My father’s 1960 Ford tractor is dependable, and he keeps his baler and other equipment together with duct tape, wire and prayers.
If only his health was as dependable as that tractor. Time has taken its toll. My father, Eugene, is a proud, 75-year-old rancher from Chama. He takes pride in his humble profession that pays little but continues a long tradition.
And in the ranching tradition, he rarely complains.
He is a man who can bolt heavy machinery together, despite being nearly blind as a result from heart complications suffered in 2004. He has the courage to rescue solitary animals from coyote packs, and the tenderness to gently bottle-feed calves at 2 a.m. in below-zero snowstorms.
Small ranchers like my father are more common in the state than one might imagine. According to Travis Hoffman of the Colorado Beef Council, 64 percent of the state’s 13,100 ranches consist of herds fewer than 50 head. (The national average is 77 percent.) The numbers suggest Colorado’s ranching families are “dedicated to their operations . . . the backbone of agriculture,” Hoffman said.
Colorado may not be completely comfortable with its “cow town” image, but the state is home to 1.3 million head of beef cattle. Luxuries like leather handbags and thick cuts of beef begin on ranches just like my father’s.
He grew up in Chama, on his father’s ranch, then gave in to the urge to “go to the city” in his 20s. But his inner voice pushed him to return to the San Luis Valley and his first love: ranching.
After 20 years of managing a soft drink plant in Denver, he heeded that advice and returned to Chama in his late 40s.
Dad’s lessons to his eight children have always been about the value of work, especially revering those who literally put their shoulders to the yoke.
He appreciates nature and sees humor in most everything. During the drought a few summers ago, we drove two cows to distant water. When I asked why we didn’t drive the whole herd, he just smiled. “Cows are nosy,” he said, “just like people. Just watch.” Sure enough, the rest followed in pairs, curious about what the other animals were doing.
My father (who everyone calls “Buddy”) and ranchers like him are true Renaissance men. They may not have college degrees, but they are inclusively electricians, plumbers, mechanics, veterinarians and engineers. They don’t have the time nor the means to run to “the city” every time something breaks or call for help when an animal needs help.
If there is a slow time on the ranch at all, it’s in mid-winter, but that doesn’t last long. Calving begins in early February and lasts through mid-May. By late October, the animals will have pastured all summer and gained the most weight, right before the winter holidays.
This means ranchers like my father might have to trudge in knee-deep snow, trying to find the cow that wanders into distant thickets to give birth. He delivered one such calf in blizzard conditions in late February. The newborn male was motionless, and my father hauled it in the dark of night on a makeshift sled as far as he could. The following morning, the calf was covered with several inches of snow — and yet still alive. Barely.
“God must want to you to live,” my father said.
He moved the calf into a nearby heated adobe shelter. Every few hours that day and through the next night, my father gently gave the calf small tastes of milk. By the next morning, the calf was able to raise its head and take a bottle. My father called him El Pinto.”
This spring, dad had to brand the herd’s 17 calves while they were still manageable. Instead of the stereotypical Marlboro-man roundup on horseback, my father circled his herd slowly in his worn pickup. He honked the horn a few times and the 27 head of Angus-blend cattle moved sluggishly toward the corral, calves trailing behind.
In rural areas like Chama, the silence is interrupted only by the rush of water in the nearby, ice-framed ditch and the deep baritone of mooing cattle — and every spring during branding, by the blast of truck horns.
My brother separated the calves into a guide chute lined with heavy cedar posts. The animals weigh up to 140 pounds and pushed against each other like schoolboys in lunch line. One by one, the calves were guided into the steel calf-tipping chute. This held them immobile while we went about our work.
Every animal received a bright yellow numbered tag in its ear, an inoculation, and a well-placed band that changed the young bulls to steers. The branding followed; white smoke rose with the smell of burning hair, the calf’s thick leather exposed on the left hind-quarter. Soon the animal was released into the corral and reunited with its mother — none the less for wear and in compliance with state law. El Pinto received tag No. 14, a grateful look and parting pat from my father.
The actual branding was over in minutes. What took more time was fixing the corrals, preparing the shots, chasing those calves determined to squeeze through any open space in the fence, and then inoculating the grown cows. The day started cold and ended in the heat of the late afternoon. The air was filled with the combined smells of sweat, cow pies, branding, and wood smoke from nearby houses.
This is the land of my ancestors, whose roots extend so deep that every visit is a reminder of the state’s original settlers in 1851. Ranching is so revered that a rare, common grazing acreage in nearby San Luis, called La Vega, was established in perpetuity for residents’ domestic livestock.
My father spent years to clear acreage of thick brush, and redig age-old ditches for irrigation. It’s land that produces hay to keep the cattle fed in winter.
Like all ranchers, my father faces the constant foes of weather, aging equipment, too much or (more common) too little water, fence-wrecking and haystack-devouring elk, and struggles with rising costs of operations.
In the end, many people reflect on their lives and wonder would could have been. With Eugene “Buddy” Lobato, it was about keeping the faith, returning to his roots and relying on nothing but a patch of God-forsaken, sage-covered land. And he’s given much of his life to turning it back into what it once was: a living, breathing, working ranch.
Some friends and family members called his move foolish, a mid-life crisis. Today, years later, he calls it “mi tierra.”
He’s working his land, embracing his dream.
Armand Lobato (armandlobato@comcast.net) of Broomfield has worked in the fresh produce busienss for more than 30 years.
