Jake Yancey on Farmer Voices

Farmer: Jake Yancey
Farm: Tracking Y Ranch
Location: Olympia, Washington

My name is Jake Yancey, owner/operator at Tracking Y Ranch.

I’ll give you a quick little rundown on us. I grew up in Eastern Washington, a little town called Starbuck of 200 people. I went on to college at Washington State University and Walla Walla Community College. Following that, I spent about five years working and managing ranches in Washington, Oregon, and Montana.

Then ultimately, I was at the point where I was living a wonderful life, I had a company truck, company house and everything, but as far as the future and agriculture, it just wasn’t there. So I went into public safety work, and have been doing that now for just under 20 years.

Then I met my wonderful wife over here in Western Washington and settled here in 2015. We got offered the opportunity to pick up a cow-calf herd in the middle of winter, and my wife had enough trust in me to jump on board. We ended up picking up that cow-calf herd and brought it back home in the middle of winter in Western Washington, which is the worst time in the world to bring cattle on…

We just have five acres here, and so she kind of turned and said, “how the heck are we gonna make this end up working?” With a lot of trust, we started knocking on doors. Ultimately, we ended up looking at grazing as a management tool that property owners could use to manage their property without the cost of spraying, mowing, and all those things that they were doing previously just to maintain their land.

We looked at our cattle and our grazing operation as an opportunity for that. At the same time, about two thirds of our property currently are in conservation trusts, and those two thirds all have some sort of endangered species on them.

So we quickly got involved with different conservation and ecologically interested partners working on studying the effects of grazing. Fast forward to today, nine, almost 10 years later, we’ve grown to managing just over a thousand acres in a four county area, and currently we don’t own any of those acres.

That’s quite different than most operations. As a first generation operation, especially in Western Washington, that’s really been the way that we’ve been able to carve our niche.

I think something folks don’t realize who maybe work a normal job, maybe are putting in 40, 50 hours a week, they may not have a clear understanding of the amount of time and hours that ranching families end up putting in. If this is calving season, it may end up being that they’re taking truck naps as they watch a heifer going through different stages of labor, checking on her. If it’s during harvest season, they’re trying to chase those raindrops before they start falling.

And at the same time, many of these same operations are working, the family members themselves are often working another job in town. None of this is said to drive up sympathy or anything else, but it’s quite different than what I describe to folks as often being the “Yellowstone Syndrome,” that this is not sugar and gumdrops and stuff, that we don’t have folks cooking meals for us. Sometimes it’s a can of beans heated up on the back of your tailgate.

And that’s really what it’s all about, putting in those hours and the amount of love that we end up having. I think if there’s another thing, speaking to ranching, the amount of love that we have for the animals that we end up raising.

It’s often thought that since animals often go to harvest and get slaughtered, that there’s some sort of disconnect between the producer and that process. We kind of joke in our operation that almost half the cattle have some sort of name or some sort of memory that ties along, even if it’s just a number on their tag that we remember. Many times those memories go back to how they gave birth or the weather that it was that day, or maybe the time that we had to nurse that calf when it was struggling.

The amount of care that we end up having for those animals is huge. And it’s a big thing that we love, especially in our family, to teach our daughters about having sympathy and empathy for the animals that they raise, and really respecting those meals that they ultimately produce for not only our own family, but also for our customers.

One of the struggles that we end up dealing with is farmers are tied to their land, and their land is really what they pride themselves on, that they work for. Often we think about, especially as a first generation family, we didn’t inherit anything, and so we’re really blessed with the partnerships that we’ve been able to develop with the property owners that we work on their soil to improve it and everything.

In just under 10 years, we’ve lost over 170 of the acres as we’ve rotated through. That’s now almost 300 homes that have gone up for development. And so we often talk to folks about the fact that farmland often is argued as far as what it’s value is. And unfortunately, for the soil itself as a farmer, there has to be a direct correlation for the sustainability of that property for years to come, for its valuation being derived from what it actually produces.

And when I mean produces, I’m not talking about the number of homes that can go on it, the upzoning that can occur, or anything else, but how many cows can it stock per acre? How many bushels of wheat can it produce? All of those types of numbers. And often what we end up seeing is the valuations of much of the farm ground that we commonly deal with gets reassessed at more of a developer rate.

One of the big challenges that we often talk about is if a farmer’s love is truly tied to their land, and their grandparents worked all these years to build up the soil beneath their feet, the minute that they decide to break those properties up for multiple houses, they’ve gone from being a farmer to being a developer. When we talk about farmers selling their places, we kind of argue that fact.

It can be controversial, but we tell them that the minute a farmer breaks up their land, they became a developer. We don’t see houses getting plowed under anymore and getting turned into farm ground. It never will be that way.

Many of the fields that we used to calve cattle out on right now are houses, and we have beautiful pictures that we share in slideshows that used to be this beautiful soil that’s now paved over. And so we often tell folks that one of the biggest things about farming is leaving that legacy, and sometimes that’s tied to direct family, and we’ve been blessed to at least temporarily be able to utilize some of the land in that way.

I think right now, it’s important to share that farming and agriculture, when done properly really benefits the soil. It used to be thought that farming was about taking away nutrients from the soil and that stuff was getting depleted, but now with the concepts of regenerative agriculture I think there’s been a new understanding that sustainable agriculture is a product of ranchers reinvesting in the soil.

One of the things that we often see from our customers, as well as our conservation partners, is this understanding that working lands are really a great way to not only improve the soil, but really make these multi-purpose landscapes that support not only wildlife, but also productive agriculture to feed our ever growing populations.

I think if there was really something that I’d appreciate the audience understanding, it’s that there still are lots of folks out there that wake up every day and want to be farmers. There’s often this notion that farming is a dying breed. But I think there’s nothing better than going out to a property and watching your livestock, watching plants bloom in the early spring, or smelling freshly cut grass.

My daughters have been blessed with being able to grow up and see some of those wonderful things. We often have friends and family come out who get to see those wonderful things. And I can tell you, every one of them would not say that farming is a dying breed.

As a matter of fact, every one of them kind of asks the same question, like, “Uh, how the heck do we get this started?” But it takes a lot of work and dedication, and kind of a vision for the future, and staying positive through those down times. Just like any self-run business.