Sometimes a city girl like Brittany Johnson just has to run for the hills.
Working a desk job in her dad’s company alongside her husband in 2018, she found herself wistfully sketching out designs for her future cattle brand—the kind for branding cattle with red-hot smoking iron.
The couple, who once lived in a bustling western Washington state suburb, longed for their own ranch in Montana where they could raise Highland cattle, though they knew nothing about raising livestock.
They were both “city slickers” back then, Johnson, 34, told The Epoch Times. “If we didn’t want it as bad as we did, we would have failed miserably,” she said.
They owned rental properties and lived a suburban lifestyle. Growing up, Johnson had always felt she was made for city life, pursuing a college degree, a career, and luxury. She had studied psychology to be an child life specialist but set those dreams aside in 2011 to work as a safety director in her dad’s trucking company.
That all changed in 2017 when her dad was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.
“Dad was my whole world,” said Johnson, who remembers sitting in her office when he called her and said, “Hey Sunshine, I have a tumor.”
It felt “like the beginning of the end,” she said, “but it really was just a scratching of the surface of this deep desire I had building to just run.”
After Johnson’s father died in 2018, leaving her emotionally shattered, and her mother sold the company a year later, the couple continued in their roles under new management. Keith, 36, was the director of operations.
But when their request for a transfer to an office in the more rural eastern Washington was granted, she felt “God opened the door” for them to say goodbye to the city and embrace open skies.
“Keith and I started to have a stirring in our heart to move away and start a ranch,” Johnson said. “We would drive to Montana and look at houses there while also looking online in Idaho and Wyoming.”
Scouring real estate website Zillow by night, they drove to Montana on weekends, scouting for land they could afford with savings earned through smart real estate decisions.
In the end, though, Johnson’s early dreams of Montana weren’t in the cards. Instead, Keith found a ranch in eastern Washington “on a whim,” said Johnson, adding that they fortuitously signed the deed in January 2021 “on the anniversary of my dad’s passing.”
“Neither my husband nor I grew up with any background in farming or ranching,” she said. “But we both have a strong ‘anything is learnable’ attitude, which has really helped because being brand new in agriculture isn’t for the faint of heart.”
Her first real taste of ranch life arrived as a Mother’s Day surprise—a Highland heifer Keith had picked up, even though they had no proper fencing or extra hay. They bought overpriced tiny bales from a local Tractor Supply though had no hay bale feeders, so they used old car tires as a feeder instead.
“Keith learned how to fence,” Johnson said. “We bought our first livestock trailer, followed by a flatbed trailer so we could go load our own hay, and then we bought our first tractor.”
Being embraced by the community also helped. The previous ranch owners left a “cheat sheet” with all their former contacts, including hay suppliers, veterinarians, and the neighbors’ phone numbers. Though the nearby town was sparse, with no traffic lights, no sidewalks, and no downtown, its inhabitants have been “so helpful,” Johnson says.
The family lives in a fairly new ranch-style four-bedroom house built in 2006, which they recently renovated, so they’re comfortable living with their three kids, aged between 7 years and 7 months. Their two eldest attend a small private school with even smaller class sizes.
But ranch life has also taught the couple harsh lessons.
“There is a saying we heard early on: When you have livestock, you also have deadstock,” Johnson said.
After a celebration for having moved their last load of cattle off the trailer and into the field, the family joyfully witnessed the birth of their first calf, only to have it die in a truck on the way to the veterinarian days later. “We did everything we could,” she said.
Just the same, they’ve had blessings that make it all worthwhile: “There is nothing like summer on the ranch,” she said. “The soft steady breeze that whispers through the aspen leaves, the feeling of warmth on your skin—it’s magic.”
Although their business has seen profits, it’s still growing. It can’t fully cover all the family’s costs yet, which is why Keith continues working. But Johnson has learned money isn’t the only measure of success.
It’s not about having a perfectly manicured ranch or a certain number of acres or heads of cattle, she says.
“We measure success in the peace we feel at the end of a hard day’s work, the lessons we’ve learned the long way, and the simple joy of building something with our own two hands.”
