Montana

One of North America’s Largest Farms Files for Financial Protection, Is Restructuring

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:50:01 GMT

Earlier this week, Monette Group, which farms more than 400,000 acres in Canada and the U.S. filed for financial protection and is restructuring.

The company filed for creditor protector in Canada via the Companies’ Creditor Arrangement Act (CCAA) and filed Chapter 15 in Delaware Bankruptcy Court.

The Cost of Expansion: Efficiency Erosion and the Leverage Trap

The group’s recent financial trajectory highlights a cautionary tale of aggressive, debt-fueled expansion meeting a volatile economic climate. While the organization successfully scaled its footprint and top-line revenue over the last several years, operational efficiency and debt sustainability have reached a critical breaking point. [all dollars are Canadian]

The Era of Aggressive Growth (2017–2022)
Driven by substantial borrowing, the Group underwent a massive scale-up, growing revenue from $45 million to $198 million and expanding its cultivated land from 97,000 to 269,000 acres. While total EBITDA initially followed this upward trend, the underlying efficiency—measured by EBITDA-per-acre—began to signal trouble, dropping significantly from its 2015 highs.
Operational Headwinds and Margin Compression (2024–Present)
The transition into 2024 saw revenue climb to a record $347 million across 440,000 acres, yet profitability decoupled from growth. Diversification into produce and cattle, intended to broaden the portfolio, instead acted as a drag on the bottom line. By 2024, EBITDA-per-acre plummeted to a decade low of $83—a nearly 50% decline. This downward trend was exacerbated in 2025; despite a projected $72 million EBITDA, actual earnings reached only $31 million due to a “perfect storm” of poor crop prices, high input costs, and yield losses.
The Sustainability Crisis
The group’s reliance on cheap capital (approximately 3% interest rates) and rising real estate valuations proved successful in a low-rate environment. However, the convergence of flat property values, persistent inflation, and high interest rates has rendered the current capital structure unsustainable. Despite holding significant underlying asset value, the group is now overleveraged, with compressed margins leaving little room to service debt or maintain liquidity.

What Is Monette Group?

Since 2010, Monette Group has been aggressively expanding from its family farm in Saskatchewan to Manitoba and British Columbia in Canada. Current President Darrel Monette took over the family farm in 2013. In 2019, the company expanded into the U.S. first in Montana and then Arizona and Colorado. The company’s website says its core values are: teamwork, efficiency, growth and ‘get shit done.’

With its expansion and diversification, the business expanded into four main brands:

Monette Farms: growing pulses, wheat, corn, sugar beets, barley, and alfalfa in Canada and the U.S.
Monette Produce: with growing locations in California, Arizona and Canada
Monette Cattle: ranches located in Saskatchewan and British Columbia
Monette Seeds: located in Saskatchewan in partnership with NexGen Seeds

The 18 business entities of Monette Group employ between 300 and 600 people, depending on the season.

Grain production, primarily canola, wheat and durum accounted for over 60% of group revenue in 2024 and more than 50% in 2025. Grain operations dominate the Canadian footprint with 68% of the group’s production occurring in Canada.

Fresh produce operations are primarily located in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, with significant fall and winter production in Arizona. In 2025, produce accounted for approximately 15% of group revenue. Crops include carrots, squash, broccoli, cabbage, pumpkin, cauliflower and watermelon. The group’s produce is mainly sold to Loblaws and the Little Potato Company.

Cattle ranching accounted for approximately 10% of revenue in 2024 and 17% in 2025. Cattle ranching operations focus on Black and Red Angus cattle, including herd breeding in British Columbia and feedlots across Alberta and Saskatchewan.

Seed processing accounted for 19% of revenue in 2024 and 16% in 2025.

Its main crops 10 years ago were green and red lentils, durum, canola and malting barley.

According to the company’s website, Monette Farms’ newest addition is west of Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a certified organic farm and headquarters to Monette Seeds USA.

What Monette Farms Has Said

President Darrel Monette has penned a letter sent to landowners and leasing partners as well as a press release distributed with general counsel as the point of contact. Both are dated April 21, 2026.

In both Monette says this process will allow them to stabilize finances, restructure debt, and continue operating.

The letter read: “This filing is a proactive response to current industry pressures (higher input costs, higher interest rates, and tighter credit) and is not a liquidation.”

It continued: “We are working with our advisors and a court-appointed Monitor to develop a restructuring plan for credit and court approval.”

Per a company press release, the day-to-day farming activities, spring seeding and livestock care are continuing as planned. The release also said all employees are being retained at this time.

The Assets of Monette Group

According to its 2025 financial statements, the group has $1.24 billion of total assets booked at cost (and not reflective of market value.)

As of April 12, 2026, the group owns 274,000 acres of land. In the U.S. Monette owns 61,700 acres in Arizona, Montana and Colorado.

For crop production, it leases 175,000 acres in Canada and 43,000 acres in the U.S. with annual total lease payments of $29.4 million. For its cattle business, Monette holds grazing licenses on 1.2 million acres of land in Canada.

The group owns three seed processing facilities in Canada.

It leases more than 1,700 separate units of farm equipment, with 1,600 units leased from John Deere Financial. Annually, the group spends $26 million on leased equipment.In 2023, it was newsworthy when the business transitioned from Case IH equipment to John Deere equipment in a reported $100+ million deal.

What Else Is There To Watch?

Monette Group is one of the largest privately held farming operations in North America.

The timing of this filing is critical for the farm to put in a 2026 crop. In the CCAA filing, Monette Group said its seed expenses are $40 million per year. To get set up for seeding, Monette’s operations may receive 41 truck loads of product a day (nearly 15,000 truck loads a year).

The main filing is in Canada with proceedings under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) as part of a court-supervised restructuring process. From here is a process by which Monette will work with a court-appointed monitor to develop a restructuring plan for creditor and court approval.

The Chapter 15 filing asks the U.S. court to recognize the Canadian CCAA proceeding as the “foreign main proceeding” which can extend the protection of U.S. assets. It also prevents U.S. creditors from taking legal action such as seizing assets or filing lawsuits.

In the CCAA document, it is stated Monette Group held a $950 million secured credit facility dated December 5, 2018, which matured on April 15, 2026. Repayment of the obligations owing to the syndicate of lenders is a necessary component of the group’s overall restructuring strategy.

The CCAA filing comes after Monette per the guidance of its lending syndicate to sell assets. Two tracts were sold in 2025: in Regina, Saskatchewan for $41.18 million and 17,000 acres of land in Montana for $47.5 million. Additional sales were attempted this this winter, but with only one completed sale of 12,932 acres of farmland in the Stewart Valley of Swift Current, Saskatchewan for $54 million.

In the affadavit, Monette says a restructuring and selling of assets by the court appointed monitor is important to provide an orderly sale of assets and not cause a bulk liquidation which could result in lower values.

The farm has been active on social media:

One Montana Farmer's Fight to Break the Generational Cycle of Failure

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 13:43:16 GMT

Ryan Lankford hasn’t just seen failure. He’s lived it.

“My father definitely tried to discourage me from farming, because it wasn’t good,” he says. “I mean, we went broke.”

“We grew up relatively poor,” he says. “We leased all of our land.”

The Lankford family had an allotment on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, the 1,014 square mile land shared by the A’aninin and Nakoda Tribes in north-central Montana.

Lankford compares the arrangement to the Homestead Act. But, it was designed for failure.

“The hard part for us as Indians is that the title was held in trust by the federal government, meaning that we really couldn’t borrow off of that title,” he says. “We had no leverage for capital, no leverage to expand and so it really limited us on resources and what we could do with our land.”

But as an Army veteran, Lankford knows how to launch an offensive. When he came back to the farm to make it his life, he did so with a mission – use every tool at his disposal to protect his farm, his Tribe and his family’s future.

Fighting for Land Ownership

As a member of the Tribe’s Agricultural Expert Committee, Ryan has helped to chip away at the generational curse of Tribal land ownership.

“Now, our Tribe owns the land, and our ground goes out to bid first to the primary members of the tribe,” he says. “As a member I live here on my allotment, and I have the first right to go bid and negotiate with my Tribe without competition from the outside.”

Under the new arrangement, Lankford and his father have brokered nearly 10,000 acres.

“I was the first generation in my family to buy land,” he says. “That’s something I’m really proud of.”

He’s also tackling another land issue – how to manage absentee land ownership.

“There’s a lot of farm ground that’s being abandoned on our reservation, because it’s too hard financially to farm here,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of the same tools you do on the other side.”

His goal is to recover some of that abandoned and neglected land and seed it in native pasture ground in an effort to restore prairie lands to the region.

Fighting for Land Stewardship

He’s already managing diversified production on 10,000 acres, where he has a Red Angus herd of cattle and grows year-round wheat, canola, peas, lentils, chickpeas, flax and barley. He’s transitioned some of his acreage to Certified Organic to capitalize on the premium market.

His relationship with conservation on the land is intensely pragmatic. Lankford views it as another tool in his arsenal – one that helps him de-risk innovation and protect his bottom line.

“On the conservation side, what we try to do is make sure that we’re doing the best economically we can, because if we run out of money, we don’t get to play the game,” he says. “We can’t do a lot of the big experiences and trials, so we try practices out one at a time, like we might take a half section and do it and see what it works out.”

“And I think that’s our conservation journey -- seeing what works and what we can utilize on our farm.”

R.L. Lankford Farms manages diversified production including a Red Angus herd of cattle, year-round grain crops including wheat, canola, peas, lentils, chickpeas, flax and barley.

(America’s Conservation Ag Movement )

One lever that he’s used to accomplish that pragmatism is funding and technical assistance from USDA-NRCS .

In states like Montana, USDA-NRCS deploys Tribal Conservationists to tackle the unique land and management issues that tribes face.

Michael Kinsey, one of those tribal conservationists for Lankford’s area, uses his expertise to match a producer’s unique conservation goals to both funding and technical assistance opportunities within the federal agency.

“Like any big goal, there are several small steps that need to be taken to reach planned conservation outcomes,” said Kinsey. “We can help interested producers get started with smaller projects to test technology, different management strategies, incorporate traditional ecological knowledge and new conservation practices while building on what they already do.”

For Lankford, that looked like using the popular Conservation Stewardship Program to gain access to both guidance and funding to innovate use of existing technology. It wasn’t a silver bullet, but it was incentive enough for him to take the leap.

“We did variable rate fertilizer through the CSP, and it didn’t cover my cost of buying the tractor and buying the drill that did variable rate, but it gave me the motivation to expand our existing technology,” he says. “We did that on probably about 15% of our acres, and they helped me write a prescription.”

Fighting for Security

Lankford has seen what happens when there is no safety net for farmers. In 2024, he took national steps to start breaking down the barrier that agriculture’s intense amount of risk poses. His four-year term on the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) Board of Directors puts him at the center of the conversation around federal crop insurance administered by USDA.

“Our margins are so tight, and the risk is so great that we’re putting our whole lives into it,” he says. “I think that’s something other industries don’t understand—that there’s no safety net for us year to year.”

“We need that crop insurance to take as a marketability tool to our bankers and borrow money.”

Lankford has some very specific goals with his work in that space, which include protections for his fellow farmers against shallow losses as much as the catastrophic ones.

“Catastrophic insurance is a one-year fix to get your machinery lined up for the auction,” he says. “That’s not the fix. I think the fix for me is, how do we insure those shallow losses?”

“Because as a producer, I would rather pay a premium every year and not have any help, because that means I’m doing things right.”

Fighting for Family

Lankford is now in his forties, with six children who are into the normal things, such as basketball.

In your 40s, sometimes you take a hard look at your priorities. So, he went looking for a tool to help him tip the work-life scales more in his favor.

Now, when he leaves the farm in the hands of family and employees, oversight is readily available in the palm of his hands, courtesy of tractors with Starlink gauges.

“When I’m coaching junior high girls’ basketball, I can look at my phone and see if they are in the right field, applying the right things and if it’s timely and on-point,” he says.

He’s not the only one that is leveraging tools like precision ag technology to capture efficiency and work-life balance.

“Precision agricultural technologies afford farmers the opportunity to be more efficient through increased insights into their operation that assist and speed up the decision- making process while also bringing that precision into the field through the more precise placement of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides,” says Austin Gellings, senior director of agricultural services at Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), an organization that regularly publishes insights into equipment integration and adoption.

“This leads to less passes, less stops and, overall, more time.”

Lankford uses precision technology and Star Link internet on his equipment to capture efficiency on-farm, which allows him to manage labor even when he is off-farm.

(America’s Conservation Ag Movement )

For Lankford, that extra time in his day is time that he can spend with his family.

“That gives me the ability to live a life off the farm too.”

In his thirties, Lankford says he missed a lot of life. When he was off-farm, he was constantly worried about production. Now, though, he’s able to not only leave the farm for his family, but he can prioritize responsibilities that maximize his skills.

“And that’s one of the things that I see technology doing for me is giving me a way to say I don’t have to be married to the machine.”

Icing on that cake, for Lankford, is the ROI that his technology is unlocking.

“I need to make sure I am maximizing the capabilities of my equipment all the time and I think the technology is doing that,” he says. “It’s taking the operator error out of it so I can more closely pencil and get a better baseline of ROI.”

Gellings believes that the benefits of technology can reach all the way to the bottom line.

“In total, the increased efficiencies that an operation can realize through the use of precision ag technologies can often lead to less overall inputs with increased productivity, helping to both reduce cost and increase overall profits.”

Fighting for Legacy

In his tractor is when Lankford really starts to add up his ammunition and consider if it really is enough for him to leave the farm and the industry better for the next generation.

Is he doing enough?

He has a son and daughters coming up behind him, quicker than he’d like, and the work that he is doing today has stakes higher than they ever have before.

“There are times where I’m running this machine and we’re cutting 200-bushel and I think, ‘Man, it don’t get any better than this,’” he says. “But I’ve also ran this machine and cut seven bushel and thought, ‘Oh man, are my kids going to have what they need?’”

The stress is real. And Lankford knows that he’s not the only one who feels the tightness in the chest sometimes. He works with the Veterans Farmer Coalition to help ensure that his peers have the support they need.

But, that starts at home, so he’s working on taking care of his own mental health. He’s getting out of the sprayer more. He built a heated shop with an office that, critically, has a door. When things get tough, he shuts the door, leaves the building, leans on his kids, his wife or his church.

Because his kids need him to create an operation that they can take over someday. But, they also need a dad.

“It’s no better reward than working with your dad, I’ll tell you that right now,” he says. “There’s, not a person in your life that wants you to succeed more than your father.”

“I have that same feeling for my son -- that I want him to succeed.”

“If he wants to come back, he can come back,” he says. “But I want him to have the ability to say ‘I’m marketable--I can do anything I want to do, and if it happens to be farming, I’m going to be excellent.’”

America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at americasconservationagmovement.com .

One Montana Farmer’s Conservation Solution: Get Back to His Prairie Roots

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 14:21:34 GMT

A few years ago, Jeff Sather was dealing with burnout and the routine of doing things how they’ve always been done.

“Spray this chemical, put on this fertilizer and hope and pray you get a crop,” he says.

Sather Farms sits in Larslan, Mont., the far northeast corner of the state. When it comes to the ranching side of his operation, Sather felt like he’d made great progress after taking a course in the art of “ranching for profit.” Through that work, his 10,000 acres of pastureland was finally working for him.

What wasn’t working for him? The 4,500 acres of crop ground he was farming.

He started looking for a solution. He took online courses and went to the Montana Soil Health Symposium.

“In spring 2020, I heard these guys talking about how biology in the soil works and how they could cut fertilizer and phosphorus use,” he says. “That was what I wanted to do, so I went home and told everyone we weren’t buying fertilizer that year.”

“I knew that was our end goal so I thought we’d might as well go there now.”

Partnerships That Unlock Potential

Sather had heard about farmers in his area receiving financial and technical assistance from the USDA NRCS to implement conservation. It seemed like a logical place to start.

Completing conservation enhancements through NRCS’s Conservation Steward Program meant he could afford a no-till disk drill to plant seed with minimal soil disturbance.

But the dominos kept falling for Sather. The no-till disk drill could be used with a stripper header that would leave stubble standing after harvest. In Montana, stubble is critical.

“Because we’re high and flat with long winters and the wind always blows, anything that’ll catch snow is in your benefit,” he says.

That’s when the biggest domino fell for Sather Farms. In an effort to find financial assistance for that equipment purchase, he connected with Marni Thompson, then a NRCS soil health specialist.

In 2020, Sather Farms enrolled in an Environmental Quality Incentives Program contract aimed at solving their most challenging soil health concerns.

Sather’s path to regenerative farming was now in overdrive.

Jeff Sather uses cover crops as part of a five-year intensive soil health partnership with USDA-NRCS.

(USDA-NRCS)

On 600 acres, Sather and Thompson got to work. The partnership put these key soil health practices into place:

Using a no-till disk drill to limit soil disturbance
Implementing a diverse rotation with no fallow ground
Planting diverse, full-season cover crops
Integrating livestock through grazing cover crops
Using a stripper header to maximize organic residue
Testing soils regularly

Betting On Diversity

Of the soil health principles, Sather is putting his chips into diversity. He calls it intensive cropping of his cash crop rotations.

“We were growing yellow peas and spring wheat before and maybe some lentils,” he says. “Now we grow peas, lentils and spring wheat, durum wheat, winter wheat and hull less oats for gluten-free flour.”

Sathers planted some safflower and flax, and he’s looking into adding old-fashioned oats or maybe another crop.

Montana doesn’t have an extra-long growing season, so Sather has started intercropping to stack those crops into the same field in the same year.

He’s grown lentils and flax in the same field, harvested them at the same time and then used a cleaner to separate them. Last year, he intercropped flax and chickpeas.

“We are looking at adding a grass, or some kind of perennial mix in the rotation, so we can plant the grass and keep it in grass for up to six years. Then we would take it back out to farm again as a quicker way to improve soil biology and organic matter,” he explains.

By implementing his rotational matrix, he’s seeing surprising benefits, including an increase in residue material and a decrease in pathogens.

Planting lentils and peas along with flax has allowed Sathers to avoid spraying a fungicide because he’s eliminated the likelihood of blight becoming a problem.

“Peas and lentils are not a high-carbon plant, and their stubble basically disappears before winter even happens,” he says. “But by adding in flax, when we harvest we leave more residue behind and a higher carbon that will still be there next year.”

Multiple years of experimenting with this mixture is starting to pay off, even with current drought conditions in Montana.

“The cool part about intercropping is it might be flax one year and the next year might be a lentil,” he says. “You end up with two different crops you can market.”

Soil health practices are helping Sather Farms weather the drought that Montana has faced for the past several growing seasons.

(Sather Farms)

Reaping the Benefits

Thompson had taken some initial soil health tests prior to the pair’s work. Now, every June, she’s back at it, collecting more data to see the benefits of Sather’s intensive soil health focus.

“It’s tough in Montana because the environment is dry and it’s windy, so soil health moves pretty slow,” she says. “But we did see some really cool things happening in comparison between benchmark data and where he’s at now.”

Slake tests show Sather’s soil is staying intact and the water around is remaining clear, signs his soil biology is holding the soil together.

“In a PLFA soil test, we are keying in on the increase of mycorrhizae fungi because that is lacking in our area,” Thompson says. “In his soil test, we are seeing an increase in those, which is huge because they are very susceptible to chemical and physical disturbance.

“We are seeing the increases in mycorrhizae fungi because he is bought in to these practices and incorporating the soil health principles,” she adds.

Agronomic Armor

Coincidentally, Sather says his work with NRCS hass coincided with the tap drying up for his region.

“We went into a drought in 2020 and now we are in a long-term drought,” he says.

Sather knows what the data is showing him in terms of the health of his soils, but anecdotally it’s adding up to a protective armor for his crops, which he can see every growing season.

“A couple of the years, the guys who used the heavy fertilizer with their seed, their crops really never even grew, where mine put on with biology and fish hydrolysate came up and look good,” he says. “It still ran out of moisture and wasn’t worth combining, but it looked better than some of the crops across the field or across the fence line.”

That visual confirmation made Sather feel like he’s on the right track.

“Now we’re just hoping, praying one of these days it’s going to start raining again.”

Jeff Sather is working to establish a “farming-for-profit” model for his cropping acreage by investing in soil health practices.

(Sather Farms)

Farming for Profit

Sather feels like he’s on track to reaching a profit-centered approach on his crop acres that is yielding benefits not only for his soil but also for his brand, Prairie Roots , a brainchild of his wife, Marisa, to direct-market their food products.

“I might not have the bumper crop yields everybody else might have in the area, but I’m still making a profit on every acre,” he says.

While Sather is concerned about the health of his soil, interested in preserving a legacy and choosing to grow healthier food products for consumers, he knows none of those interests trump his ability to keep farming.

“Mom and Dad rent me everything they own, so I need to make profit to be able to pay them rent,” he says. “I need to be able to make a profit to afford to stay here.”

If the Sather legacy is going to survive in Montana agriculture, he knows he must make a profit in order to set up his sons for a future on the farm. Along the way, he’s bringing his sons on his regenerative journey, hoping they will learn how to steward the land for the future.

“I’m just working on trying to get my system figured out and learning as much as I can to hopefully continue to improve yields,” he says.

America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at www.americasconservationagmovement.com .

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New Survey Shows Labor is Serious Challenge for Ag Industry

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 18:00:19 GMT

A new survey from the Minneapolis Fed found ag bankers rank labor availability as a top concern for their farm clients.

The survey, which was conducted with ag bankers from the ninth district (Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin), found the issue is viewed as a “serious challenge” for 63% of respondents and a minor challenge for the majority of the remaining 37%.

“It’s becoming more and more difficult to obtain the labor needed to operate,” a Minnesota-based banker told the Minneapolis Fed.

The availability of livestock workers was seen as more limited than crop workers and those surveyed also shared that finding long-term help is more difficult than temporary help due to the seasonal nature of the ag industry.

As far as how this compares to past conditions, 39% of respondents said labor availability has gotten “much worse” over the past five years and 44% said it’s “a little worse”.

The Minneapolis Fed attributes this challenge to the region’s low influx of migrant workers and aging workforce.

According to U.S. Census Bureau data, 10% of animal production employees in the area are foreign born, compared to 18% nationally. The number is even lower for crop production with just 5% of workers being foreign born, compared to 32% nationally.

The region also has some of the lowest unemployment rates in the U.S.

At the same time, the median age of workers in the region rose from 51 to 56 in 2021. The number of workers between 45 to 54 has declined over the past decade with a small increase of those between the ages of 25 to 44 and a large increase of those over 55.

Keystone XL Pipeline Gets Enough Shipper Pledges to Proceed

Thu, 22 Sep 2022 02:14:17 GMT

(Bloomberg) -- TransCanada Corp. has secured enough shipper interest to go forward with the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.

The Calgary-based company now has “approximately 500,000 barrels per day of firm, 20-year commitments,” according to a statement on Thursday. The pipeline operator will continue to secure additional volumes.

The announcement marks yet another hurdle overcome for the project, first proposed in 2008. In November, TransCanada received state approval in Nebraska to construct the project there using an alternate route, a decision that may spur added legal action by foes who say the new path hasn’t received the same review as the original plan.

Meanwhile, the company said in its statement it is working with landowners along the new path to obtain the necessary easements. Construction preparation has begun, the company said, with primary work potentially coming in 2019.

“Over the last 12 months, the Keystone XL project has achieved several milestones that move us significantly closer to constructing this critical energy infrastructure for North America,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s chief executive officer, said in the statement.

Keystone XL would be a victory for Canadian oil sands producers who are facing transportation bottlenecks getting their crude to market.

The pipeline would ship 830,000 barrels of crude a day from Hardisty, Alberta, through Montana and South Dakota to Nebraska, where it would connect to TransCanada’s existing Keystone system that carries crude to the U.S. Gulf Coast hub of refineries and export terminals.

The statement didn’t say that a final decision has been made by the company to proceed and Terry Cunha, a spokesman for TransCanada, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Keystone XL drew fierce opposition from environmentalists concerned about climate change and landowners along the path in Nebraska. Former President Barack Obama rejected TransCanada’s application in 2015, saying that it wasn’t in the national interest. That decision was reversed by the Trump administration.

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.

Cowboy Recalls Career Working At Matador Cattle Co.

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 18:14:04 GMT

The following article first appeared in the Montana Standard, Butte, Montana, Jan. 13, 2022, and is reprinted here with permission from the author and publisher.

Ray Marxer’s first day as a hired hand at the Matador Cattle Co. ranch south of Dillon began with two lessons in humility. As dawn approached, jitters struck.

“I was so nervous, I threw up,” Marxer recalled.

Next, he joined a crew wrangling horses in preparation for a cow and calf weaning operation that day. A cowboy consigned him a horse. As he was bridling the animal it collided with another horse and Marxer watched forlornly as his designated mount trotted away.

“One thing this life will do for you is humble you,” he said.

Marxer’s career at the Matador Cattle Co. began Oct. 8, 1974. He retired in 2011 as general manager of a ranch whose scale tends to elicit awe: 345,000 acres, roughly 3,000 miles of fencing, 15,000-plus animals, including cows, calves, bulls and horses.

Today, more than 47 years after his greenhorn debut, Marxer’s description of that first day still hints at a young man’s mortification.

Marxer fretted then that the ranch’s seasoned hands would conclude he was a “gunsel,” a sort of counterfeit cowboy – someone wearing a Stetson, boots and a belt buckle the size of a dinner plate but bereft of skills and gumption.

Yet as the sun climbed the sky, Marxer proved his mettle. Marion Cross, then general manager of the huge ranch, sensed that this rookie wrangler from Cascade had the right stuff. He asked Ray to run a gate for him as they separated cows from calves.

“He saw something in me,” Marxer said.

The Wall Street Journal reported in early December that media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the newspaper’s executive chairman and owner, and wife, Jerry Hall, had purchased the Matador Cattle Co. from Koch Industries for $200 million.

That news sent Marxer and his family into nostalgia’s embrace. They reminisced about halcyon years they had spent working on a ranch whose territories included portions of the spectacular Centennial Valley, clear, cold trout streams and habitat for abundant wildlife.

“Those were absolutely the best years of our lives,” Marxer said.

During a recent interview at his home south of Twin Bridges, Marxer, now 68, reminisced about the 37 years he worked at the Matador Cattle Co. ranch south of Dillon. For 21 of those years, he served as general manager.

His voice caught and his eyes brimmed with tears when talking about Marion Cross’ intuitive grasp during that very first day of Marxer’s potential to be a capable wrangler.

“He recognized then, in just a few short hours, that I was an employee with the right values and beliefs and skills, but mostly he realized that I had the right values and beliefs,” Marxer said.

“He saw that I was in the game. He saw that I was paying attention,” he said. “A lot of the old guys wouldn’t say much. They just expected you to pay attention.”

Skills can be learned, Marxer said. “But values and beliefs, they’re more of a job for God.”

Just a few months passed before Cross and Tom Griggs, cow foreman, felt confident enough about Marxer, then 21, to ask him to be the foreman of Matador’s Sage Creek Division, an 80,000-acre subsection of the ranch near Dell.

“I told them I didn’t think I was qualified,” Marxer recalled.

Yet he agreed to go, and he and his wife, Sue, moved to Sage Creek from a trailer at ranch headquarters.

“I made a lot of mistakes, but that’s how I learned,” Marxer said.

The Sage Creek Division was about 60 miles from headquarters.

“It was colder and things were about a month behind,” Marxer said.

As a consequence, hiring seasonal hands could be challenging because by the time Sage Creek had thawed they had signed on with another outfit. In those days, many cowboys came and went like the wind.

“They’d work long enough to get a paycheck to go to town,” Marxer said.

He had first felt the pull toward ranching and ranch management as a teenager.

Ray Marxer grew up in Cascade. His father, Dale, worked as a farmer and rancher. His mother, Shirley, tended the home. Toward the end of Marxer’s junior year at Cascade High School, a guidance counselor summoned him. He asked Marxer, a good and promising student, what he wanted to do with his life.

“I told him I’d really like to be a foreman on a large ranch,” Marxer recalled.

The guidance counselor scoffed, telling Marxer, “You’ve got more to offer than that.”

After a brief flirtation with higher education, Marxer decided to chase getting hired by a large ranch. He landed a job with the Matador Cattle Co., sometimes referred to as the Beaverhead Ranch to differentiate it from the Matador ranch in Texas, also owned by Koch Industries.

Fred Koch, founder of the company that became Koch Industries, had purchased the property in Beaverhead County in 1950, when the ranch was significantly smaller. His sons, Charles and David Koch, continued the ranch ownership.

Marxer and Sue, who grew up in Bigfork, had three children while at the Sage Creek Division.

The oldest was Clayton, who is now 39. In December, his nostalgic Facebook post about growing up on the Matador ranch attracted many readers.

He described living as a child at the backcountry Staudaher Cow Camp in the summer and then following the cows home when they headed back down the Blacktail Road for winter. Marxer said one problem at Staudaher involved wranglers traveling after work to tie one on in Lima. He said he realized there was little to hold them at cow camp.

“We built a roping arena. We made it so they could have fun and want to stay.”

Marxer became cow foreman in late 1985, and the family moved to ranch headquarters from Sage Creek. Marxer’s employment by the Matador Cattle Co. commenced during an era when characters still hired on.

One was Roy Drinnen, a D-Day veteran, a steadfast bachelor and loner who meticulously tended the ranch’s thousands of miles of fence on foot with a shovel and a crowbar. He retired at 91 and lived to be 100.

“He would wear out a shovel every year, literally wear it out,” Marxer said.

Ranch work could be dangerous. Yet Marxer said serious injuries were rare.

“Everybody had to pay attention,” he said.

One day a cowboy got distracted and didn’t realize his lead rope had become looped around one leg.

“When he got off his horse to shut the gate, he fell off the horse and it started to drag him. Here came that horse running a hundred miles an hour and [the cowboy] was just spinning behind it,” Marxer recalled.

The man suffered a compound fracture of his right leg. A helicopter evacuation followed.

Marxer made numerous changes at the ranch during his tenure and the Matador Cattle Co. won environmental stewardship awards and collected other honors.

He said his first reaction after learning about the sale to Rupert Murdoch was to wonder why it happened. David and Charles Koch, often referred to as the Koch Brothers, always seemed to have a strong emotional connection to the Matador ranch, he said.

“I questioned in my own mind what motivated Charles to sell the ranch,” Marxer said.

Koch Industries did not respond to a request for comment. David Koch died in 2019 at age 79. Charles Koch survives and is 86. Both visited the ranch as young men, Marxer said. They were expected to work hard and they did, he said.

“Charles once lived in a shack at the cow camp with Bitterroot Bob,” he said, referencing the late Robert Roy Stewart, another World War II veteran who worked at the ranch. “Bob and his pistol shooting in the shack left a lasting impression on Charles,” Marxer said.

Stewart, a Darby native, died in February at age 92. His obituary noted, “There was not a tougher guy than Bob.” It also reported that Stewart had once worked for the P & O Ranch, the Matador’s predecessor.

The Poindexter & Orr ranch was named for P.H. Poindexter and William Orr. Poindexter, from the East, and Orr, a native of Ireland, came to the region around the time Beaverhead County was formed in 1865. They raised cattle and horses on their ranch.

Meanwhile, Marxer said he would happily provide a horseback tour of the ranch’s breathtaking landscapes to the Murdochs and their children and grandchildren.

“I would dearly love to take the new owners to places like the site that has 117 teepee rings,” he said.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch declared, “We feel privileged to assume ownership of this beautiful land and look forward to continually enhancing both the commercial cattle business and the conservation assets across the ranch.”

Marxer said he hopes the Matador remains a working cattle ranch. If it does not, the ranch will linger in his memories.

He knows when the sandhill cranes return in March. He can imagine the calves bawling and the piercing cry of a red-tailed hawk. He remembers the magnificent array of stars.

“I lived a dream. I got to experience living and raising a family and spending much of a lifetime in a setting only God could have created.”