers switched over to raising beef cattle. One dairy had Jersey cows and bred them with a Brahman bull to create half-and-half Jersey-Brahman cows. Then they came back with a Hereford bull, and I felt that a three-way cross would be a good base cow, so I bought their heifers two years in a row.

The first piece of ranch property I bought in Gonzalez County dates all the way back to just after the Mets won the World Series in 1969. From that first ranch in 1970, we have been buying and building ranches for more than forty years. When a piece of land would come up that would work in our operation, we would try to acquire it, and then we would try to acquire anything that came up next to that, in order to amass as much contiguous land as we could.

 

WENDY: “I always thought of my dad as a cattle rancher. Our family would travel to cattle sales all over Texas and he would host auctions at our ranch. Spending time at our ranch was our most precious family time. We could get away from the routines of being in town and just enjoy being around the cows. I had a love for the ranch and the cattle business, and then I reached a point where I really didn’t know what career path to follow after college. Dad asked me, “What do you love?” And I told him that I love the ranch more than anything. That’s when I decided to make the ranch my job. I went to the Master’s program in Ranch Management at Texas Christian University. It covered everything from learning about grasses for grazing to actually working the cattle and learning the cattle market. As soon as I got out of the program I went to work for my dad’s ranch business and I worked to update the technology of the cattle business. My kids love spending time with their grandfather on the ranch and checking on the cows. It’s a family passion that really spans all the generations.”