My Origin Story

Why I’ve Spent 20 Years Trying to Make Ranching Work Better

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been trying to solve the same problem.

How can ranching be better? Economically, operationally, and long-term, without losing what makes it ranching in the first place?

That question has followed me across states, oceans, countries, job titles, and entire phases of life. It’s shown up whether I was horseback, in a sale barn, sitting in front of a computer, or staring at a spreadsheet.

The work on the ground

I didn’t start with technology. I started in the dirt. I didn’t even know how to properly use a computer beyond browsing the web until I was 31 years old. I’m now 45.

I’ve spent countless days as a day-worker, the kind of cowboy who hires on to an outfit for a day wherever help is needed. I’ve worked cattle on outfits like the 6666, LIT, Donnell Ranches, and Bell Ranch, stepping into crews, learning different ways of doing the same work, and watching how decisions get made and how crews operate.

I worked as a professional horseshoer. I worked at sale barns as a yard hand. I learned the rhythm, pressure, and reality of livestock handling and marketing from the inside, where timing matters, information moves fast, and mistakes are expensive.

Those jobs taught me something early: most ranch problems aren’t caused by lack of effort or care. They’re caused by fragmentation. Information scattered across notebooks, whiteboards, spreadsheets, emails, and people’s heads.

Learning the systems

In 2010, I attended TCU Ranch Management, where we traveled more than 10,000 miles across Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma, studying nearly every type of beef cattle operation imaginable: commercial cow-calf, seedstock, stocker, integrated systems, innovative feedlots with scientific labs, branded beef programs, and more. Each operation had a different perspective, land base, and proximity to markets, towns, and technology.

Different scales. Different philosophies. Different constraints. One business.

Looking outside the fence

I’m a curious person by nature. I’ve always been interested in new places, people, and opportunities. That curiosity took me overseas with TCU’s Institute of Ranch Management, where I led a research team to Ghana to explore a partnership with the Ghanaian government to develop an educational ranch. Later, I lived in Uganda for a year and, because of my agricultural background, learned an enormous amount about their cattle and crop systems.

Those experiences didn’t give me answers as much as perspective. A new worldview.

When resources are limited, systems matter. When margins are thin, clarity matters. Margins are almost always thin in ranching. And when conditions change quickly, adaptability matters more than perfection.

Ranching in the U.S. has more software tools than almost anywhere else in the world, but tools alone don’t create clarity. They don’t magically improve the bottom line or make life easier. In practice, I’ve found they often create complexity and frustration and are eventually discarded. That failure creates a negative feedback loop, making ranchers even more wary of technology than they were before they tried it.

Developing, and failing, at technology

At some point, I became convinced I could develop technology to help ranchers better understand and manage their grass and cattle.

I studied advanced technology and information systems, digital marketing, and computer programming at the University of Montana, always with a specific lens: how could these tools actually support ranching in the real world?

At the same time, I was living and working on a 450-head commercial cow-calf operation, checking pregnant cows every two hours in negative 20-degree temperatures during February. I developed checklists to ensure consistency during calving so every newborn received the same level of care.

I was laughed at for it. Some locals said that if I needed a checklist, I must not know what I was doing. One of them was a professional pilot. Pilots live by checklists.

Each December, I attended the Montana Stockgrowers annual meeting in Billings to reconnect with ranchers across the state. Every year, I turned that into a personal deep-dive learning experience. It helped grow my network and led to early work building maps and datasets around county-wide cattle numbers.

I tried to build ranch management software twice.

The first time, we were too early and too bleeding-edge. Silicon Valley wanted nothing to do with AgTech, and neither did ranchers. It was a long, difficult road.

The second time, we failed to get buy-in from the people who actually influence the sale of cattle: the sales reps. The ones who ensure the money clears, the cattle are as described, and delivery happens on time.

Both failed.

Those failures were humbling and invaluable. They taught me something that’s shaped everything since.

Technology doesn’t fail because it’s bad.

It fails because it doesn’t fit.

It doesn’t fit the people who use it, how they use it, or the flexibility they need.

If a system doesn’t match how people actually work, it doesn’t matter how powerful it is. If it asks for more effort than it gives back, it won’t last.

Design, adoption, and reality

After that, my path ran through design and systems work: brand design, user interface and user experience design, and project management. Not as a detour, but as a way to understand why some tools get used and others get ignored.

Good design isn’t about how something looks. It’s about whether people trust it, understand it, and actually use it when things get busy.

At the same time, I stayed close to operations. I worked intimately with a sophisticated small-grain and cattle operation. I helped manage multiple stocker grazing systems.

Everywhere I went, I kept building the same things:

• Brand guidelines
• Websites
• Excel spreadsheets
• Grazing plans
• Pregnancy-rate trackers
• Budgets and cash flows
• KPI dashboards

I built them because I enjoy building systems, and because the work demanded them.

The pattern that never changed

Here’s what I’ve learned after 20 years.

Software and systems don’t usually break all at once. When technology doesn’t work well, it slowly fades into the background of someone’s hard drive or browsing history. It becomes a dusty password in a password manager.

The ranch doesn’t fail. It just becomes more frustrating to operate.

And most of the time, the fix isn’t more data, more software, or more complexity.

It’s better structure.

Why this work exists now

Today, my work sits at the intersection of ranching, technology, and design. Not because it’s trendy, but because that’s where 20 years of experience, failure, and iteration have led me. One unintended effect of COVID was that it pushed more ranchers to try technology, for better or worse.

I don’t sell software for software’s sake. I don’t believe technology can fix poor systems or bad data. And I don’t believe ranches need more tools – they need fewer tools that actually work together.

The goal is simple: bring land, livestock, people, and money into one clear system that reflects reality.

When that happens:

• Decisions get easier
• Stress goes down
• The operation becomes legible again

This isn’t a pivot.

It’s the accumulation of everything I’ve been working toward for two decades.

And I’m still chasing the same question I started with.

How do we make ranching work better?

One clear system at a time.