Why I Gave Up My 6-Figure Job to Start a Ranch
“Why are all these teenagers wandering around the mall? It doesn’t look like they are shopping.”
“They are just hanging out.”
“Are you serious, kids hang out at shopping malls for fun?”
“Haha, yeah babe.”
“Did you do that?”
“Yep, all the time.”
“Huh.. I never realized that was a thing kids did. Do you want that for our girls when they are teenagers?”
My wife Julie paused and looked at me and answered “F### NO!”
It was in the Kennewick WA shopping mall in December of 2014 when we knew it was time to begin a new chapter in our life and make a drastic change for our daughters Olivia (4) and Millie (almost 2).
Julie and I were both born in John Day, a rural Eastern Oregon town. Her family moved away to Portland before she’d started school. My family had moved from our family cattle ranch in Kimberly, an unincorporated town 60 miles from John Day, back to John Day when I was 7.
After we moved, we’d often visit the ranch to help brand cattle, go hunting, help feed hay, help with irrigation / go fishing and some other ranching work. The ranch was certainly a part of my life growing up after we moved, but I didn’t spend a ton of time at the ranch.
I ended up only working one summer with grandpa after I’d graduated college. Similarly, Julie’s cousins Clint and Jill invited her out to the ranch they were managing in another rural Eastern Oregon town Westfall when she was 13. Clint taught her to ride horses and how to rope. It was the best summer of her childhood.
Julie and I actually met for the first time at a small town rodeo nearby by to my family’s cattle ranch, the Spray Rodeo.
Not long after we started dating she moved from Bend OR up to the Tri Cities in Richland WA, then several months later our work transferred us up to Calgary, Alberta.
In 2009 we got married and shortly after we had our first daughter Olivia in 2010. We’d moved back to the Tri Cities, I had settled into my career as a Project Controls Analyst and was working on the Advanced LIGO Project a National Science Foundation funded project managed by Cal Tech and MIT.
My dad and brother had taken over the operations of our cattle ranch from my grandpa and I’d always felt an internal pressure to help them in someway.
So as a curious mind does, I tried to learn all that I could about ranching.
I remember the first video I watched was Allen Savory’s Ted Talk on Desertification. This is still one of the most profound videos I’ve seen on the impacts we are having on the environment and what can be done to fix it.
The first book I read was “How To Not Go Broke Ranching” by Walt Davis. Walt is an Oklahoma rancher who shares the lessons he learned in a lifetime of ranching, it’s a great read.
I had an hour commute each day and I dove deep into many many audiobooks, but I wasn’t connecting with any of the conventional ranching methods that were at the core of how our ranch was operating.
So when Julie and I had this ah ha moment. We both knew that this was our opportunity to try raising cattle and to try some of the regenerative practices that I’d been learning about.
2015 marked 9 years in the Project Controls field for me and 5 years at Advanced LIGO project working for Cal Tech. I’d just been given a promotion that brought my annual salary up to $100,000 per year and this promotion also was the beginning of a new role for me as a Financial Analyst with Cal Tech on the operations side of LIGO.
Project Controls is a field that can be unstable, as it’s not required during the Operations phase of work and it’s only done on major projects $50M or greater typically. So to find work in this field you would have to move to where the project is happening and it was difficult to find something “permanent.” You are usually moving from project to project every 5 years or so.
Financial Analyst jobs are stable, me accepting this role with Cal Tech was giving us the stability just about every American dreams of, six figures 15% towards retirement, with lots of opportunity to advance.
Upon taking this new job there was one major condition that I’d asked. It was that I’d take the new role as long as they hired someone to fill the role I currently had. This never happened, so I was working 60 hour weeks.
I even had my computer with me at home the week Millie was born. I had Olivia watching cartoons on one monitor while I was working on the other.
The Advanced LIGO project was scheduled to continue until 2018 and would require one person working half time for the remaining three years.
This left us with the perfect opportunity to step away from my full time role and keep my part time role for the next three years while we tried to start a cattle ranch.
We found 160 acres just outside Spray OR (population 140 and the same town where we met) and by May of 2015, together with my dad, we’d purchased it and moved down. It had a house site developed, but no home on it so we were bringing a small camper to live in as our home was built.
As we were getting ready to move I checked the camper water lines and as luck would have it there was a major leak in the back of the camper. I knew nothing about campers and we’d just bought this one, well it turned out to be a burst water heater, a common problem if the camper isn’t winterized correctly.
Olivia finished up preschool and we celebrated her birthday early as a farewell to our friends in the Tri Cities and moved to Spray.
There were only a few trees on the 160 acres and it was mostly irrigated fields. But there was a house site that had been developed in the early 1990s.
We parked our camper on the home site and setup the Toy’s ‘R Us swing set and Little Tikes picnic table in the dirt in front of our camper and began our adventure.
This move was one of the best decisions we ever made and such an amazing chapter of our life.
I’ll be sharing more about our time in Spray as well as Kimberly in the upcoming blogs.
If you’ve lived on a ranch or have family members that have, I’d love to hear your origin story and maybe even share it with our readers as well.
Nate Campbell ~ Founder of The Ranching Life
