A cattle rancher in rural Colorado is also a state representative. We learn about the two sides of her work life, and listen as she does chores on her ranch. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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| Actually, I started uh purchasing heifers in 4-age when I was just a young girl, seven, eight, nine years old, and have always had cattle. | |
| Kimmy Lewis is a rancher in Southeast Colorado. | |
| And as if that's not enough. | |
| She tends to her neighbors' interests with a key position in Denver. | |
| Producer Meredith Turk brings us our first on-the-job story from rural America. | |
| On the job from hired to retired, is brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. | |
| Over the past 34 years, Express Employment Professionals has put millions of people to work in meaningful and fulfilling jobs and careers. | |
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| Now here's Meredith Turk with the story of Kimmy Lewis. | |
| Driving south on Highway 109 in Colorado is a surreal experience. | |
| They call this God's country, and I begin to see why. | |
| There's expansive horizons, beautiful grasses and stark canyons. | |
| Just before Les Animas County, we dip into a canyon that took my breath away. | |
| I could smell a moist desert pine scattered with yucca blossoms. | |
| Well, it looks more like West Texas or Northern New Mexico than it does uh Colorado. | |
| Everybody thinks Colorado's mountains or plains. | |
| We're part of the short grass prairie, but we're part of the Purgatory Canyon lands, and so there's it's beautiful green right now this spring because of all the good moisture we've received. | |
| What a blessing that has been. | |
| But um we live in the canyons where there's mesas and rocks and trees and cactus and rattlesnakes and cattle. | |
| Across more than 17,000 acres in the high desert of Southeast Colorado, we visit a cow calf operation with 300 heifers. | |
| I'm Kimmy Clark Lewis and I grew up here. | |
| We're at Muddy Valley Ranch that lies halfway between La Honta, Colorado and Kim, Colorado in Los Animos and Bent County. | |
| This part of the country just got moisture, as they call it. | |
| It came in the form of a blizzard, but they're not complaining. | |
| In the high desert, they pray for rain. | |
| Lewis took over this ranch from her father in 1992 and raised her kids here. | |
| All six of them. | |
| Well, I grew up here at Muddy Valley Ranch. | |
| I was the youngest of four daughters, and they moved here in 1958, and I was a year old. | |
| And I I lived here until I married, and then um we had our children and then came back and bought the ranch back from my dad in 1992, and have been here ever since. | |
| So actually I've been here longer than my dad was here. | |
| Lewis says it was hard to build a ranch. | |
| She talks about a particularly hard time when they were scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep the ranch running. | |
| It was a lot a lot of work and we had to watch every penny. | |
| I can remember one time when uh we had bought a brand new pickup and that was unusual for us to buy a brand new one. | |
| We always just would buy used because we didn't think we could afford a brand new one. | |
| When the land payment came along, we were a little bit short, so we had to sell that brand new pickup to uh make the difference. | |
| And you know what? | |
| We made our payment and uh kept right on going. | |
| So, you know, when you're growing that many children in a household, you just get by the best you can and the good lord takes care of you. | |
| But uh you're just so busy with fun of life, and and I guess as a mom of six kids, I did a lot of cooking and cleaning and a lot of laundry. | |
| When you work where you live, Lewis says that everything merges together, but you have more time for each other, more time for the family. | |
| Uh at the time the banker didn't want to do both loans. | |
| He said, you know, you can't hardly pay that off, and then he says, and I'm really confused, Mrs. Lewis. | |
| How are you gonna do that? | |
| And with six children. | |
| But the children were, you know, getting older then. | |
| Uh we had six children in nine years, and um, but they were very good helpers. | |
| And in fact, um the banker said, Well, I need you to call three people and have three people call me and let me know why you should get this loan. | |
| Because I was a female and I of course my husband was we were applying together, but he knew I was gonna be the one to do it because my husband ran a Trucking company and was gone all the time. | |
| When I went back to see the banker, I had the veterinarian, another lady rancher, and another good friend of mine that was an older man called the banker, and uh he said, Oh my gosh, we should run you for governor. | |
| He said, I can see now that it's with those six children, that's how you're gonna get all this done. | |
| This weekend almost the whole family is here to work. | |
| Lewis lost her husband a few years ago, but she's been keeping the ranch up with her children. | |
| And today's Mother's Day. | |
| But it's also time to brand several hundred calves with their brand, one of the oldest in Colorado. | |
| Lewis tells me it's gonna be pretty wild out there. | |
| Cowboys rounding up cattle, roping them and branding them on the ground. | |
| We start early. | |
| The cowboys and girls start at dawn. | |
| I thought it was early, but apparently there's an even earlier. | |
| I've been up since three because I had to put the beans on and make a big two big cobblers for lunch today. | |
| So besides that, I had chores to do. | |
| I had the two nurse cows and fed the horses and uh then put on a little breakfast uh for us and they all got gone before we did, so anyway. | |
| But I had dishes to do because yesterday was kind of a big day too. | |
| So neighbors are what make this ranching work possible. | |
| They call it neighboring, where neighbors team up to do big workloads like branding, and they rotate until everyone is finished. | |
| Some of the people that'll be here today helping us will be neighbors. | |
| They'll just uh from neighboring ranches, and uh we try to help them whenever they need some help, and then when we call them and say, hey, we need a couple guys, and and it's so nice to have them here because you know what, that's what you gotta do. | |
| You have to neighbor with your because uh it's it's so important. | |
| And then of course, some of us have been here a long time, so we've been neighbors a really long time. | |
| so it's kind of like you get kind of get to be old friends We finally get to the location of the branding. | |
| There are at least a dozen neighbors helping. | |
| There's a crescendo of mooing as calves await their turn for branding and castration, and the mothers look on. | |
| There's also a growing heat as the sun rises high with nothing to protect us, only cowboy hats. | |
| Everyone is in jeans, button-up shirts, boots, and hats. | |
| The classic ranch uniform. | |
| So we don't have kind of hormones or anything like that. | |
| These are just calf hood vaccinations. | |
| Uh, this one is a seven-way. | |
| Well, actually, an eight-way, uh, which helps them like with overeater's disease and things, and it has things in it that they can get. | |
| If you don't doctor them for them, they can get that later on. | |
| And then this shot is just for pink eye, and the way the year has started with a lot of rain, we could have a lot of sunflowers. | |
| Sunflowers bring pink eye. | |
| And flies, flies bring pink eye. | |
| They heat the branding irons over a fire and prepare tags and injections. | |
| Lewis tells me they try not to work the cattle too much, only touching them when they have to. | |
| When they're not being worked like this, the cows are roaming in expansive pastures for grazing. | |
| Lewis is joined by most of her children today. | |
| Some who live on the ranch and others who traveled home for the occasion. | |
| My partners are my children. | |
| I don't want partners that I don't know anything about. | |
| I know these children, and they know me. | |
| And when the day comes, which won't be too long down the road, um, that I need to kind of step aside and let them worry about making land payments and because they're all the right age. | |
| They're all in their young 30s. | |
| Uh the twins are 29, and they all need to come together and probably need to do this as a family. | |
| Most of the people in her family are women, but they saddle up with the men and round up the cattle just the same. | |
| Lewis is used to proving herself as a woman on the ranch. | |
| I was one of four girls growing up, and my dad used to always brag about the girls, and finally when I was age 30, I realized he didn't have anything else than girls, so no wonder he was gonna brag about them. | |
| He always said that the girls had a better handle on a horse because they didn't they wouldn't lose their temper as bad as a guy. | |
| This branding is a little later than normal. | |
| They always consult the farmer's almanac to make sure they're using the correct moon cycle to brand and castrate. | |
| There was a weather that postponed the branding, but also Lewis has a side job and a pretty big one. | |
| Lewis just completed her first year as state representative in Colorado. | |
| We'll hear more after the break. | |
| So stay with us. | |
| So stay with us. | |
| You're listening to On the Job from Hired to Retired. | |
| Meredith Turk is our guest producer today. | |
| I'm your host, Steve Mencher. | |
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| Welcome back to On the Job from Hired to Retired. | |
| Kimmy Lewis has plenty to do at her Muddy Valley Ranch, but she decided that helping her neighbors by being their voice in Denver was something else she just had to do. | |
| Once again, here's Meredith Turk. | |
| Lewis ran for office to protect the things that are most important to her on the ranch. | |
| She went to the Colorado House of Representatives to be a voice for all the other ranchers in her region. | |
| I never intended to run. | |
| I never did. | |
| I enjoy just being here. | |
| My whole intent on the whole thing is to show these people Help show them that they too can do this. | |
| So I intend to not be in there forever. | |
| I expect some of these other people that worked right alongside with me to step up for some type of run for something, whether it's city council, whether it's a county commissioner race or Congress or whatever they want to do, show them, hey, I'm a rural person, but you can get elected. | |
| She's been fighting for property rights against the government conservation organizations. | |
| She also wants to educate the public about beef production and explain that ranch in Southeast Colorado produce most of it. | |
| We've always been a little bit of a political family. | |
| My sister Sparky was the state director for U.S. Senator Hank Brown for 15 years and actually was working for him when they took the first big group of land in Pinyon Canyon in 1983. | |
| So, so. | |
| So I knew the battles that they had fought, and then um watched dad and people always respected dad and always they would call here. | |
| They'd have an issue. | |
| And so basically, I think after I got elected, I th I made a statement. | |
| Well, at least now I'm elected to the position that I've been doing for quite a while. | |
| So Lewis said next year she'll be smarter at the legislature. | |
| She knows she doesn't have to run everywhere and do everything like she did this year. | |
| Tackling a city job and a country job means when you come home, you're coming home to work too. | |
| Just the night she got home, her ranch was in the middle of a blizzard. | |
| I came in from Denver the night of the blizzard started two weeks ago, the big blizzard that killed a bunch of the cattle over east here. | |
| And I got my pickup unloaded. | |
| I have some water running out here in the trees, the windbreak, and moved that because I thought, boy, if this storm's gonna get like they're saying, I better do all these things. | |
| Did everything and was putting my pickup in the barn, and I thought, well, I better go check that last heifer. | |
| Well, she was calving. | |
| And it was starting to snow and rain, and I'm out there, and this is like 10 30 at night, and I've been working since since I left Denver trying to get all this done, brought in groceries, and I got her in the rock barn, and that last heifer calved in there. | |
| Even though she works where she lives, Lewis says there's nothing like coming home. | |
| Well, the first thing I always notice is the smell. | |
| This I just smell the fresh air, the fresh air, uh, the air, the wind usually blows out the south-southwest here off of these mesas, and the mesas are full of pinyon pine and cedar trees and it just smells so good. | |
| And this spring, of course, uh this last month, we've had a lot of good moisture, so then you just smell that. | |
| And it's just um I I think that we take a lot of that stuff for granted, and and it's just it just really felt smells clean and fresh, and and I really enjoy that more than the other. | |
| What have you learned about yourself through this career? | |
| Well, this career change. | |
| I've learned that there are a lot of things that you can do that you never thought you could. | |
| Uh the funniest thing about someone like me going to Denver is it didn't scare me to be in the House of Representatives at all. | |
| And it doesn't scare me to stand up there and talk agriculture and be on a completely different wavelength than everybody else. | |
| That doesn't scare me at all because I'm always just trying to be myself. | |
| What would you be doing if you weren't doing this? | |
| You know, I don't know what I would be doing. | |
| Uh I guess ever since I was a small girl, I figured somebody would need to take on the ranch. | |
| And uh all my sisters were either teachers or worked in public relations or something, and I I just I wouldn't know. | |
| I wouldn't know what I'd do. | |
| Lewis hopes to retire soon on a patch of her land and watch her kids run the ranch. | |
| But she'll probably always be involved somehow. | |
| I've been talking with Kimmy Lewis, owner of the Muddy Valley Ranch, south of La Hunta, Colorado. | |
| She's also a legislator who represents her neighbors in Colorado House District 64. | |
| I'm producer Meredith Turk in Denver. | |
| That's all for this edition of On the Job from Hired to Retired, brought to you by Express Employment Professionals. | |
| Find out more at ExpressPros.com. | |
| Music for this episode by Steve Mencher and Ghost from Creative Commons site CC Mixter. | |
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