Betty Jo Gigot, Editor and Publisher

For four generations, the Hands family has called southern Finney County home. Located south of Garden City in far western Kansas, the family has flourished, raising crops and cattle and kids on one of the most vertically integrated operations in the country.

In the early 1900s, Samson Hands traded his land near Iola, Kan., for property near where his grandson and three great great grandsons farm and ranch today. Vestil, Samson’s son, and Fielding, his grandson, raised their families on the same farmstead. Today, Fielding and his three sons operate Triangle H Grain & Cattle Co.

The Family Returns
“I always knew I wanted to work with cattle,” said Sam Hands, the eldest brother. As a boy, he and his brothers, Greg and Cedric, worked closely with their father.

“I have to give Dad credit,” Hands said. “He never treated us as just a labor source. We were part of the operation.”

As Sam and his brothers went off to college at Kansas State University, they all doubted that they would end up back on the farm – with 1,000 acres to farm and 100 cows, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity.

“You could call it rain-dance timing,” Hands said. As he completed his obligation to the army through ROTC and then Vietnam, the other brothers graduated and all came to realize that southwestern Kansas was changing.

It was like a gold rush, Hands said. With the work Earl Brookover was doing in the cattle-feeding and land businesses, and what the Gigot brothers were doing with pivot irrigation, the area was coming into its own.

“We never were a family that acquired land,” Hands said. “We worked as custom operators.”
Greg, the first to return, put together a deal with an owner to custom farm his property, and immediately doubled the operation. Cedric, after teaching and coaching for a few years, decided that he wanted to raise his family in Finney County, too.

Sam looked at a number of other opportunities with banks, associations, feedyards and packers after leaving the service, and decided that southwest Kansas offered the best opportunity. So in the early 1970s, the three sons formed a partnership with their father, and Triangle H Grain & Cattle Co. was born. Eventually, the time was right to purchase land and the property now encompasses 8,500 acres.

Satellite Ranching
Most people think of a ranch as a spread with cows and calves grazing across the land, and cowboys gathering the herd. At Triangle H, ranching is different. The 1,500 company-owned cows are scattered across nine different locations. Two hundred spring-calving cows and 100 fall calvers are at the home place, spread across 8,500 acres of company farm ground. Most of that property is irrigated by center pivot systems, with three and a half circles dedicated to cool-weather grasses used exclusively for cattle.

Winter wheat pastures and corn stocks are fenced with hot wire, giving the company the opportunity to make the most of their acreage. They grow corn, grain sorghum, soybeans and wheat, along with alfalfa, which makes a good cash crop as well as a supplement for the cattle operation. Triangle H’s stocker program involves both company and customer cattle for preconditioning programs, backgrounding and grazing of wheat pasture.

The rest of the cows are located on eight satellite ranches, most of which are in central Kansas with one in Colorado. Plans are in the works to add one more this year.

Triangle H provides these ranches with cows and bulls, and establishes a health program. Each ranch manager formulates a nutrition program.

Hands visits the ranches twice a year, preg testing the cows and overseeing the vaccination programs for the suckling calves. When calves are weaned, they are shipped back to the Garden City property to be backgrounded and then fed out in the company feedyard. The 4,000-head capacity Triangle H yard also custom feeds cattle and does bull testing.

Special Program
Sam Hands started working with yield and grade marketing in the 1970s and got seriously involved with grid marketing in the 1980s. His company has settled on a breeding program that provides the type of cattle – primarily Angus – that seem to work extremely well on a grid.

Hands is a strong believer in alliances with other players in the industry. One of his strongest is with Gardiner Angus Ranch at Ashland, Kan. He feeds a number of Gardiner bulls on test, and feeds for a number of Gardiner’s customers. Other well-known names such as Fink and Fansher use the lot for bull tests or customers’ cattle.

Sam Hands personally markets all of the operation’s cattle, many of which go into the U.S. Premium Beef Program. One sign of the company’s breeding and feeding success is the number of first-place banners from Beef Empire Days hanging on the walls of the conference room at the office. And the Earl C. Brookover Memorial trophy has a special place in the front office for the third time in eight years. Randy Browning, a Gardiner customer, fed this year’s winner at the company feedlot.

Triangle H Today
Fielding Hands still plays a role in the business, according to Sam, but he picks and chooses what he does; he prefers driving tractors and combines. Greg and Cedric operate the farm and Sam works the cattle side of the operation. Each of the brothers has three children who are coming of age and will be welcome back to the company that they have worked at since childhood.

“We have told them they are welcome back,” Hands said, “but we want them to have a college education and have worked for someone else for five years before they make that decision.”

Certainly Samson and Vestil Hands would be proud of the family and what they have accomplished in their little corner of Kansas, developing a program that is on the leading edge of a difficult and challenging industry.