TORRINGTON – The Torrington Rotary Club met for their weekly meeting, held at the Cottonwood County Club, on Monday, April 1 at noon.
Eric Boyer, president, opened the meeting with a prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, the four-way test, and donation collection for Rotarian efforts.
Guests were introduced by club members and Boyer introduced the speaker of the afternoon, Ron Rabou.
“Ron is with Rabou Farms, a fifth-generation farm family, located in southeast Wyoming along with his wife, Julie,” Boyer explained. “A strong long-lasting relationship with their buyers is very important to their operation and family. Organic wheat is their primary crop. Mr. Rabou is also a recognized author and entrepreneur.”
Boyer went on to explain Rabou was also a member of the Cheyenne Rotary Club.
Rabou began his presentation with humor.
“I am a little old-fashioned,” Rabou said. “I can tell just by looking around the room that some of you have been out of school for a while, no offense.”
After a short activity, Rabou gave a history lesson to the club on his family and his family farm.
“My history actually runs pretty deep in Wyoming,” Rabou began. “My relatives, believe it or not, came out here in their wagon in the 1870s and I can just see them coming out in their wagon, showing up in Albin, in Cheyenne and they’re like no trees, no water. The grass is not really grass it’s just crunchy and they decided to live there. Why would they leave Illinois to come to Wyoming to settle down? We know the answer because we are from Wyoming. It’s called free land.”
According to Rabou, his family was given 160 acres of land in Wyoming.
“They had this idea that they were going to come to Wyoming, and they were going to be able to have these farms and ranches. If they stayed there for five years, then they got their free land,” Rabou explained. “My relatives originally came to Wyoming. My great-great-grandfather was actually a stone mason and he helped build the Wyoming State Capital and the Union Pacific Train Depot. He passed away in the early 1900s.”
Rabou then stated his great-great-grandmother decided to take advantage of the Homestead Act.
“She and all of her kids, which included my great-grandfather, decided they would move out to the Albin area and they each got their 160 acres,” Rabou said. “Most everyone except my great-grandfather was smart and they left and went and did something else. My great-grandfather decided he was going to stay in the Albin area and become a rancher.”
The small particles of land developed by different members of the Rabou family, throughout time, according to Rabou.
“My great-great-grandmother started this place and then my great-grandfather had some kids and pretty soon everyone’s together on this operation,” Rabou explained.
According to Rabou, his grandfather would often tell him stories about his great-grandfather and great-grandmother, who stayed in a tent for a year after they were married by the hills in between Albin and LaGrange.
Rabou showed the club a newspaper clipping, which he had found in his great-grandfather’s belongings telling the story of 40 hogs, owned by his grandfather, running loose in Albin.
“It’s the wild west. My grandfather’s hogs get out and he goes over to get his pigs and his neighbor shoots him with a shotgun,” Rabou recounted. “It’s just the wild west and it was just how it worked and all of us who were from here and who had families who homesteaded here understand this.”
Rabou explained the ranch he grew up on was a cattle ranch and he grew up riding horses and working cattle.
“With this partnership it was equal. Everyone owned 25%,” Rabou said. “But how many partnerships do you know that are really truly equal? Very rarely does the workload end up being equal, even though on paper maybe we’re equal. I always tell people there was one family tree but there were two completely separate branches,” he explained.
Rabou expressed his dad and partners were organized when it came to estate funding stating they all had trusts, an operating agreement, and had developed a limited liability company.
“They figured out how to navigate all of this stuff. Like if something happened to them, you know, what was going to happen next? It turns out, I have five grown girl cousins and one male cousin but the males are the only ones according to the Rabou ranch documents that were competent enough to run the place. We were the only ones that could inherit it; Rabou sons only,” Rabou explained. “Even if you were a lady and you were more competent than one of the males, you weren’t allowed to become a partner.”
Rabou explained his ranch had 250 to 300 head of cattle which supported five separate Rabou families.
“You probably know enough about agriculture and certainly the bankers know, that’s not a winning formula, that that’s not a winning formula. Like that does not work,” Rabou said. “There was this challenge everyone really neglected to face and that was even though we transferred this to the next generation, what does this actually look like? My dad and I would always get in these conversations about what’s going to happen in the ranch and what are we going to do and how are things going to work?” Rabou continued. “We were just incredibly close, and he was very open-minded with me. We talked about a lot of things and when I was in college, I was real active with the state FFA program and he asked me to come home and help work cows.”
Rabou explained to the club his father died while they were working cattle.
“My dad and I were filling vaccine guns, and I turned around and my dad was gone,” Rabou explained. “I look in the alleyway and he’s lying down. I jumped over the fence and put my hand under his head, and I said, ‘Are you okay? What happened?’ He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and his lips turned blue.”
Despite Rabou’s heroic efforts his father was pulled from life support the next day. At age 26, Rabou explained his life has never been the same after losing his father and his best friend. According to Rabou, the intense conversations with his father before his death, provided an outline of how the ranch was to be transferred, however, there was just one problem.
“He and I talked about it, I know how things are going to transfer,” Rabou explained. “Except what I didn’t know is that my dad passed away out of order and because he passed away out of order, that our family was going to get the short end of the stick. When he passed away and when my grandpa passed away. I found myself in a very, very precarious situation. I found myself in business with my grieving grandparents. I found myself in business with my dad’s relatives, who were making comments like, ‘You taking care of your grandpa has taken a lot of time away from this ranch and you need to put your grandpa in a rest home,’” Rabou recalled. “People always think they know what’s going to happen because all the documents are written.”
When death happens, it changes living people, Rabou explained.
After the death of his grandfather, Rabou and his wife decided to break up the family ranch which was a difficult decision for the couple since the ranch had been in the family for 100 years.
“I know that in order to make my situation better is up to me,” Rabou explained. “I know that I’m responsible for my own decisions, my own family, my own marriage, and my own children. I take that commitment very seriously and if that means I have to step out and do something that I’m unfamiliar with, that I’m scared of, that I’m actually downright terrified of doing, and that it’s my obligation as a person, as a human being, as a family, as a business owner, as a community person, to make sure that I am taking care of those things,” Rabou continued.
Rabou explained it was important to look at an agriculture operation as a business and not a family heirloom.
“It’s a huge mistake that we make in family agriculture,” Rabou said. “That it’s an heirloom. No, it has to be a business. So, my wife and I looked at everything we had. We sold over 85% of everything we owned, and we started over.”
At the time, according to Rabou, they had 800 acres of farm ground, a falling down farmstead, and really no farming equipment, and today, Rabou and his wife and children have 12,000 with over 8,000 acres of dry land crop production with updated infrastructures, updated storage, and modern fleet of equipment.
“We make sure that our business runs as a business,” Rabou said. “The reason that we’ve done that is not because of anything great. It’s really, I always tell people, we don’t always make the right choices, but I think the Lord always found a way to make our choice right,” he added. “If we just always have that perspective, that we can discover what we’re actually capable of if we will just be willing to step out and make some changes and do something that is hard.”
According to Rabou, people are often limited by naysayers.
“People have told us enough times that you can’t do that. You can’t leave the family ranch, you can’t build another place, you can’t do this, you can’t do that,” Rabou said. “We’ve all heard it before. We have to train our minds to not allow ourselves to succumb to that kind of pressure, to not be influenced by that kind of pressure from the outside.”
Rabou explained the world has changed and agriculture has changed but it is important to adapt to the changes. It is important to change your thinking, according to Rabou.
“I think one of the biggest problems we have in the agriculture industry is it is a traditional industry, but we have to learn how to embrace unconventional thinking. We have to stop divisiveness,” Rabou said.
Rabou explained he has taken some scrutiny for growing organic crops. According to Rabou, that makes economic sense to produce crops essentially the same way as other producers but with fewer inputs and of course two to three times the profit.
“What makes economic sense? It goes back to the unconventional thinking in a conventional world,” Rabou said. “We have to break tradition. We have to learn to look at these things.”
Rabou continued to explain changing his way of thinking led to increased productivity, even if that meant going against the grain.
The meeting wrapped up shortly after 1 p.m.
