Texas Is Training Veterans to Ranch. Now the Four Sixes and the Pitchfork Want to Hire Them.

Erin Kimbrough has watched more than 1,000 people come through her program at Texas A&M AgriLife Extension, most of them veterans. Some arrive without ever having stood next to a cow. Years later, she said, they're the ones running the ranch.

"I get to see them from getting to start and not knowing even what a cow looks like up close to now they've got their own ranches, they're raising their families on their ranches," said Kimbrough, who manages BattleGround to Breaking Ground, AgriLife's training program for veterans who want to farm and ranch. "It's incredible."

The program is now on its 20th cohort, and it's about to add a new piece. With the Airpower Foundation, a North Texas nonprofit that supports military families, Kimbrough is building a registered apprenticeship that would place graduates on some of the best-known ranches in Texas, starting with beef cattle.

It's aimed at two shortages at once. Ranches can't find hands with real experience, and the number of U.S. farmers with military service is shrinking and aging. The 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture counted 305,753 producers who had served, down 18% from 2017. Their average age was 68.2, a decade older than the 58.1 average for all producers.

Melissa Dabi Kithas, the Airpower Foundation's executive director, said the idea started with a board member who works in ranching and kept hearing the same thing from friends at big operations like the Four Sixes and the Lazy E. They didn't have enough people. Through state workforce contacts, she was connected to Kimbrough's program, which was training veterans but had nowhere to send them next.

"We were the missing piece for them, because they go through this training, but they didn't have a place to put them to get that on-the-job training to start their career," she said. "So that's where we kind of fit in."

Kimbrough said the Four Sixes, the Pitchfork, the Lazy E and a fourth ranch have committed to hiring apprentices and training them. The Department of Labor requires a set training plan, and the apprenticeship will probably run two years, with the ranches paying salaries. Once Labor approves it, Kimbrough plans to seek approval from the Texas Veterans Commission and the VA, which would let apprentices use their veterans benefits, including housing support, while they learn.

That matters because most ranches can't afford much help. "Most of these operations are one man shows, so they don't have a lot of money to pay for any labor," Kimbrough said. She described a friend who runs 15,000 acres with a spouse and one part-time employee. "They have to be an asset pretty much from the get go."

The details are still being worked out, including how long placements will last. "It's not as easy as it sounds," Kithas said of training and placement. "There's a lot more that happens."

BattleGround to Breaking Ground teaches participants to start their own operations: business planning, how to apply for financing and how to manage a farm or ranch. It is funded through grants from the USDA's National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Completing it helps participants qualify for low-interest USDA Farm Service Agency loans.

The program is also a Defense Department SkillBridge site. Service members in their last six months of duty, still drawing military pay, spend 13 weeks with the program: at least three days a week on a working farm or ranch and two days on coursework. Their mentors, who are paid, must be graduates of the program themselves. Kimbrough estimated there are a couple hundred of them.

Participants come from bases all over the country and move to wherever their training ranch is, Kimbrough said. Fort Hood transitions about 12,000 service members a year, but only a couple have come from there.

Kimbrough said the classroom only goes so far. "They need to be in the field and know what it's like to touch grass and move calves and check water and close gates behind them," she said.

One of her SkillBridge participants arrived expecting to ride horses and check cows all day. Most of ranch work is fixing fence, seeding pastures and putting out feed. "He learned a lot from our program. Then he participated in some internships up in Wyoming, and now he works for the King Ranch," she said. "He cowboys for the King Ranch."

Kimbrough's own household is part of the pipeline. "My husband is also a veteran, Marine Corps veteran, and now a graduate of the Battleground program, and we're ranchers," she said. "We raise beef cattle."

Joseph Burdulinski grew up in Chicago and spent 15 years in the Army as an infantryman, with deployments to Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait and South Korea. He is a Purple Heart recipient. After he was medically retired, he bought 35 acres outside Lott, Texas, in 2020 and named it Cross Rifle Ranch, for his Army specialty, according to the Farmer Veteran Coalition.

Kimbrough said he had never been around agriculture when he left the military. He is a BattleGround graduate and a client of Texas AgrAbility, the program Kimbrough also runs, which helps farmers and ranchers with disabilities stay in production. Through the Texas Workforce Commission's vocational rehabilitation program, he received hay equipment worth something like $130,000, by Kimbrough's estimate. He now runs a hay business alongside his cattle.

"I started with five head of cattle. I'm at 30 right now," Burdulinski told KBTX in September.

Chuck Wright, a Texas Veterans Commission commissioner and former Marine helicopter pilot, introduced Kithas to Kimbrough. "They are training veterans to be ranchers and farmers," he said. "Well, this is Texas, baby."

Wright said the hardest part of a veteran's job search is often translating what they did. "If you're an infantryman, what is your value statement to an employer? And there is one, but a lot of them don't realize the value of their training as part of a whole person," he said. "The skills I can teach anybody. That's not even difficult. That's the easy part."

What employers should want, he said, is leadership. "Veterans get the finest leadership training in the world, bar none."

Kimbrough wants to take the SkillBridge model beyond Texas. She has worked with Tennessee, and she said the Noble Foundation in Oklahoma has shown interest. Any new state's mentors would have to complete the program first.

Kithas said other industries have already asked the foundation whether it can build something similar for them. Further out, she hopes to help graduates who want ranches of their own find land in Texas.

Location Decision is building a national database of veterans workforce programs, from SkillBridge hosts to apprenticeships. Send programs we should include to [email protected].