VO: The president of the 1994 edition of Beef Empire Days, Sam Hands is personally involved with the production of beef in Finney County, where his family farms and runs a small feedyard.
SH: My family's operation is known as Triangle H Grain and Cattle Company. It involves my father, Fielding, and my two brothers -- Greg and Cedric. We started our partnership about 20 years ago. We farm the same location that my grandfather and great grandfather farmed. Course they all came here in the late 1800s, early 1900s. But we're involved in irrigated crop farming -- corn, grain sorghum, wheat and some alfalfa. We have a cow-calf operation, and then we have a small family farm feedyard where we do some growing and finishing of cattle of our own there as well as some in the commercial feedyards.
Mary Warren: This has been beef country from the very beginning of settlement out here and even prior to that. Our first resident of the county was a cattleman from Texas who drove a herd of cattle up here with the idea in mind to pasture them on the buffalo grass before taking them in the Spring to the railhead in Great Bend. And that was in 1872. So it's been cattle country ever since then.
VO: At the Finney County Museum in Garden City, a new exhibit illustrates the development of the beef industry here. The director of the museum, Mary Warren describes the man who brought some of the first cattle in to southwestern Kansas.
MW: I'm sure he was not unique, but he was very unique to this area. His name was Welborn Barton, and he came from Mason County, Texas. He had a nicname of "Doc" -- Doc Barton. And when he was 19, he and a couple of his brothers drove a cattle herd of about 3,000 up the Goodnight Trail, and then came from Pueblo east to this part of the country. They spent their first winter just south of Garden City. And then they drove their herd of cattle up to Great Bend in the spring to sell. He saw this area as a good place to fatten cattle ... and envisioned quite a large number of cattle here. He settled here eventually and encouraged quite a number of Texas cattlemen to do the same. And there were large ranches dotted across this area for some time ... prior to settlement -- homesteading.
SH: So it's always been cattle country. But the thing that's made a lot of things happen here is our underground water supply allowed for increased production of feed grains. Of course, that also fueled by the natural gas resource. So the building of the grain supplies, which brought in the livestock feeding. Livestock feeding came both for that as well as the good climate we have here.
Jack Reeve: That's why there's over a million cattle within 75 miles of Garden City -- cause this is the best feeding climate in the world.
VO: The low humidity and rainfall here make it easier for cattle to stay healthy and gain weight, while irrigation systems support the production of feed for them. A veterinarian who installed center pivot systems and built a feedyard on the sand hills south of Garden City, Jack Reeve understands the value of water in this semi-arid region.
JR: I was a high schooler here in the '30s -- the Dirt Storm days. So I've been through all of that. There were some real severe lessons in that period. And that is that we were actually looking at the wall. I mean, there was no production and there was nobody had any money. You couldn't do anything in agriculture. It didn't rain at all. You couldn't even plant anything. Fourteen years later we got back into another severe drought ... in the '50s. And just coincidentally with that, Mr. Brookover built his feedlot just at the north edge of Garden City. And the hard core of the cattle owners started using his facilities so they could own some cattle. And they found out they liked it.
MW: Earl Brookover came from Scott County ... or he had been involved in Scott County with irrigation. When he came to Garden City, he had travelled and seen feedlots in other areas. And he put up a feedlot in 1951. And I think that the capacity for that feedlot at that time was 3,000. The whole idea centered around confined feeding -- not having cattle out on the range or in a pasture -- having them confined within a pen and bringing the feed to them and feeding it to them in a trough. And so feeding became much more efficient and effective.
JR: The Irsik brothers started the Ingalls feedyard, I think, was the first large one that came after Brookover's. And it was probably four years. And then there was two or three other deals started in various communities around here. The real big change didn't come until the 1960s.
MW: In about 1965, a farmers cooperative -- the group of people there joined together and put up a packing plant -- for their own needs primarily. And the name of it was Producers Packing. And I believe to begin with their slaughter capacity was about 500 head of cattle a day. And it was the first packing plant in this area. And of course, IBP opened up in the early '80s. And its capacity is somewhere in the range of 5,000 head a day, plus.
SH: I think once they saw that there was adequate supply of cattle being produced here and actually saw an industry that was growing in numbers, it behooved them to move their plants to this location. You know, the plants that they were dealing with back in Kansas City, Chicago, were old plants. They were not as efficient as they could be. So it was an opportunity for them to move directly to the cattle supply and upgrade their efficiency as well. So they made that move.
MW: So it's the final link in the chain -- cattle on feed; grain for the cattle; and processing plants are here now for slaughter of cattle, so you're not wasting a lot on transportation any more. It's all done within this area.
#### (copyright 1995, KTWU/Channel 11, Washburn University, Topeka, KS.)