What Fourth Generation Ranching Actually Looks Like in 2025

The version of ranching most people picture comes from a movie made fifty years ago. I don’t live in that movie. I live on a working West Texas ranch in 2025, where the land looks the same as it did when my great-grandfather worked it, but almost everything else has changed. Here’s what a real week actually looks like.

What Doesn’t Change

The land doesn’t care what year it is. West Texas caliche doesn’t get easier to work because you have a better truck. The wind doesn’t stop because you’re tired. Cattle need feeding regardless of what the market is doing or what else you have going on that day.

That constancy is part of what ranching teaches. There is a category of things in your life that have to happen whether or not you feel like doing them, whether or not conditions are ideal, whether or not you got enough sleep. Ranching puts that category front and center every single day. You internalize it, and then you carry it into everything else you do.

My great-grandfather understood that. My grandfather understood it. My father built his life around it. I’m trying to pass it on to my daughters — and the ranch is the best teacher I have for that lesson.

What a Real Week Looks Like

I’m up before 6. Not as a discipline habit I read about somewhere — because the cattle need to be fed and checked before the day gets hot enough to matter. West Texas summer mornings are a window. You use them or you lose them.

The morning check covers water — waterers fail, troughs get fouled, and a cattle animal without water in a Texas summer is a serious problem fast. It covers fence — a breach you don’t catch becomes a problem in someone else’s pasture. It covers condition — you learn to read a herd with your eyes, noticing which animals look off, which ones are moving differently, which ones are isolating.

After that, the ranch work gets sorted by what needs to happen versus what can wait. Some days that’s moving cattle. Some days it’s fixing equipment. Some days it’s making decisions about feed programs, market timing, veterinary calls. The cattle operation doesn’t run itself, and neither does anything else I’m building around it.

In the afternoon, the business side gets its time — Heritage Range Partners, Ellison Land & Cattle, the other projects. Those don’t live separate from the ranch. They grew out of it. The same discipline that gets me out to check cattle at 6 AM is what makes the business side work.

The Parts Nobody Romanticizes

Ranching in 2025 means managing costs against markets that move constantly and that you have almost no control over. Input costs — feed, fuel, veterinary, equipment — move in one direction. Cattle prices move in their own rhythm, which does not necessarily correspond to your inputs. Managing that gap over a multi-year cycle is the actual business of ranching, and it requires the same rigor as any other business.

It also means making decisions with incomplete information. Is this animal sick enough to warrant treatment cost, or will it resolve? Is this fence worth the repair or does that pasture need to come out of rotation anyway? Do I market this group now or hold them another 60 days? Every week has decisions like that, and there’s no manual that covers all of them. You develop judgment through experience and through paying attention to people who have more of it than you do.

And it means things going wrong. Equipment breaks at the worst possible time. Animals die, sometimes for clear reasons and sometimes for no apparent reason at all. Weather does things that no forecast predicted. The rancher who only shows up when things go right isn’t a rancher — he’s a tourist.

What Four Generations Actually Means

I get asked sometimes what it feels like to be fourth generation on the same land. The honest answer is that it mostly feels like a responsibility. The first three generations kept this going through conditions that would have ended a less committed operation. They made decisions that they knew they wouldn’t personally benefit from — because those decisions were right for the land and for the family that would come after them.

I think about that when I’m making decisions now. Not just what does this look like for the next quarter, but what does this look like for the fifth generation. That long view changes how you manage land, how you manage cattle, and how you manage the businesses that have grown around the ranching operation.

It also changes how you raise your kids. Kenna grew up around working horses because horses are part of what this land requires and part of what this family has always known. Ashten grew up in the show barn because understanding animals — understanding how to select, condition, and present livestock — is a real agricultural skill with real roots. None of that is performance. It’s inheritance.

Why We Wouldn’t Trade It

I’ve had conversations with people who grew up in cities and later moved to land, and the thing they say most often is that it changed their relationship to time and to work in a way nothing else had. The land is honest. The work is honest. You put in real effort and get real results, and when something goes wrong you know exactly why it went wrong and what you have to do about it.

There is no version of my life I would trade for one that doesn’t include this land and this work. The early mornings, the equipment repairs, the market stress, the drought watching — all of it comes with the thing that makes it worth it. Which is the thing I’m trying to put into words here, and probably can’t, not quite.

You’d have to come out here and see it in the early morning light to understand what I mean.