Ree Drummond, a popular Food Network personality and creator of the Pioneer Woman lifestyle blog, has provided an update on her daughter Paige Drummond, sharing that her second eldest child quit her corporate job to work full time at the family’s cattle ranch.
“She can really hold her own with the cowboys,” Ree Drummond said. “She’s not learning it for the first time. She grew up doing this.”
Paige Drummond is the first of the Drummonds’ five children to return to the family business, which Ladd—a fourth-generation cattle rancher—runs. The couple, who wed in 1996, also share daughter Alex Drummond Scott, 27, sons Bryce Drummond, 21, and Todd Drummond, 20, and are foster parents to son Jamar Goff, 21.
“This job is not like a hands-off job. It’s physical, it’s tiring, you get kicked by cattle, like, I have bruises all over my legs,” Paige Drummond shared in a video accompanying the blog entry. “It’s definitely something where you kind of feel and see the physical toll of it.”
For these reasons, Paige Drummond—who now lives in the home of her late grandfather, Chuck Drummond—acknowledged that she didn’t enjoy her work on the ranch growing up.
“I never really thought that I would be back here working on the ranch—I kind of had it written off,” she said. “But then as I got older and I went away to college and then started working a full-time job, I just really realized how much I missed it and that I just kind of wanted to come back here and try it out.”
Paige Drummond graduated from the University of Arkansas in 2022, earning a degree in hospitality management. Although she is no longer working in the corporate world, she said she is happy her life has come full circle.
Life on the Drummond Ranch
Reflecting on her experiences on the ranch, Paige Drummond—who recently got engaged to her boyfriend, David Andersen—noted that some people may have misconceptions about cattle ranching, namely because it has been widely glamorized on various television shows, such as the Paramount Network’s hit series “Yellowstone.”“I don’t think a lot of people understand what it’s really like,” she said.
“You see people riding horses and it looks wonderful. If you could ride your horse all day, every day, everyone would want this job,” she added. “But 90 percent of the time it’s just hard, hard work. You’re getting kicked, you’re getting crap on you, you’re fixing fence, you’re doctoring cattle. ... It’s a time-consuming, exhausting—yet rewarding—profession.”
Despite waking up at 4 a.m. each day to work 12- to 13-hour shifts, which include rounding up, vaccinating, and branding calves, she said her time at the ranch has been fulfilling overall.
The Pioneer Woman
Life on the Drummond family ranch has been a focal point of Ree Drummond’s blog, which she launched in 2006, per Parade.The food blogger subsequently began expanding her Pioneer Woman empire, launching a recipe website called Tasty Kitchen in 2009. In October of that year, she debuted two cookbooks, “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country Girl” and “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: A Year of Holidays.”
In 2011, the best-selling cookbook author landed her own television show on the Food Network, aptly dubbed “The Pioneer Woman,” which has now been on the air for 37 seasons. Five years later, she opened The Pioneer Woman Mercantile, a restaurant, bakery, and store located in Pawhuska.
