The late Dale Lasater was my mentor, my longest and best friend. I measure his influence on my life at watershed scale – he caused big things to happen that changed the course of my life.  And he caused big things to happen in the cattle breeding and ranching world.

Our friendship began when I was ten years old, when Dale stopped in to teach me 5th grade at my home ranch in Mexico, before his trip to Argentina as a Princeton Fulbright scholar. Many years later, in my early twenties, we met again for the first time since Mexico, at a Beefmaster Breeders conference in Reno, Nevada and stayed up all night talking. We planned a horse packing trip down Copper Canyon, Mexico’s equivalent to our Grand Canyon. It was to be an epic trip that we would spend the next few years planning as a means of staying in touch with each other. We left the hotel in the dark that next morning and found a hill to sit on together to watch the sun come up.

Staying up all night was the kind of energy he had. Life energy, I think. Unstoppable. Relentless.

It was the beginning of a 35-year letter-writing spree. Dale was a prolific writer of letters. Over the course of three decades, I would stop in to visit him and his family. One time I came on his annual bull sale day and met the man with whom I would begin my ranch management career. On another visit, he asked me to read the manuscript of Falfurrias, a biography he was writing of his grandfather Ed Lasater, who at the height of his career operated his cattle enterprise at the same scale as the King Ranch. Before I left the States to work on cattle stations in the Australian bush, he insisted I keep a journal, and when I returned, he read all of it. When I was working in Oregon, he located a mountain peak on a map close by and invited me to meet him there.

On a visit to his home in 1989, he asked me to sit with him to chart out a business plan for a joint venture between us, offering ranch management services to absentee ranch owners. I had spent the last five years working for a wealthy businessman managing his large ranch in New Mexico and was burnt out. I wanted to return to professional ranching that was based on the land – growing cattle and healthy grasslands. Dale was running his family’s ranch in Matheson, Colorado, one of the most prestigious operations in the world and home to the foundation Beefmaster herd. The Beefmaster breed is one of three American breeds, which his mother and father founded beginning in 1935. My family had been buying bulls from the Lasaters starting in 1960, so coming to work on their ranch was making the full circle.

I moved my young family to one of Dale’s ranches that coincidentally bordered the Chico Basin Ranch’s eastern border. I can recall standing on the hill at the edge of the Chico Basin Ranch looking across its wide girth to Pikes Peak, the 14,000 foot mountain crowning the Colorado Rocky Mountain Front Range. Little did I know that I would eventually spend 25 years on the Chico raising my family and building a business. Little did I know that the next 10 years that I spent working with Dale on the Lasater Ranch would hone my professional business and ranching skills, the foundation upon which Ranchlands would be built, and that working for a rancher of his stature and magnitude would empower me to be successful in my bid for leasing the Chico Basin Ranch, my big break to work for myself.

Dale was so many things. He was a man of deep intelligence and contemplative thought, yet he was a man of the earth. He could write books and just as easily, go out and sort a pen of cattle. He could lead discussions about genetics as easily as he could talk about a poem. The cowboy and his family were as important to him as the financier. He was a man of God like no other whom I have ever met. He was one of the most consistent and giving members of his community. 

He was a mixture of old-world charm and cattleman, the most gracious host that you can imagine. He cared about you, and you felt it immediately in his presence. He had a way of taking your elbow in his hand and guiding you to a corner to sit down to talk in such a way that made you feel special. He was a scholar, the most intelligent person I have ever met. I realized one day while we were in the ranch office together that I needed to write down one thing every day that I learned from him because there was so much: the way he used a word like God, marriage, faith, bulls, wives, traditions, family, ecology, grazing. 

But most of all, Dale was a cattleman. He was unshakable in his work developing the foundation Beefmaster herd that he believed was based around linking the genetic selection processes directly to their natural environment: nature and the natural rhythms of life, boiling the elements of selection and culling to their most fundamental order. His art was distilling  everything down to the perfect balance, and with this herd it was divided between purely functional, open range traits: fertility, conformation, milking, disposition, weight, and hardiness. 

We would often go out to the pasture, and he’d have his Folgers coffee can in hand filled with cake as he’d walk from animal to animal through the herd, feeding individual animals out of his hand. He knew each animal but did not believe in the individual merits of an animal, no matter how significant they might be. He believed instead in the innate ability of a herd as a whole to evolve naturally through competition, selection of the fittest, in its natural environment. I was raised with this philosophy, but I had never been taken so deeply inside this way of thinking, much less seen firsthand the results in a herd that had been culled and selected under this philosophy since its inception in 1995, when it was closed to all outside genetics. Dale had grown up on the ranch, had been intimately involved as a way of life since a child, and now was at the helm, guiding this amazing herd of cattle into the future, and where this philosophy was in stark contrast to the norm in the cattle breeding world.