Life on a Working Ranch
The progression of the day depends largely on what the working ranch actually produces. If it specializes in the breeding, raising, and training of horses, then most of the morning and afternoon are spent in the saddle. If there are cows, the feeding usually takes most of the morning, and they must be cared for in the afternoon. Crops must be tended, eggs have to be gathered, and fences will be fixed lest the animals escape. Life on a working ranch is never without work, and everyone will pitch in if they want it to get done.
I grew up on the Rapid R Ranch in southern Kentucky, which is nestled in between ridges just south of Glasgow. It is a beautiful stretch of land – more than three hundred acres of lush grass, rolling hills, and rocky mountainsides. The entrance to our ranch is a solid metal gate that bares our brand, and a crushed gravel drive that leads up to the farmhouse. We have eight full-size barns, with twelve stalls in each, as well as four arenas, two roundpens, and several miles of trails that wound throughout the property. My father had inherited the ranch from his father, who had helped my great grandfather build it more than one hundred years ago. Obviously, there have been several additions made as time goes on, but it still boasts the old-fashioned architecture of that time.
Our main business is horses, though we also raised goats, sheep, and Brahman cows when I was young. I never had much interested in anything but horses, but my father forced me to learn how to take care of each of the animals. Every afternoon, he would drag me away from Barns A, B, and C, and I would help him feed and check each animal for injuries. Our vet, Dr. Mouldin, lived more than thirty miles away, so we performed much of the medical needs ourselves.
At any given point in time, Rapid R Ranch was home to at least one hundred head of horses, though we often had even more. We bred Quarter Horses, Appaloosas, Arabians, and Appendix Quarter Horses (half Thoroughbred, half Quarter Horse) for both sale and competition. I was involved in reining and cutting, which are two of the most popular western sports, and later I became interested in jumping and dressage. I learned from our head trainer, a very kind young woman who had joined us from Scotland, and when I was seventeen, I took on much of the training myself. It was hard work, and I often went to bed with aching muscles and various bruises, but I wouldn’t change my experiences for the world.
A working ranch is basically a farm that is used to generate money through animals. In other words, we weren’t a dude ranch, where people paid money to spend a day in our shoes. We worked with the animals, and we made money off of their performance and sale. We also taught horseback riding to neighboring children, though it was never our main source of income. Some farms teach between 300 and 500 lessons each week; we never taught more than fifteen or twenty. Most of our profits came from western competition, where we showed some of the most talented and athletic equines in Kentucky.
Our mornings started at five o’clock, at which point the morning feeding would begin. It was always quite an ordeal because there were so many animals, and even with ten of us it took more than two hours. My two sisters and I took care of the horse barns while my father, my mother, and five of his hands would feed the other animals. It was made especially hard because we didn’t just carry a bag of feed from stall-to-stall, dumping grain into their bins. Each horse had a set amount of grain, and there were three types of feed: oats, pellets, and sweet feed. Some horses received a mixture of two, while others received just one. We had a list that we kept in the feed room, and we took it around with us as we measured grain.
When horses were sick, we would also have to carry their various medications, administering them either into their feed or via needle. We were taught at an early age how to give IM (intra-muscular) injections, and as teenagers, we learned the more difficult IV’s (intra-veinous). For IM’s, you simply aim the needle in the middle of the neck, and pop it in as fast as you can. The crest of their neck, the point of their shoulder, and the bottom edge of their chest muscle makes a triangle, which was used as a guideline. IV’s are more complicated because you must first find the vein.
After feeding and medicating all of the animals, we started on stalls. Since there were so many barns, the hired hands couldn’t possibly have finished them all every day, so the entire family pitched in. we kids only helped in the summer, since the rest of the year we would be off to school. We grabbed pitchforks and plastic barrels and bunny-hopped each other through each barn, digging out urine and feces and changing sawdust shavings when necessary. Abdias, our most skill hand, drove the tractor down the center aisle so that the manure could be spread in the field. When we finished filling our barrel, it was dumped into the tractor, and then we would move on.
After stalls were finished, we were always starving, and Mom would have headed in early to start preparing our lunch. Since we worked all day, we always ate a very light breakfast in the early morning hours, and then an enormous lunch around eleven o’clock. It usually consisted of some type of meat (steak, pork chops, chicken breasts, etc.), a vegetable or two, and sometimes baked or mashed potatoes. Once a week, we would have pasta, and during the winter we would have chili on the weekends.
Lunch was always over by noon, at which point the real work of the day would start. My sisters and I were comfortable on the back of a horse by the time we were five, and throughout our school years we each exercised at least ten horses per day. Every horse that we worked would be groomed thoroughly, saddled, bridled, and then ridden for a minimum of twenty minutes. If they were competition horses, we worked on endurance, patterns, and cutting cows. If they were farm horses, they were just “hacked,” which involved walking, trotting, and loping around the arena to keep them fit.
Wednesdays were endurance days, which were the most fun out of all the exercises. My sisters and I, and sometimes our friends, would take the competition horses out of the arena and into the fields and trails surrounding our property. We would walk for a mile, then trot for two miles, then lope for three miles, and finally run a half-mile hand gallop across one of the most beautiful fields in Kentucky. It was the most exhilarating experience because we weren’t cooped up in a fenced arena, but actually riding out in the open, which is how it was meant to be done.
Rides usually ended around five o’clock – seven or eight if school was in session – and we would return to the barns for evening feedings. My sisters and I would load bales of hay into wheelbarrows to be distributed to all of the animals, and then we would take care of the goats, sheep, and cows while my father and the hands fed the horses. After feeding, we would clean any stalls that were already dirty from the morning, and head back to the house for dinner.
Mom usually cooked something light for our evening meal – sandwiches, soup, pizza on the grill, or fajitas. Dinner was only for the family, and we were never allowed to invite friends over to eat with us. Mom and Dad usually had a glass of wine with the meal, and my sisters and I were allowed to have sodas. Then, after dinner, we would head back out to the barns to make sure that all of the animals were safe for the night.
Essentially, our workdays ran from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night, and it was the most gratifying work that I have ever experienced. I can’t imagine being cooped up in an office all day, crunching numbers or finalizing reports. My home is on my family’s working ranch, which now is owned by my husband and I, and we still work hard to keep things in top shape, though we only have horses as residence now.
We still bale hay every fall, throwing hundreds of square bales into the upper levels of our barns, and we still clean the stalls every morning. We don’t get as much time to ride anymore, since we have two little ones to look after, but we love Rapid R Ranch and we do our best to keep it up.
Living on a working ranch is difficult work, but it is incredibly fulfilling. If you ever have a chance to visit Glasgow, Kentucky, you can look us up. We’re in the book.
