Jeff Horn Began In The Swamps;

At 83 Hes Ranching In The Sand

By Colleen Schreiber
WEATHERFORD Eighty three year-old Jeff Horn describes
himself as a gypsy, though a Texan by birth.
Hes ranched in many different places, from the swamps of
Louisiana to the Kansas Flint Hills to the Oklahoma Osage, and now
the Sandhills of Nebraska. Hes leased country and partnered on
cattle in just about as many other places, including East Texas, New
Mexico, and even on the Arizona desert the few times it rained out
there.
As for a favorite place, Horn acknowledges that wherever he was
at the time was usually the best place, but every place had advantages
and disadvantages.
I dont know that theres a perfect place, says Horn. Louisiana
was great as long as fertilizer and fuel were cheap. On the other hand,
it required a lot of machinery to plant and mow.
The Flint Hills is the simplest operation in the world; you just
burn it off. I went from having a bulldozer and motor grader and
draglines in Louisiana to a four-wheel drive pickup, a cake truck and
a string of horses, he continued. The only problem was its short
season-country.
And if youre going to run wheat pasture cattle, you cant beat
Oklahoma.
Horn says he always wanted to have a ranch in Texas, but it was
always priced totally out of reason when productivity was taken
into account.
When he left Louisiana, he looked all over Texas for a ranch. He
looked at the Gray Ranch at Freer.
Down there everything bites you or scratches you or sticks you,
says Horn. But it has the most wonderful deer and quail hunting.

The Gray Ranch was priced at $250 an acre, a ranch in the Flint
Hills $300 an acre.
Hands down, Kansas was better.
Born in Palestine to schoolteacher parents, he credits his maternal
grandfather, John Jackson, for giving him the love of the cattle
business. His grandfather lived at Malakoff, near Athens, and by the
time he was six or seven, young Horn was spending every weekend
and every holiday on his grandfathers farm.
Originally a stockman and a cotton farmer in the Trinity River
Basin, his grandfather met the same fate as many during the Great
Depression. He also had to contend with a levee breaking, which
ruined his farmland. Horn came along at the tail end of the
Depression, and by then his grandfather had managed to put together
another small piece of land and rented some additional property. He
had a small registered Hereford operation.
When Horn was seven his grandfather gave him the pick of the
bull calves. That calf ended up being the grand champion steer at the
county fair, the Texas Fruit Palace.
One of my prize possessions is a clipping from the Fort Worth
Star-Telegram in which I was identified as the youngest 4-H club boy
in Texas as far as they could determine at that time, says Horn.
The next year he had the grand champion bull. And so it went;
from that time on Horn always had a few cattle. His dad bought 160
acres on the edge of town for $10 an acre, and by the time Horn was
in high school he had accumulated about 25 cows and a bull.
At 12 years of age, Horn recalls that he was told he was now old
enough to ride the kind of horse that the real cowboys rode, so he
began to help his grandfather and those within a 15-mile radius of his
place gather cattle, as they had to be dipped on a regular basis. His
grandfathers brother also had a contract to supply two milkfat calves
to the local grocery store every Monday morning. Young Horn
helped him sort off those calves, pen them and butcher them.
It was this upbringing that he loved; it wasnt necessarily
prosperous, though they always had the necessities of life a milk
cow and a garden and they were content with that. Now, however,
looking back on life, Horn says he was basically taught not to dream
big dreams.

My grandfather was bitter in a way, says Horn. He felt his

banker had quit him just when he needed him. Plus, my mom and dad
as schoolteachers had a steady salary, and compared to what hed
gone through, he thought that was the thing to do get an education
and get a salaried job.
Even though ranching was the life Horn had come to love at a
young age, he did what his grandfather suggested; he went to college
and got a degree in Agricultural Engineering from Texas A&M,
specializing in irrigation and drainage. The plan was to make an
honest living as an engineering professional in the High Plains of
Texas, working on the development of crop irrigation, which was just
getting underway.
As often is the case, however, life got in the way and ultimately
changed the path. It started with a commission in the U.S. Air Force.
He graduated from A&M in 1955, but the Air Force sent him back in
1956 to study meteorology.
They needed weather officers, and I had a good background in
math and physics, Horn says.
They had promised to send him to a co-ed school, which sounded
really good, but instead he ended up back at A&M. From there he
went to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where he served as a
weather officer for a year and then the last two years as a weather
officer for the B-52 bomber wing.
During this time he met Martha Annis Walker, a student nurse.
This was really where the plan to head to the High Plains once his
commission was completed went awry, but in a good way. As he
explained, his future father-in-law, Morgan Walker, did not want this
Texas boy taking his baby daughter off to the Panhandle. So he
offered him a job.
He was a great businessman; he had land and cattle, but I guess I
was too proud, Horn says. I wouldnt agree to that.
Being the kind of entrepreneur he was and having his own goal in
mind, Walker tried a different route, introducing the son-in-law to his
banker and to the president of the federal land bank. The three men
showed Horn some swampland down along the Red River. When the
Red River levee was built, it closed off all the natural drainages, and
part of the Levee Act was to provide adequate alternate drainage by
building a canal. Their thinking was that when that canal was built, it
would make the swampland valuable and productive. And, with the

political connections these men had, they felt sure they could get that
done.
The swampland was selling for $25 an acre; they figured it could
be cleared and seeded for another $25 to $30. The land bank man
offered to loan $100 an acre after it was cleared, ditches cut, and was
seeded to grass. The local banker would provide interim financing.
It enabled me to do something on my own, and that was very
attractive, says Horn. So thats what I did.
The 1500 acres of swampland was located near the little town of
Cheneyville. He recalls the first day he met the mayor at the local
cafe.
He was a big cotton and sugarcane farmer with some wonderful
sandy loam land. He had already figured out that I was the one whod
bought the swampland, says Horn. He proceeded to tell me that he
could have owned the whole country back there for a dollar an acre,
and that he wouldnt have it if someone gave it to him.
Nonetheless, in 1959 Horn set about clearing the land, and then he
dug some canals to give it drainage. About the time he got 600 acres
cleared it started to rain more.
Remember, this was in 1959, and even in Louisiana during the
1950s, it was dry, says Horn.
Almost immediately he saw that it wasnt going to work out like
hed planned, and the Corps wasnt getting anywhere close to getting
the major ditch dug that the Levee Act promised; in fact, they never
did.
They just routed the water through some bayous and put it in the
Atchafalaya River.
So having studied drainage in college, Horn next set about to build
a ring levee around the whole property. Then he installed huge 40inch pumps capable of pumping 50,000 gallons a minute.
They were doing that in Florida, so I brought that technology into
that area, says Horn.
The land had a foot of fall to the mile, and he only had 100 acres
in the whole deal that wouldnt flood when the big rains came. The

entire operation was based on cheap energy. When he started, diesel

was selling for 13.6 cents a gallon.
We poured diesel on the windrows of trees to make them burn
faster, says Horn. Also, those big diesel engines on those pumps,
they really drank the diesel, but it was cheap.
In the end, Horn turned some worthless swampland into lush
bermuda grass, clover and fescue pastures, and in that way developed
a successful ranching operation. While he was developing the
swampland, he leased other land and began building his cow herd.
I bought the best cows I could find, F-1 Brahman type cows and
calves, for $160 a pair, he recalls.
Horn continued to expand by leasing more land, and in time he
bought an additional 1200 acres of swampland and cleared it. That
gave him about 2700 acres of deeded land.
By then hed begun to feed some cattle in the Texas Panhandle as
cattle feeding was just beginning to get underway.
People like Bob Bliss and Jack Carrothers came out of the
Midwest and brought the idea of big-time cattle feeding to the
Panhandle.
Horn fed some of his own yearlings, but he also bought outside
cattle.
I was never a traditional operator. When I could buy a calf
cheaper than I could raise him, I would liquidate my cows and run
yearlings. I never had a cow herd that I developed that I fell in love
with and couldnt give up no matter what.
There were lots of cattle in the Southeast back then. All of the
lower type land that the farmers didnt use to grow cotton was
pastureland. Thats where the cattle were.
Arthur Lacy, Lacy Cattle Co., was in his heyday, Horn says.
He was shipping 300,000 calves out of Louisiana every year, and
Bill Faubio had 27 trucks hauling cattle to the Panhandle.
Horn lived about two miles from Lacys barn.

Lacy had buyers at nine sales in Louisiana and Mississippi, and I

could pick whatever I wanted, says Horn. I bought a lot of thin
cutting bulls.
He commuted between Alexandria and Cheneyville in a 24-foot
bobtail truck hauling a load of those cattle every morning about
daylight.
Things were working well for young Horn. Then along about 1974
corn went to $5 a bushel and the industry was just coming off
Nixons price freeze on beef. The world came down around Horn and
most others like him, including Arthur Lacy. Some like Lacy never
recovered.
When I initially told my grandfather that I was going to go into
the cattle business, all he said was Well, son, I just hope your banker
doesnt quit you right when you need him. I thought about that a
million times after Id lost everything, Horn admits.
He figured the only thing he could do to get out from underneath
the debt was to sell all of his land. But then his banker called him into
his office. His banker had brought the bank through the Depression;
he understood tough times.
When he put his feet under the desk, he ran the bank, says Horn.
A banker could do that back then. It was basically his bank, and the
regulators didnt challenge him.
Horn knew that if the banker believed in a customer, he went to
bat for him. Nonetheless, he was prepared for the worst.
The banker started the conversation by telling him that hed heard
he had a lot of grass and not nearly enough cattle to utilize all that
grass.
I was afraid to even talk to him about buying more cattle, Horn
recalls, but then he asked me what I thought I could buy those little
350-pound calves for. I told him 18 to 19 cents a pound.
Then his banker gave him some advice that has stayed with him to
this day.
He said, You know when you lose something, the only place
youre going to find it is to go back to where you lost it. He told me
that I needed to buy those calves.

Long story short, Horn bought twice as many cattle as he had fed
the year before, and he was able to make it back.
My kids would all tell you that their memory of me was that I
always had a package of Rolaids in my shirt pocket, Horn says. It
nearly killed me because, you see, I had gone back on my raising. I
was raised that you use it up, wear it out, make do or do without, and
you dont borrow; if you dont have the money you dont buy
something.
But his father-in-law, being a well-established and successful
entrepreneur, came from a different world. He sat Horn down and
told him that if he was going to make any money he had to learn to
use someone elses money. He referred to it as the wise use of
credit, and he went through all the details.
He gave me the courage that I would never ever have had, says
Horn. Plus, he had the connections to introduce me to like-minded
people.
Another thought Horn has about that time in his life is that it was a
world away from todays corporate America.
Back then my banker saw it as his obligation to build up the
community.
That kind of thinking came to a screeching halt in the 1980s
during the savings and loan crisis. Horn was on the bank board
during that time; his old banker had been removed from the bank by
the bank regulators.
Our hands were tied, Horn recalls. We couldnt do what my
banker had done for me in the 1970s. The regulators were telling us
what we could and couldnt do. It was all about collateral.
It was a sad experience for him in that he knew of people who
could have made it had the bank just stood behind them. It reminded
him of his friend Arthur Lacy, who early on had gone with the other
bank in town.
When things came unwound, that was it. He was never able to
feed cattle again.
In addition to the 70s debacle in the cattle market, energy prices
soon spiked; 13-cent diesel all of a sudden went to 50 cents. Horns

entire operation was based on cheap energy, and he began to realize

that his deal was no longer going to work.
By then he was running cattle in the Flint Hills of Kansas on a
per-head basis. He really liked that country and could easily see its
benefits.
That grass is superior to anything you can grow anywhere in the
United States for a short period of time, and all you had to do was
take a match to it.
So he began to think about trying to buy a ranch in the Flint Hills.
He had been buying bulls from Emmett Lefors. Lefors had a
registered Hereford operation at Snyder, Pampa and Lefors, Texas,
but he kept a hotel room rented in Eldorado, Kansas, as he placed
bulls all over Kansas. It was at his place in Eldorado that Horn first
met and tried to do business with Lefors. Hed already been warned
how a tough a trader he was, and the rumors proved to be true.
You never got the better of Emmett Lefors, says Horn. I did
learn the secret to dealing with him, though. If I went up there to pick
the bulls out, he would invariably try to get an inferior bull off on me,
but if I dealt with him on the phone and we finally came to an
agreement on price, he would send the best he had.
It was ultimately Lefors who told him where to buy in the Flint
Hills.
He knew that country; he was about 70 when I first met him, and
he lived to be over 100. He said, Young fella, you go to Chase
County and go up that Old Diamond Creek Road and find you a
ranch up there, and youll never regret it.
As luck would have it, after having little to no success with a
realtor, Horn happened to pick up the paper one day while waiting on
a plane out of Kansas City. He turned to the classifieds, and there he
found an advertisement for a 10,000-acre ranch in the heart of the
Flint Hills.
I called up the realtor and asked what he considered to be the
heart of the Flint Hills. He asked if I knew where Strong City was,
and then he said Well, you go up Diamond Creek Road right
where Emmitt had told me to go.
He was able to trade his ranch in Louisiana for land in Chase
County. That was in April 1978. Horn partnered with two brothers

and fellow cattlemen from Louisiana, Jack and Sam Methvin, who
also traded their ranch in Louisiana and purchased property in
Kansas. The Methvins were successful multi-generational cattlemen
who also saw an opportunity to move to better cattle country.
Horn said what really saved him on his Louisiana land was that
the laws changed on rice allotments. Originally the rice allotments
were on the Coastal Prairie on some pretty poor soil. When the laws
changed, it allowed rice farmers to move their allotments off that land
up into the alluvial land where Horn was. The place hed cleared was
ideal for rice production.
Though that Flint Hills country was the best steer country in the
world, Horn recognized that the secret to its success was having the
cattle ready to go in the spring. This was short-season yearling
country, and he had to have a place to inventory cattle, so he
remained in Louisiana for 10 more years and partnered with different
people, running cattle on sandbars and on rented places all around.
Emmett always told me that if I didnt have grass on May 1, Id
have it on May Second, and so his philosophy was to get the cattle
there by mid-April. He reasoned every day missed on the front end of
the season was a day you never got back and the cattle never caught
up, because you lost about three pounds of gain a day in the front
end.
Many people out of Texas would send aged steers to the Flint
Hills, but by the time Horn got to going good it was hard to find those
kind of cattle, so he mostly bought cutting bulls out of the Southeast
weighing 600 to 650 pounds.
We were buying them one at a time, and those cattle were
exposed to every disease known to man, Horn says.
Over the years Horn also ran a world of steers out of Mexico.
Theyd gain three pounds a day for 100 days just like they were
in the feedlot.
His boys grew up doctoring cattle. After one particular 14-hour
day, one son turned to his older brother, Shelby, and asked if he was
going to do this the rest of his life. When Shelby said yes, he replied
that hed rather be a garbage man than a cowboy.
I pretty well burned all of them out, all but Shelby.

Shelby got bit by the bug when at 14 his dad took him to the bank
to get his first loan to buy some cattle. Shelby has followed in his
fathers footsteps since, and is now president of Great Plains Cattle
Feeders in Hereford and vice president/general manager of ranch
operations for Llano Partners Ltd., with ranches in Texas, New
Mexico and Florida.
It was Shelby, then 29, who took over the family operation when
in 1995 the elder Horn was called to Florida on short notice to
oversee 150 missionaries for the Mormon Church. During the next
two and a half years, Shelby leased their Flint Hills ranch. He ran his
own cattle and custom grazed some for others.
During this time, he had an interesting confrontation with the
most infamous crook in the order buyer world. Shelby stood his
ground, thats for sure.
After Horn finished his commitment in Florida, he and Shelby
continued with a family partnership. By then theyd moved the base
of their operations to Tyler, Texas, where they had three pretty goodsized ranches leased. They continued to run cows and calves and
straightened high-risk southeastern calves to send to their ranch in the
Flint Hills.
A few years later Shelby had an opportunity to go to work for
AgReserves Inc., better known as Deseret Ranches, as their general
manager of livestock marketing and risk management, so he moved
to Pawhuska, Oklahoma.
Horn lost Annis, his wife of 45 years and mother to his seven
children, in 2003. Soon after, he moved to the Osage to be near
Shelby and his family. It was at this time that he came to the
realization that he could no longer physically do what he used to do
insofar as getting calves ready to go to the Flint Hills, so he began
instead to look for a ranch where he could run cows and calves.
He found that in part of the old Mullendore Ranch, the piece they
called the Kansas Camp, which straddled the Oklahoma/Kansas line.
So Horn made another trade, this time part of his Flint Hills ranch for
the Kansas Camp.
It was in sandstone country, and good cow-calf country, but it was
still not large enough to handle all the cattle he needed to stock the
remainder of the Flint Hills ranch, so within a years time he found
another good limestone place at Cedar Vale, Kansas, just north of the
Oklahoma line and west of Sudan. He decided, however, to get

completely out of the business of starting cattle and running

yearlings, so this time he traded the Kansas Camp and the remainder
of the Flint Hills country for the Cedar Vale ranch.
By then the price of land had really begun to accelerate, Horn
says, and in about four years the price of the Cedar Vale ranch had
doubled. He made the decision that it was time to pay some taxes, so
in 2009 he was on the move again.
He and Shelby had a partnership with a man who ranched in the
Nebraska Sandhills. They furnished the cows and he provided the
care and grew out the yearlings. Horn had run cattle on a custom
basis in other places in the Sandhills. It was ranch country that Horn
found quite attractive in terms of its ability to do what he wanted to
do with cows and calves.
In the Sandhills, when I look at the quality of the cattle that are
around there and I think about what it takes to run a cow-calf, I
would have to put the Sandhills of Nebraska pretty high up the ladder
as a cow-calf country, says Horn. Plus, they have the best market in
the U.S. because of all the grain close by.
I was watching the auction yesterday in Bassett and one today in
Valentine, and those prices are fully $12-15 a hundred higher than
they are in Texas for the same weight cattle.
Horn found a 10,000-acre ranch in the northcentral part of the
state near the little community of Brewster, which sits about 100
miles northeast of North Platte and about the same distance northwest
of Grand Island. It includes about three and a half miles of the North
Loup River frontage and a couple of irrigated circles. Another real
plus is that it sits atop the Ogallala Aquifer.
Forty feet below the surface there is 600 feet of saturated water
sand. Thats a very valuable asset.
The best part, perhaps, is that he was able to get a really good deal
on the ranch.
For as long as Id prowled around in the Sandhills it was always
said for every acre in the Flint Hills you could buy two acres in the
Sandhills, Horn says. But when I got ready to buy, there was an
aberration in the market, and I was able to get three for one.
Horn has a really good ranch manager in Frank Utter. He handles
the day to day, but Horn spends much of the spring through early fall

on the Nebraska ranch. Horn purchases all the replacements and

markets all the calves, and he and Shelby do the risk management
together.
They calve much later in this country because of the weather.
Theres a lot of labor involved if you calve in February, so we
wait until April and May, says Horn.
They wean a light calf, 475 pounds on average, but they run them
on irrigated circles and get them up to 575 pounds and then on to
native grass with a little cake on through the winter.
From the time we take the calf off the cow, well put 170 pounds
on them by spring, says Horn. We can winter those calves pretty
cheap through the winter by feeding some distillers cake; thats all
we do. We have a lot of native meadows, and we only feed hay if it
covers up with snow.
The same is true for the cows. Last year they only fed hay in April
while calving before the grass came.
The Nebraska ranch came stocked with SimAngus cows.
They were huge, and I didnt think they fit the environment.
Now hes in the process of switching over to moderate-sized,
moderate-framed Red Angus cows bred back to Waggonhammer
Charolais bulls to get to smoky buckskin-colored calves.
He found what he was looking for in a cow from John Warren at
Stapleton.
Theyve been there forever, raising Red Angus cattle, says
Horn. His cows have been time-tested in making their own living
out in those rough fields.
Horn has long been a student of the market; in fact, he lives and
breathes the market.
If youre going to be a hedger, you have to be on top of the
market, particularly in the yearling business, says Horn.
Hes long been a user of the futures and options and a believer in
that tool; now not so much. Horn says the live cattle futures contract,

established in 1964, wasnt used in the industry to any great extent

until after the big 70s wreck.
Before that we all thought the futures were for the gamblers,
says Horn. But after the wreck, I came to the conclusion that if I was
going to buy feeder cattle and graze them or feed them, that I was
going to have to manage that risk, and so I set out to learn to do that.
Hes mostly self-taught. He bought lots of books and learned a lot
from Harold Heinhold, who had a big commodity brokerage
company in Chicago, and he had cattle on all kinds of contracts in the
Midwest. He also credits Dick Sparks, who was in charge of
Deserets hedging program, with educating him.
He was proud to never have a marketing opinion, recalls Horn.
He was an expert with the charts, and he and I were on the phone
constantly.
Horn says there have been times when the futures paid off
handsomely. Once he and a partner had 1200 cows, and they sold the
calves for a dollar a pound.
That was really a big deal at the time.
They later put the cows on corn stalks in the fall in western
Kansas. Horn kept eyeing the futures, and he had an opportunity to
sell the contracts to guarantee another dollar a pound for the calf
crop.
I sold those contracts at 88 cents a pound, and that was back
when you could deliver feeder cattle against the contract when the
basis on a 500-pound calf was well established at 12 cents per
pound, Horn explains. I ended up buying those contracts back for
66 cents and sold the calves for 75 cents and added those $22. That
was one of the times when being hedged really was a real boon.
Horn calls himself a selective hedger.
Anyone who was hedged coming out of 2013, if they stayed
hedged they lost those huge profits that came along in 2014, says
Horn. I was fortunate in that I got out of my contracts and was able
to sell those $1500 calves in 2014.

Last year, recognizing that a $1500 calf crop was a gift and rather
than get greedy, he made the decision to lock them up again and
hedged the familys ranch cattle.
In the end, in 2015 about a third of the revenue came from the
Merc, and we got a $1500 calf crop again after the market broke,
says Horn. I wasnt that smart this year; you never hit every ball that
is pitched.
That aside, like many, Horn is not convinced that this latest
debacle should be as bad as it is.
I was at the grocery store in Weatherford the other day, and they
had $10 T-bone steaks. That doesnt make a lot of sense to me when
fat cattle are a dollar.
He also opined that the market would never have gone as high as
it did except for the futures market.
I dont think the expanded limits have been beneficial to the
producer, and I certainly dont think HFT (high frequency trading)
has been good for the producer, Horn opines. When we have a
range of $4-5 a day in a contract and at the end of the day the open
interest hasnt changed, that just tells me that theyre using it as a
casino.
They drove it up until they couldnt drive it anymore; they drove
it too high and damaged our market share, and then when they
couldnt make it go higher, they drove it lower. Now its lower than it
should be, and I dont know that its over yet.
He pointed to the June 2016 contract, which was trading $7 to $8
below cash within a few days of expiration. Horn says hes never
seen that in all his tenure.
There was no reason for it except that there were no buyers. They
killed off all the speculative fundamentalists.
Again the they he referred to were the HFTs, also often referred
to as algorithmic traders.
There used to be bigtime fundamental speculators in the market
that would buy the market, he points out. They got crushed in these
huge swings the expanded limits that allowed these huge swings
and the HFTs.

The HFTs, he adds, dont even want to leave a bid in for a second.
They put it in and take it out, put it in and take it out, Horn
remarks. They run this market and get it going in one direction, and
the momentum carries it up. Then the first thing you know its going
down, and theres been no fundamental change. Its just a casino, in
my judgement.
These speculators, he insists, dont have a clue about the cattle
market, nor do they care to know anything about the cattle.
They cant make money unless there is volatility, he points out.
Horn is adamantly against going away from a delivered live cattle
contract. He doesnt like what happened to the feeder contract when
it changed from delivery to cash settlement. He contends that change
only benefitted the speculators, those who dont actually own any
cattle.
If people had to be prepared to buy them, this would be a whole
different world, Horn insists. Thats what needs to happen. A
bunch of those HFTs need to get trapped someday, but theyre so
quick that it probably will never happen.
He recalls the first time he took delivery on fed cattle. He was still in
Louisiana.
I got long on several cars, and my broker kept telling me I had to
get out. I told him I didnt have to get out. He asked what Id do if
they delivered them. I told him to let them deliver them, that I knew
what to do with them.
They delivered those cattle and he turned around and made money
on them.
For those HFT guys it would be absolute disaster if they were
told they had 40 cars of fat cattle waiting at Worthing, South
Dakota.
A broker he spoke with recently said he thought fed cattle could
get to 90 cents.
I think that would be ridiculous, given all this meat weve moved
in the last 12 months, and at huge margins for the packer and huge

margins for the retailer. If demand hadnt been there, they would
have had to lower their prices at retail.
Simply put, like many, Horn contends the futures market is
broken.
I say that even though I got a lot of money out of them last year,
says Horn. My broker tells me that its working just like it was
meant to work. He points to the fact that those who were hedged
made $7-8 off basis this year. Yearling steers are bringing $1.30 a
pound, and theyve got the deferred contract at 90 cents. How are you
going to hedge that? It doesnt matter what the basis is. Are you
going to hedge yourself a big loss?
And yet like most in the industry, Horn really doesnt have a
solution. Instead, he sees more consolidation coming down the pike,
consolidation at all levels. He also predicts this will be one of the
shortest expansion phases the cattle market has ever seen.
If you didnt have a lot of equity, who could survive what weve
seen in the last 18 months?
He sat with a young man at the auction barn at Bassett, Nebraska a
few weeks back. The young man, Horn says, was having a hard time
coming to grips with the fact that hes broke.
The bank reworked his loan last year to allow him to be in
business this year, but theres nowhere to go from here. Hes done,
and hes now looking for a job.
Some might contend that this is just business as usual, and when
the cattle market goes through a wreck, cattle people always look for
someone or something to blame.
I agree that weve long considered the packer the bad guy, but
thats not always the case.
Still, he cant help but point again to the 2015 farm to retail spread,
which was about 25 percent above the five-year average.
I just dont know how you justify that, says Horn. We now
have a situation where four packers buy practically all the fat cattle in
the U.S., and very few cattle are traded in the cash market, and yet
the cash market determines all of these grids. So I think theres a very
valid argument that things are not healthy.

Everywhere hes been Horn has always learned from the natives,
but perhaps none more than his father-in-law.
I had a great businessman mentor in my father-in-law, says
Horn. I would never have had the nerve to do everything that I did
except for him. He was a special man.
There was also Lucien Laborde, in Hamberg, La. He and his
father-in-law developed Louisiana S1 white clover.
They were experts in grasses, and I never went past their place
that I didnt stop and pick their brain, and I used their seed.
And it was Emmett Lefors who schooled him that if it wasnt
north of the Cottonwood River, he wasnt in the heart of the Flint
Hills.
He and his wife, Gail, whom he married in 2005, split their time
between their home in Weatherford, Texas, and the Nebraska ranch.
Regardless of where he lays his head, Horn is never far from the
computer or the phone, as he remains avidly involved in the day to
day of the market. Even at 83 there seems to be no quitting in this
cattle ranching gypsy.
The Lord blessed me; thats the only way I can explain my life is
to say the Lord blessed me for whatever reason, concludes Horn.

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