Lazy J2 Ranch

Wednesday, 16 November 2011 17:48

Sydney Spencer lives in the San Rafael Valley on the Lazy J2 Ranch, in a one bedroom house with one fireplace and a tiny kitchen that is in the middle of a whole lot of land.

That land requires an extra amount of work, fixing fences, checking windmills and checking fences. She plows, drives in fence posts and loads hay on the Bobcat for all of her animals.

“It is a very physical demanding 24-hour job. I start before the sun gets up and I am doing book work and paperwork till 10 p.m.,” Spencer said.

The ranch was originally owned by her grandparents.

They put together six little ranches in 1939, and her grandmother ended up living on the ranch during World War II. Her grandfather would continue to stay in Chicago and fly there on a regular basis. He put an airstrip up on the top of the crest of the hill where they would feed the cattle.

“All of my family flies. I have 300 hours. My uncle and my dad fly.  Flying is a big deal,” Spencer said.

The pasture is called airplane pasture because of that.

When Spencer was little, she spent all of her summers with her grandmother. “This place just creeps into your heart.  It is a part of you, and you can’t get very far away from it,” Spencer said.

Spencer remembers and loves the ocean. When she wasn’t with her grandmother, she was in southern California. “I love to surf and sail,” Spencer said. But certain circumstances in her life pushed her to go back home. 

She moved back in 1995 after she had been living in Manhattan and loving every minute of it. She worked on Wall Street and remembers losing everything she owned in 1988, when the market crashed.

After that, Spencer knew she longer wanted to live the New York lifestyle.

“Choosing to come back, of course, it is an isolated place, but I have lots of interests, one of them is this concept of how everything works together and fits together,” Spencer said.

She needed to have a place where she could mend and she always wanted to get that place back but it was sold in 1953. She decided this was the time, and she went through the process of putting the ranch back together. It had been subdivided after her grandparents sold it.

With a lot of time and effort, Spencer was finally able to buy back Lazy J2 Ranch.

At a certain point, she knew she needed to have the ranch support itself. She also knew there were four generations of cattle to take of care of.

Her great-grandfather started the Chicago stock yards, and her grandmother ended up at the ranch. Spencer was educated in England and had a wonderful time there, and yet she was very comfortable coming here because of her childhood and being around cattle.

“I love the way they look, the way they smell, each one of them has a personality, and they are just adorable to me," she said.

She started looking into raising grass-fed beef 1995, but the list of things that people could feed to natural beef was shocking.

“The list of injections the animals could have from Cullman beef out of Colorado, and I thought I would originally raise the cattle for them. And then when I saw what they were doing,” Spencer said.

She knew it wasn’t the caliber that she wanted.

“My animals don’t get any injections. In all these years I have had cows and calves, I have only had one die, but not to an illness. I was able to cure him but he had antibiotics. He was not a part of my beef program,” Spencer said.

This is one of the last short grass intact prairies in the United States.  There are over 150 different species of Sonoran grass in the San Rafael Valley and “these cattle, that’s all they get,” Spencer said.

“I am really proud of the beef and I’m proud of the way that I do it,” she said.

“When it is time to take them to be harvested, that is a really hard time on me. I know it's rough on them, but it’s really rough on me,” Spencer said.

As she walks through her 7,000 acre ranch, she tenses up with each step she takes towards her cattle. She cares for each one of her cattle. She laughs with them and sings to them.

“Having to pick who has to go is difficult, very difficult and I cry,” Spencer said.

She watches them as they are assembled into the truck and her eyes begin to tear up. She tries to fight back her emotions, but she has become attached to each and every one of her cattle.

They take a car ride to Wilcox, Ariz., where the meatpacking house is located. Usually, Spencer chooses not to take the car ride with the cattle. She has her longtime friend Bob do the job.

“The guys down at the meatpacking house, they laugh and they think it’s funny when I show up crying over my cattle,” Spencer said.

However, it is a family operation and they do it just how she asks them, very respectfully.

She is very, very specific in saying, “look I don’t want them lined up. I don’t want them to be able to pick up any emotion or fear from another one. The room, I want any scent of blood out of that room. I do not want them to be frightened.  They also allow me to be in the cutting room. I am fine once the animal is dead. I am fine. I will be there. I help double-wrap it and put labels on. I make sure things are cut the way I want them to be,” Spencer said.

There are very few inspected meat processing plants that would really allow that.

Spencer then has all of her beef brought back down to the Lazy J2 Ranch, where it is counted for inventory and shipping orders are sent out.

"This place was a dream that I held in my heart since the time I was eight," Spencer said.

Written by Taylor Medeiros