Ten years ago, Mary Heffernan got on her laptop and dug up the riskiest venture she and her husband had ever tackled. The couple were Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but after finding land online, they made the gamble of a lifetime by taking up ranching in Northern California.
Today, they are first-generation ranchers. The catch? For the family, pastoral life is an endless field of risk. Yet it’s worth it, they say.
They knew next to nothing about livestock or agriculture while living their urban lifestyle in the Bay Area, concerned more with scheduling workouts and nail appointments than destructive weather or infectious outbreaks in the herd.
For college, she moved out of state, but she soon returned and met her lawyer husband, Brian Heffernan, and together they built a small but lucrative startup empire cashing in on the boom. They had brick-and-mortar businesses, two restaurants, and errand-running services for busy parents working in emerging Big Tech industries.
After the girls were born, and after moving up the ladder from their starter home into their spacious dream house—which they thought was their forever home—the couple found the area wasn’t the stomping grounds they remembered. It was no longer best for the girls.
In matters of business and branding, the Heffernans take pride in providing the very best. “We don’t do it unless it’s awesome” is the phrase of the family business, Mrs. Heffernan tells The Epoch Times.
So, in search of great meat for their clients, they realized no one had the top-notch goods they were seeking that were readily available. Failing to find a source led them to strike out on another venture: to raise their own cattle.
“It was the easiest decision we ever made,” Mrs. Heffernan said. “We wouldn’t go back.”
Today, the family live in a big Victorian-esque house built in 1868. It’s probably from a Sears catalog hawked by a door-to-door seller. There is only a wood stove for heat, and the family use lots of blankets. Far from the suburban lifestyle they led until a decade ago, today, they are happier than ever despite fewer comforts.
“In the Bay Area, you’re always working for a bigger and more beautiful house that you’re proud of,” she said. “We were proud of our being out there working the land.”
Life was even grittier in the beginning. When they arrived at Scott Valley in 2014, they made do in a 760-square-foot ranch hand’s house, which, legend holds, was a chicken coop back in the day. Their four daughters, all named Mary, slept in one double bed.
“We found a satisfaction in that, [which] we realized we‘d been missing in the Bay Area,” the mother said. “We’d come home at the end of the night dog tired.”
She said, “We wanted to be huddled together in that tiny house around the wood stove, cooking dinner, and eating around this tiny dining room table.
“I’m doing the dishes, and my husband is 10 feet away in the chair working on ranch paperwork.”
On their lush 400-acre irrigated pasture with some 1,400 acres of mountainous open land for grazing (cattle love the mountains), the family raise several hundred black Angus cows and Berkshire hogs, as well as Navajo Churro sheep.
Resources were built up piecemeal as they realized startup costs were “never ending.” A fence system for rotational grazing was installed along with grain silos and hay barns for alfalfa.
The work was grueling—and still is. The family initially mixed feed in garbage cans and hauled it out in buckets by hand. They still laugh at the photos. Then they graduated to their first “Dr. Suess-Mobile.” Now they own a Kirby mixer like everyone else.
Alas, most of their equipment is scoured from auctions of family farmers liquidating their assets or going out of business, Mrs. Heffernan said, indicating their parents’ sage advice was correct:
“My mom told me that her grandfather, who was a farmer, said, ‘You have to love gambling and be a gambler. If you’re in agriculture, your livelihood is a gamble,’” Mrs. Heffernan said. “I don’t ever feel secure in agriculture because the weather can destroy an operation in a few day’s time.
“We laugh that we tried spread sheets and business plans when we got started, and you might as well throw those out the window, because they look nothing like what actually happened.
“We just put in long days, early mornings, late nights, working as hard as we could to make the numbers work,” she said, “starting small, putting things together with duct tape where we had to.”
With her roots steeped in farming, indeed, ever since she was a young girl, Mrs. Heffernan gravitated toward horses and country life. Her husband also hails from agriculture. In a roundabout way, they came full circle, finding a way back to fulfill their family legacy.
In a sense, they never left. Standing on the supportive shoulders of relatives proved indispensable. Mr. Heffernan’s dad, a crop farmer, set them on the right track for an irrigation system; their brother-in-law, a fifth-generation rancher, steered them toward black Angus cattle—the Cadillac of beef—instead of trying to be different.
“We could have invested everything we had and gone down the wrong path,” Mrs. Heffernan said.
In another sense, though, they surpassed their forbearers, who deemed family farmers a dying breed. The game changer for the Heffernans was the direct-to-consumer model: shipping frozen meat straight to the customer, a means only enhanced by the pandemic.
“It took a little education to say [to our customers], ‘I’m going to ship you frozen meat, it’s okay,’” Mrs. Heffernan said. “Whereas now, that’s common practice in the post-pandemic world.”
The great advantage is they can sidestep the dictates of the beef commodities market by setting their own prices. And now we can have steak with stellar genetics that is grass-fed and grain-finished, raised from start to finish.
No, the Heffernans won’t change the world with their farm. Big Agri still provides the bulk volume to sustain the majority of Americans. What ranchers like the Heffernans might do, though, is teach people how to follow in their footsteps: to obtain all-natural more flavorful steak, and maybe even lead more fulfilling lives.
Mr. Heffernan offers words to those caught up in the rat race: “My worst day ranching is still better than my best day lawyering.”
And the girls? Growing up gritty has taught them to love rodeo, for one. And “the world doesn’t revolve around them,” Mrs. Heffernan said.
