75creates
A gallery of creative work by members of the Williams College Class of 1975
Ben Duke
Major at Williams: Geology
Some forty years ago, my wife Laurie and I embarked on an adventure that had grown out of my family’s Western and Colorado roots. My true passion has been agriculture, and more specifically, cattle ranching. Outside of the small eastern Colorado town of Elizabeth, we have raised Red Angus cattle on our Fire Rock Ranch. My grandfather, Ben Duke Sr., was a life-long cattleman, heading up the Producers Livestock Marketing Association at the Denver Union Stockyards. I always wanted to follow him into the livestock industry, but I wanted to be a cattle producer, creating a quality herd of cattle producing exceptional beef.
Over the past forty years, we have worked to produce a quality product that we market directly to consumers, who recognize and desire wholesome, natural, and sustainably raised beef. We continue to serve some customers who have been with us for over 35 years.
Raising cattle is not a particularly easy undertaking, as it requires seemingly endless work revolving around breeding, calving, growing, weaning, feeding, vaccinating, doctoring, and generally seeing to the welfare of mother cows, their calves, and bulls. Each has different needs, and as the seasons change, the duties do as well, from middle-of-the-night calving (no matter the weather), to growing and irrigating a hay crop, to making sure cows and calves have adequate pasture and grass on which to thrive and grow, to ensuring that cows are bred to top-quality bulls, to feeding cows throughout the winter months, oftentimes in blizzards or through deeply drifted snow at zero degrees! The rewards are many, with the birth of healthy calves, to the summer months of grazing on green pastures, to the consistent demand for our beef over many decades from loyal customers.
The lifestyle, though, is so much more. Ranchers are stewards of the land, overseeing wildlife management, erosion and weed control, maintenance of iconic view corridors, soil and grassland health, and enhancing important riparian and wetland ecosystems. Ranchers have to become knowledgeable about far more than just the livestock they raise. It is through the hard work of ranching that important working lands are protected, enhanced and conserved. We have placed a permanent conservation easement on our Fire Rock Ranch with the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust, thereby ensuring that the land never can be developed and will remain in agriculture and as an important wildlife sanctuary forever.
