Betty Jo Gigot, Editor and Publisher

Leadership and Vision
W.D. Farr used his 97 years for the betterment of the industry and his community. He attended his first cattlemen’s association meeting in 1938 and served as president of the American National Cattlemen’s Association in 1970. A founding member of the Greeley T-Bone Club and the Colorado Cattle Feeders Association, Farr was the recipient of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Swan Leadership Award in 2001.

Farr had an ongoing interest in water development and actively helped in the development of northern Colorado’s water use. He served on the boards of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District and the Greeley Water Board for 40 years.

Recognizing that banks are vital to a community, Farr served for years on the Greeley National Bank Board of Directors and was instrumental in founding Affiliated Bancshares of Colorado where he was chairman of the board. He also was a director of the Denver U.S. National Bank.

Among the numerous honors Farr received were the 2007 Hall of Great Westerners at the National Cowboy Museum and Western Heritage Center; the 2005 Salute for Agricultural Leadership, National Young Farmers Organization; and the 1999 Citizen of the West at the National Western Stock Show.

Nationally, Farr served the USDA as an advisor under presidents Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. As a member of The 30s Group, a liaison organization between civilians and the military, he visited military installations in the U.S. and even traveled across Europe in a C-141 cargo plane, touring different military installations there. Farr also traveled to Russia and China and developed a far-sighted and optimistic view of the world and the politics that make it work.

Early in 1990, I had the opportunity to meet W.D. Farr in the lobby at the family’s feedlot outside Greeley, Colo. I was a cub reporter, but I knew a real opportunity when I saw it and immediately asked him if I could come back and write a story. As it turned out, he invited me back to his office and basically interviewed me. (Anyone who spent time with W.D. knows that he was a master of asking questions and then sitting back and totally absorbing everything you said.) I must have passed the test because he agreed to an interview. As the date drew close, he called me and asked, “What are we going to talk about?” “The business,” I told him, never imagining what I was going to learn or that I was starting a friendship I would treasure like no other.

The smartest man I ever knew
When W.D. Farr passed away in August at the age of 97, people from across the industry spectrum paid him tribute. Whatever the project or the problem, W.D. learned everything possible about the subject and then come up with any number of commonsense solutions. From water to cattle to politics, it didn’t matter; he had a well-thought-out answer.

His failing eyesight didn’t keep him from reading, using state-of-the-art technology or from his beloved fly-fishing and, until very recently, he still attended national cattle industry conventions, rambling along with his hands clasped behind him, enjoying life and his friends.

Everyone who knew W.D. was proud to say he was their friend, primarily because he always made you feel like the most important person he ever met.

During our first interview, he talked for six hours, resulting in a 14-part special segment in CALF News . In the years that followed, we spent many more hours discussing everything under the sun. Every once in a while, a letter would come from W.D. telling me that he enjoyed something I had written and always asking a question or two. Like hundreds and hundreds of others, I am sad he is no longer with us and am proud to have been a part of his life.

In his words
The following are excerpts from those original interviews done in 1990, told as only W.D. Farr could tell them. His stories and insights are timeless.

A bit of history
This is kind of an interesting story about my grandfather, William Henry Farr. He grew up in Canada, but his parents had come from England. From the time he was 16 until he was 19, William was an apprentice blacksmith in St. Thomas, Ontario, which is just north of Detroit. In those days, I guess that’s the way you learned any trade – spending three years as an apprentice, as a blacksmith, carpenter or whatever. You lived with the people you worked for and had your room, board and a very small amount of money.

I recently saw a story on 60 Minutes about apprenticeships, and I really think they make sense in today’s world. When I was on the board of directors for Mountain Bell, we went to the universities and pitched the training program to one of two students. We picked achievers. It was fascinating to see how some would work out and others would not. The top end came from outside; the others came from the area and were trained for their specific jobs.

I remember one time, back in World War II days, going to Washington to show what to do with price ceilings and price controls. After my train left Chicago, I was traveling with a man who was the head of sausage making for Swift and Co. He lived in an ivory tower. He’d had the job for two or three years, but would have given anything to be back in the plant with his knife. That was where he was happy. He was 60 years old and made five to ten times the salary, but wasn’t doing what he wanted to do.

There needs to be somewhere in between. At ConAgra and IBP, everyone can’t be managers. A lot would be happier with a trade. Ames College here in Greeley has specific contracts with Kodak and Hewlett-Packard. They train people for specific things.

Anyway, as my grandfather finished that three-year apprenticeship, transcontinental railways had just been completed and the West appealed to him. So he went to the depot and said, “Here’s all the money I’ve got in the world, and I want a ticket as far west as it will go.”

They sold him a ticket to Cheyenne.

When William got to Cheyenne, he went to work for a blacksmith for six or eight months. Now, my grandfather was a short, heavyset man – about 5’7” and blocky with a strong chest and arms. But the blacksmith was pretty big and rough. He would get drunk and take after William with an ax, so my grandfather decided he’d better get out of there.

He went down to Loveland, Colo., and worked in the blacksmith shop there. The stage driver between Greeley and Loveland – they had a stage twice a week – told Grandfather that Greeley needed a blacksmith and he could start his own shop. He hadn’t been able to do any more than just barely exist, let alone buy a ticket from Loveland to Greeley, but the stage driver told him he could pay him later.

This was in 1876. Eventually, in 1910, William took the stage driver to Paris for the World’s Fair and they called it even!

On selling cattle
When they shipped to market in those days, whether it was lambs or cattle, they put them in a railroad car. They had to drive them to stockyards. The commission men sold them for someone, a packer buyer looked them over and feeders sorted them as they did well in the yard, depending on the markets. They learned to sort a lot of dollars into their cattle in those days. For years and years, I sorted every animal that was ever shipped. I sorted hundreds of thousands of them, picking them out one at a time and putting them in the car … 25-28 head per car. I would usually sort three extra out of the pen, look them over and take out any I didn’t like.

Back then, we understood how things worked. For example, the commission man in Denver would call me and say that Swift had an order for some real nice heifers or lightweight heifers or big steers, whatever it was. He’d tell me I would be a good buyer the next day if I had anything that would fit. So I would go and actually sort them with the idea that he might buy them. He wouldn’t always do it … sometimes I would get some competition.

It was always fun. We had nice cattle there on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Swift and Armour would battle for them and kind of establish a price. Then the poorest cattle would come on Wednesdays or Thursdays. One buyer from Cudahay would sit back and see what Swift and Armour did. He wasn’t as good a buyer, but he knew what they paid for theirs. If they’d paid so much, and the Wednesday and Thursday cattle looked just like the others to him – even though they weren’t as good – he’d buy at the same price we got on Tuesday. It was kind of a poker game all the time.

Warren Monfort and I started those things in the early days, and we learned. We started shipping heifers in the summertime – something we had never done before. We didn’t try to sell on the same day. We’d deliberately make our plans and pick our days. He’d ship Monday and I’d ship Wednesday, and we’d take our chances in the market. Instead of all of us having six loads there on the same day, we would have two loads for three days. We tried to take care of ourselves and stay in business doing it.

On cattle feeding
As a kid, I had liked cattle and worked on cattle ranches in the summertime. We started feeding cattle just because I wanted to. My father didn’t believe in it because cattle feeding hadn’t been a good business, but we decided to buy a small cattle ranch down by Roggin, Colo., and started feeding there.

Modern cattle feeding began right here in Greeley – just the same as lamb feeding, as far as really trying to feed intelligently. Up until that time, all the cattle were fed in Iowa, Illinois and eastern Nebraska, and they weren’t fed intelligently. The only reason for feeding them was to use up the corn, which people had raised but didn’t have an export market for.

For a good many years we had Prohibition and that hurt. There wasn’t even a market to the distilleries. So people raised the corn – soybeans hadn’t come in very much at that time – and bought cattle to use up the excess. They basically raised corn and hogs, and if they had a good corn crop, they harvested it, picked it and put in the corncrib.

When they knew they had some extra corn, they went to Omaha or Kansas City – whatever was close to where they might be living – and bought one or two carloads of feeder cattle. Then they shipped them home on the railroad to eat the corn. They fed the cattle until the corn was gone. They didn’t feed them to Choice grade or a certain weight, they just fed them until the corn was gone. That was all the plan there was to it. They didn’t think their labor was worth anything. They were on the farm and if they were going to use up that crop and turn it into money, that was really the only means they had. That was their means of converting.”

On quality control
I was there for the beginning of grading. In August 1950, a group of us went to Chicago for a meeting. I was representing the American National Cattlemen’s Association and met with cattle feeders from the Corn Belt.

To show how different things were, someone suggested during the meeting that determining if an animal would grade Prime involved pouring a bushel basket of corn on its back. If none of the kernels fell off, it was Prime. They were really sincere about suggesting that system!

That meeting was one of the things that got grading started. Grading was needed to achieve standardization so the chains could buy large qualities of meat. The big packers fought grading because they wanted to run their business the way they always had; they didn’t want the government to control it. Packer buyers thought they could look at a pen of cattle and adjust the dressing percentage; they didn’t want to be bothered with grading.

Some people liked really fat carcasses; others didn’t want them so fat. They knew better than everybody else, and got into open warfare. The chain-store movement grew as more and more people in the mom-and-pop stores went out of business and gradually all the big packers failed. There were no more ways to keep control. And the new food distribution process won out over the other.

As small packers started, Choice went to Good. Everything else was no roll and sold for less money. There was a certain amount of interest in that meat; they all had processing places at 2¢-5¢/lb. cheaper. But what we really wanted was tender, young beef with marbling. Lean beef is just like leaving butter off of dry bread.