MANAGING THE WINE CUP-GAMBLE RANCH
By Heather Smith-Thomas
The Wine Cup-Gamble ranch near Wells and Monticello in northeastern Nevada (just south of the
Idaho border and adjacent to the Utah border) is one of the largest in the West. The California Trail and
Emigrant Trail crossed over this landscape as thousands of settlers traveled west, and remnants of those
trails are still visible on the ranch.
The Wine Cup has an interesting history. It was first owned by John Sparks who took up
homesteads in 1868, and later owned by the Utah Construction Land and Cattle Company with their UC
brand. In 1910 it took 239 people to operate the ranch, which was close to 3 million acres at that time-until the 1940’s.
In its early days it included a large sheep operation. Jimmy Stewart, the movie star, owned it for a
while. Today it is the 6th largest contiguous private land holding in the U.S. There are a number of big
ranches, but this ranch is all in one location, with cattle running on a million acres. The ranch is 58 miles
from its eastern boundary to the western boundary, and 36 miles from the south end to the north end.
A family corporation bought it some years back as a land investment, but for a time it went
downhill, with erratic management. Now it has been turned into something the owners are very proud of.
Rehabilitating a Great Ranch
The ranch today is managed by James Rogers, who has his own place near Twin Falls, Idaho. He
commutes back and forth to Nevada. He had managed other ranches, and happened into this job because
he knew the accountant/financial advisor to the owner. “The accountant had done tax work for the owner.
We knew each other from an elk hunting trip years ago, and stayed in touch. I was doing some ranch
consulting work in Wyoming, and because he did my taxes he knew that this is what I do—help wealthy
land owners rebuild their ranches and gain more accountability for their managers, and create budgets and
business plans rather than just spending a lot of money,” says Rogers.
“Many wealthy landowners become disenchanted with their ranches being a money pit. This is
unnecessary, especially with the cattle market the way it is today. Some of these ranchers are being treated
as a manager’s playground as much as they are the landowner’s playground, and there isn’t much
responsibility or accountability on the manager’s part,” he says.
“I saw an opportunity to help educate managers and help landowners be able to become proud of
their ranches. Most of these owners are from other backgrounds and businesses, and they want to become
more proud of the business side of their ranches, and be able to see some ecological benefit rather than just
recreation. They enjoy being a part of the bigger story of ecological regeneration and creating herds of
cattle that are environmentally adaptable without all the inputs. It makes sense to these guys because it is
good business,” says Rogers.
“I wanted to bring a more holistic approach, and started doing this for several wealthy large
landowners in Sublette County, Wyoming. I was doing pretty well with that, and then this opportunity
came along. At first I turned down this job.”
The owner decided to sell the ranch. “It had been leased out and the manager was financially
irresponsible and had a bad reputation with government agencies; a lot of the range is BLM. The owner
wanted to fix it up and get rid of it. I was fine with helping him fix it up but didn’t want to move my family
there,” says Rogers.
“He found the Dykes Everett Company in Florida that he brought in, and they did an amazing
transformation—especially rebuilding infrastructure. We all sat down as a team and analyzed what this
ranch needed in order to be something the owner could be proud of. We needed to change a lot of
infrastructure so that when anyone drove in the gate they could see there are good people working there.
This started with the housing. You can’t attract good help, especially the kind of people you want, who
will bring their families, if they have to live in a single-wide rat-infested trailer house,” he says.
“We put new roofs on some buildings and brought in a couple of new modular homes. One man
(Keith Holcomb) who worked for Dykes was amazing. He knew how to clean things up and make it look
right. He put new tin on barns and restored the old concrete building that had been the shop. He put board
siding on it and made it into a nice horse barn,” Rogers says.
“The old barn that the cowboys had been saddling up in was a tattered lean-to with part of the roof
blown off, and birds could crap all over the saddles. The cowboys had to put their rain coats over the
saddles in there, just to keep the bird poop off!”
“They brought me in just to handle the cattle side because they needed to get rid of some cattle
and didn’t really know what they were doing. They weren’t sure if the cowboys on the ranch could get it
done. So I was here in an advisory role during the first 1 ½ years, to help them buy some cattle and rebuild
the cow herd,” Rogers explains.
“Then as things went along, the owner realized things were looking great. There were some good
people working there and enough cattle to maybe make a little money. So the owner decided to give this a
shot and hang onto it. He took it off the market, and at that point Keith had to go back to his family in
Florida and had other plans than staying to help with the ranch. I was still commuting back and forth three
days a week from Wyoming, so the owner asked me if I would be interested in taking over,” says Rogers.
“My wife and I talked about it, and prayed about it. We had just adopted 2 kids from Ethiopia the
year before, and had our own needs such as school for the kids. We have our own resources, so I told the
owner that I’d like to live somewhere other than the ranch, and just approach the ranch as truly a business.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the lifestyle—because I do. I grew up ranching and I own my own cows, but
I don’t want to be right here. A person can become tainted sometimes, especially with one of these big
ranches, by getting involved with the lifestyle too much and not paying enough attention to the business,”
he says.
“The owner really liked that idea. We looked around and thought Twin Falls would be the most
beneficial place to do a lot of our vendor relationships. Idaho is an ag-friendly state (not driven by gold
mining, like Nevada), and Twin Falls is an ag-friendly town, with all the farms and dairies. So we settled
here,” says Rogers.
“Instead of competing against the gold mines for labor, we opened up a whole new opportunity for
our labor force. I now have many employees from southern Idaho. I commute 2 or 3 days a week,
depending on what’s going on at the ranch. I’ve hired some amazing people and we are on a great journey
together, doing amazing things. We are restoring the reputation of a legacy ranch that had a big black eye
for many years--leased out to people who took advantage of it,” says Rogers. “I am glad to be a part of it
now, and pleased to see such good employees here, with great families.”
The Grazing Program
“We have diversified our enterprises a little, and have some grass-fed beef that we grow and
finish, marketing them with our story behind them. We sell them to a meat company; we don’t own them
all the way to the retailer or consumer, but we provide our story. These are cattle born and raised here on
the ranch, until they are finished on our pivot irrigation pastures with high stock density grazing,” Rogers
says.
“It’s a very different mindset regarding how we utilize our irrigated ground. Most of the ranchers
here with irrigation grow alfalfa hay and ship it to California or Idaho for dairies. We can make about 3
times as much money off that same ground if we put it into grass-fed beef rather than hay,” he says.
“We also focus on wildlife and wildlife habitat. The sage grouse issue is on our radar and part of
the regenerative goals. The landscape in many areas had been denuded of vegetation from years of poor
management. We are taking a different approach. We are not trying to preserve anything; we are trying to
restore everything, and do things that will actually enhance what we have. This is in contrast to what so
many people are trying to do, to simply preserve what they have,” he explains.
“Most of the cattle management in the Great Basin is very traditional. Ranchers just turn their
cows out and let them roll through the pastures, using the same pattern year after year. Cows and cowboys
have created habits. We tend to disrupt that, and use a pasture at different times of year, with different
use—sometime high impact, sometimes low impact, sometimes complete rest. We mix it up a lot, creating
a resilient landscape,” Rogers says.
“It seems like we are doing the right thing because we are seeing a lot of progress. Sometimes
it’s still difficult, and we are still learning how to incorporate all of this, and it’s also a challenge to our
ability to manage this much land mass. It would be one thing to do this on 1000 acres, but it’s more
difficult to do on a million acres, and to do it with the BLM. This is checkerboard ownership, with 750,000
acres of BLM land and 257,000 acres of private deeded ground,” he explains.
“On much of that checkerboard pattern, we control a lot of the water. When John Sparks came
into this area in 1868, he and his family and employees filed on the water sources, springs and seeps or wet
meadows, to tie that up as private property through the Homestead Act. All the other property around it,
without water, they didn’t worry about. They soon controlled a huge amount of acreage, like many ranches
did at that time. Then when the railroad came through it was granted 20 miles on either side. So there was
all that private land as well. Some of those plots went to other people, so there are other owners out there
in the middle of this ranch. Some we graze without a written agreement and some we do have written
agreements with. But it’s all about the water,” he says.
“We don’t have any rivers, or any big creeks. Most of our water is just small seeps and springs
that we’ve developed for stock water. We have 72 water wells on the ranch, 58 of which are actually
functioning and improved, and some that have dried up or are in disrepair, but we use wells in addition to
all the seeps and springs,” he says.
The irrigated ground has varied water sources. “On the Wine Cup side of the ranch there is
actually a very high water table. It grows good grass, just from all the sub-irrigated ground. There are
several springs in that area, with water close to the surface. The Gamble ranch is irrigated by well water.
We have a 2800-acre farm there but we are putting part of it back into perennial grass and do some cocktail
cover cropping and some alfalfa hay,” he says.
The land where the farm is located was at one point 180 feet under the surface of prehistoric Lake
Bonneville. The only water remaining today from that huge lake is the Great Salt Lake. “The soil here is
very high in salts, and so we are making lots of changes to build new topsoil that is rich in microbial
populations. It is our belief that we can change the soil profile with the right management on the surface.
This includes cocktail cover crops that are being grazed properly with livestock. We are now doing more
grazing and less hay. We still put up some hay, but mainly just for weaned calves. Our focus is to try to
get the cows to harvest as much as they can themselves,” he says.
“Assuming we don’t get a big snow in winter, we keep our cattle out nearly all times of the year.
We have areas that historically were winter ground, but we’re using it different times of year. It all
depends on the weather patterns and how we want to change things. We try to use in winter what had
traditionally been used in the spring, and what they used in winter we try to use in the fall or spring. We
want a more erratic pattern so we are not using the same pasture the same time every year,” he says. This
gives the plants more rest and a chance for more plant diversity coming back.
“We are in a permit renewal process right now with the BLM and changing our season of use in
most of our pastures. The fancy word for this is adaptive management. We want to be able to adapt. If we
get a high rainfall year or a low snow year, we want to be able to have flexibility. This may be the perfect
time to use areas during the dormant season that historically has been used during the growing season,”
says Rogers.
The BLM is receptive at this point. “I think we have good evidence this will work, but I wish we
were 10 to 15 years into this with strong evidence. Every time you get a good year or two, everyone says
that’s not enough time period to judge it. The Elko County BLM office is an amazing group of people to
work with and I realize they have their hands tied on some things. Our range cons and field office manager
have started to see the value in what we are doing, and other permittees in that same area helped blaze the
trail for this. We will always have pushback from environmental groups, but it comes down to having a
chance. If we have that chance to do it right, so we don’t disappoint people, we can show what this can
do,” he says.
The People
The ranch has many employees, with their own areas of expertise. “We have a cow boss, a farm
manager (managing irrigated ground), a manager for infrastructure (housing, vehicles, etc.), a manager for
the grass fed division, and a water person in charge of all the wells and making sure they are working and
pumps are pumping, and water tanks are in good repair,” says Rogers.
“We have lots of support staff underneath all of these people. I also have a surveillance guy who
helps me monitor our borders and watch for cattle theft. We work on good neighbor relations, as well,” he
says.
“I handle some of the issues we face and various things like marketing livestock, cattle
procurement, permit renewals, range monitoring, and agency relationships. We are heavily involved in
sage grouse issues as well. We are also active in SANE (Stewardship Alliance of Northeast Elko), which is
a group of 8 neighboring ranches that proactively approach management and landscape-scale projects that
will not only protect sage grouse habitat but other species. We have the philosophy that if we can manage
the habitat on this broad scale we can make a difference. With all 8 ranches we encompass about 2 million
acres. We try to collaborate on projects since sage grouse don’t know fencelines or boundaries. So we
work together to try to produce synergies and not just have fragmentation of the landscape. We also
created a fire department through that organization where we are trying to get more training and more
equipment so we can be the first responders on wildland fires,” he says.
The ranch also tries to be involved in a lot of the new technology and stay abreast of many new
things. It helps to have a good team. “One of our philosophies is that we are in the business to grow
people. That’s what we do. We can grow cows and beef, but if we’re not growing our people and making
them better, we aren’t doing our job. The guys under me are the ones I try to help so they can learn and
grow, and maybe someday they can do my job. That’s the goal, to grow up people,” he says. Then you
know you’ve been successful.
The Cattle
“Environmental adaptability is important with cattle. Every ranch is different; nobody runs cattle
like you do. Seedstock producers can’t replicate what people do with commercial cattle. They are
notorious for maximizing production with too many inputs on their outfits, and we are needing optimum
production with minimum inputs. Our environment is very unique, and not very comparable to most
seedstock operators,” says Rogers.
“We’ve found some seedstock producers who have some genetics that we think work in our
environment, that we are still testing. Most of these tend to be moderate framed, higher capacity, highly
efficient types. We feel that there is also value in some non-traditional crossbreeding. We’ve played
around with some Beefmaster cattle, and are looking at some Tule cattle to interject some different types of
blood into the herd, primarily for disease and heat tolerance,” he says.
“Predominately we have English breeding. We have a lot of Angus and Red Angus cows and for
awhile we were crossbreeding them and terminal crossing with Charolais. But we had an aging cow herd.
We discovered that we had some really good old cows on this ranch that were getting bred to Charolais
bulls with a terminal cross and we weren’t keeping any of their daughters. We realized we needed to keep
heifers so we got rid of the Charolais for a few years because even though those calves were awesome, we
needed to keep more replacements.”
“We’d cut our cow numbers through the drought, like many people did, and now we are trying to
build back. We have chosen to not do that with Charolais. Most of them are just too big for our
environment, even though we enjoy selling those big smoky-colored calves. And now we’ve also created
our own little seedstock group of cows. Most of the cows are branded with the year of birth. Two years
ago we found a bunch of good cows that were 11 years old or older that were still on the ranch and from
what we knew (even though I’d only had 5 years’ history here) had all had calves every year. Cows here
are preg-checked every year and anything open was sold. We couldn’t necessarily guarantee that these
cows always raised and weaned a calf, but we knew they’d had a calf every year and seemed to be
functional.”
“After those cows had been out all winter long with very little supplement—maybe some protein
blocks--we brought them in and the cow boss and I went through them and selected solid-colored cows,
either all red or all black. At that point we also guessed at what their udders would be like at calving. We
knew they were all at least 11 years old, and had the best fleshing ability of all the cows on the ranch,” he
says.
“It was interesting, looking at all those cows together, because they had some very distinct and
unique conformation. We selected 200 head out of 2800 head on that side of the ranch. We re-eartagged
those 200 cows and put them in a separate herd the next year, with some bulls that had held up in our
environment for at least 3 years and had good feet. These bulls showed masculine traits and crested neck
along with depth of body and capacity and still some muscling and dimension to their hindquarters. They
weren’t necessarily the very best bulls, but we were just looking for good cattle that work in our
environment. So we bred all those cows to those bulls and this year they calved for the first time with what
we are keeping as bull calves,” says Rogers.
“Those cows are now 13 years old or older. Most people would say that on a Nevada ranch you
should be mouthing those cows and getting rid of them by that age. But a good one will go well into her
teens. We think there is some real value in that group of cows. Right now we are breeding them to some
straight black or straight red bulls and contemplating creating some composite bulls out of those cows,
using a Tule bull or Beefmaster bulls, or even some Senopol bulls,” he says.
“We’ve been using some Beefmaster bulls from Lasater and doing fairly well with those. We
don’t like a lot of ear influence but we see value in the hardiness of those cows in this droughty
environment. If there was any complaint it would be that they tend to milk too much and be a little less
fertile than our English-bred cattle. Our Red Angus and Angus are extremely fertile so it is hard for any
cows to compete with them regarding fertility, but there is value in some Brahma influence,” he explains.
“We are trying to get completely away from having to treat cattle for parasites. Last year we only
poured half the cows for lice/worms and at this point we don’t see much difference between those two
groups. We want cattle that are fairly resistant to most parasites and disease. I think the English cattle are
at a disadvantage, so why fight it so much, when there are already cattle that can handle these things. We
are trying to become more in sync with nature.” A person can continue to keep selecting and fine-tuning
genetics to create a more hardy cattle herd.
“For awhile we were just trying to survive, and really didn’t know what we were doing. Now I
feel like we have a vision and a purpose—and a very defined direction that we are going. I believe that the
cattle that fit our environment are not necessarily the smallest-framed little pudgy cows,” says Rogers.
“There is a major disconnect between the livestock business and the beef business. If all you have
are really small cows, they might be very efficient, but we still sell pounds of meat. I’ve used some smallframed bulls on our ranch and they work very well in our program but I also think you can go too far that
direction. Even in our grass fed program, if we end up selling a finished heifer that only weighs 900
pounds and her steer mate only weighs 1000 pounds, we end up with only a 500-pound carcass.” There is a
happy medium and each ranch has to figure out what works best.
“I do believe that a smaller, more efficient animal will work in our environment better than a large
animal, but to take her to the next level, to actually produce beef, I think you may need to breed her to a
terminal cross sire.” This is the simplest way.
“One of my biggest complaints with the Angus industry is that every Angus seedstock producer
tries to be everything for everybody. They claim they can raise the best mother cows, and have also
selected for high carcass and marbling traits. That’s a nearly impossible challenge.” You can get fairly
close at doing well on multiple traits but won’t be the top in every trait.
“Why work so hard to try to be the best at everything (because you can’t). Why not create a
phenomenal cow herd and then cross her with a phenomenal carcass sire. That’s the easiest route, as long
as you can perpetuate the cow herd by not breeding them all to the terminal cross bull,” he explains.
“There is a lot of opportunity to perpetuate a good cow herd, especially on a ranch this size. We
run 3 herds of cows across this landscape. We have 2000 in one big mob, 1900 in another big mob, and
then we run all our first-calf heifers in another group. We run all of the heifers out in big pastures,” he
says.
“They start calving the 15th of April, and whatever heifer comes into the branding pen later with a
calf on her, she goes across the road to the next pasture with a branded calf and she gets an A-plus for
doing her job. The ones that come in dry get sent to the grass fed division and end up as beef. There are no
excuses. We probably have close to a 10% fallout; the heifers have a 42-day breeding season and if they
don’t have a calf, or don’t bring one to the branding pen in late June or July, they are done.” This is a good
way to select for the ones that will be good cows for the rest of their lives.
“If I am going to give a heifer another chance it won’t be on her first calf. It might be on breeding
back for her second calf. Our heifers and calves get no extra feed. Our calves don’t go to a feedlot. If
there is grass in California we ship our weaned calves to California and graze them there. Otherwise they
get fed hay and mineral supplement and that’s all they get until spring grass. We don’t pamper them or
feed them cake or protein tubs. Grass is all they’ll get when they are a cow and we just figure it’s easier to
sort them out in the beginning regarding the ones we want (that do well on our program) rather than wait
until later to find out they weren’t what we really wanted,” he says.