Boulder, Wyoming, may not be the coldest place on earth, but don’t tell that to James Jensen, owner of the Lucky 7 Angus Ranch.
He is a fifth-generation farmer, and his family has been raising cattle in Boulder since 1895. They know a thing or two about the area, and they believe it’s earned its stripes when it comes to harsh conditions, particularly in winter.
“We live in a place where only outlaws came back in the day,” Jensen said. “Why would anybody else come to the coldest place in the world and try to raise cattle back in 1895 if they weren’t outlaws?”
While there are places in the world that do get colder, Boulder is unmatched when it comes to harsh conditions, Cowboy State Daily's meteorologist Don Day said.
Boulder is surrounded by mountains, which means the climate can be exceedingly dry. Those mountains might stop precipitation, but they don’t do anything to stop the wind from blowing through Boulder, which sits at just over 7,000 feet.
Nor do the mountains stop cold air from sliding down the mountainside and right into Jensen’s ranch. Boulder is below freezing for nearly eight months of the year and has a short, four-month growing season.
All of that to say, it’s one of the toughest places to raise cattle in the United States. A reality that has its consequences.
One of them being that Jensen can't afford to fall for “brown-eye” syndrome. That’s where a cow looks at you with big, brown, beautiful eyes and you just can’t help but hand her a little bit bigger ration.
Cattle on the Jensen ranch have to be tough to survive. Not just for the sake of economics, either. It’s Mother Nature herself who demands it. And while that extra ration may seem like it’s not causing any harm, long-term Jensen believes any sort of “coddling” is allowing weaker, “glass bubble" genetics to creep into the herd. Genetics that ultimately affect everything from feed efficiency to survival rates — both for the cattle and the rancher.
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch) 
Survival of the fittest produces resilient genetics in nature. That works on ranches too, says Wyoming's Lucky 7 Rancher Jim Jensen. He's using the extreme conditions on his Boulder ranch to grow super cows. (Courtesy Lucky 7 Angus Ranch)
Not Just Any Bull
Jensen got his first lesson about how survival of the fittest plays out on a ranch when he was just 14 years old. He wanted to start his own herd and already had a “nice set of cows.”
Now he just needed a bull.
Not any old bull though. He saved around $3,000, which was a small fortune at that time for anyone, but especially for a 14-year-old boy.
“I wanted to buy the best bull possible,” he recalled. “So, I paid half and my dad paid the other half, and we went to Montana. We got the very best bull we thought we could afford.”
But that bull didn’t do so well at the Lucky 7 Ranch. He had been living all this time in what Jensen called a “glass bubble.” That bubble burst when he landed on a Boulder, Wyoming ranch at 7,000-plus feet.
“He looked like an anorexic milk cow that fall,” Jensen said. “You couldn’t even recognize him.”
The bull was unable to breed the cows properly, which led to them drying up prematurely. It was a train wreck. But one that started a brand-new train of thought that’s been working in Jensen’s mind ever since. One that's led him to create what he believes is one of the most feed-efficient, resilient Angus cattle bloodlines anywhere in the world.
That bloodline has earned Jensen many speaking engagements around the world. He’s just returned from a speaking tour in the United Kingdom, where he talked about his Wyoming-tough approach and how it can be used to create better economics for ranchers. For those who worry about methane emissions, a big topic in the UK right now, it’s also better for the environment.
A Battery Of Tests
Jensen doesn’t just rely on his memory out in the field to select the super cows on his ranch. He’s running specific tests at his ranch, tests that have been developed over the past 40 years. Those help him choose the best cows in his herd, the only ones he uses in his breeding program. The rest go to market, no exceptions.
“We were the first Angus breeder in the world to buy a scientific feed efficiency test system,” Jensen said. “So, we could actually put the cattle in an environment where we can scientifically test them for feed efficiency on an individual basis.”
With this system, Jensen can track how much an individual animal is eating and how much weight it gained.
“Then we could do the math to find out which one gained the most on the least feed,” he said. “That way, we were able to locate and propagate the super cows.”
Jensen has several other tests that his cattle take, but he believes one in particular really sets his ranch apart. That test is the Pulmonary Arterial Pressure (PAP) test, to evaluate which members of his herd can survive best at 7,000 feet.
“They get heart problems at high elevations because of the lack of oxygen,” Jensen said. “So, we do the test to find out whether they will get the disease that causes their heart to fail.”
For the test, the cattle need to be at high elevation for at least 100 days or be at least 9 months old.
“You’re running a catheter through their vein in the neck all the way through the heart and out the other side,” Jensen said. “You wouldn’t do that on a little, bitty animal.”
Heart Disease and Cattle
The test may sound insane, but it was developed by Colorado State University researcher Tim Holt to measure an animal’s sensitivity to altitude. The less sensitive an animal is to that, the more they can fight off hypoxia, and the better survivor they are at lower elevations, too.
Holt has been correlating feed lot deaths with what he calls a “cardiac grading score,” as well as exploring the role genetics play in cardiac failures. Cardiac failures at feedlots cost the industry $1.4 billion annually, according to Holt. Putting an end to that can help improve the industry’s economics.
Holt was given the 2018 Pioneer Award from the Beef Improvement Federation for his work, which has included tests on nearly 500,000 head.
Jensen believes the test makes a lot of sense for improving the genetics of a herd, particularly for his situation, ranching at 7,000 feet. That way, he focuses only on animals who can stand the altitude.
“Most people in most places only use a third of their lungs,” Jensen said. ‘So, they only use the very top third to get oxygen. When you get to higher elevations, we have to get more oxygen out of that blood to survive.”
That makes the heart work harder to drive blood flow, so that more oxygen can be extracted from a larger portion of the lungs.
“What happens is those veins in a milking cow are kind of pulsating to try and drive that blood lower into the heart to get more oxygen out of the blood,” Jensen said. “Like a bodybuilder, when you work out, your arms get bigger. So, the vein wall gets bigger, too.”
There’s a tradeoff to that, however. And it’s a doozy.
“As the vein wall gets bigger, you have less ability to pass the blood through there,” Jensen said. "So now the heart has to pump twice as hard to get that blood through a smaller hole.”
That leads to early heart disease and eventual failure. That doesn’t just matter for higher elevations, though.
“We create cattle to be obese, so we can get them fat to where we can get them to slaughter,” he said. “To where we can get our maximum amount out of them. So, this is becoming a huge, huge problem at lower elevations, too. We’re getting a lot of death loss because of that.”
The pulmonary test can be used to make breeding decisions for healthier cattle, Jensen said. Cattle who will live longer with less sickness and death loss.
“So, we’re running cattle in the toughest place on Earth, and we’re doing those tests … to eliminate a lot of the animals that would be the weaker animals who would not be able to survive,” Jensen said. “The animals who would be more susceptible to sickness, death loss, the animals that would actually fall apart.”
The Trickle-Down Effect
Jensen raises about 500 bulls every year but only keeps the top 100 for his own herd. The rest go to market, along with a whole host of stats, so buyers know things like the optimal elevation for that particular animal and other details.
“By doing that, we started hearing from customers who were not having to feed hay nearly so early in the fall,” Jensen said. “And then they also were increasing their cow herds, because what we had created were feed-efficient animals. So, the animals would eat less and do the same thing as the animal right beside them.”
That turned another light bulb on for Jensen. He realized his own efforts to build a resilient herd were a market opportunity for him, and could help other ranchers, too.
“If you can feed your animal $300 a head cheaper than the neighbor, you just made $300 more than he did,” Jensen said.
Those cattle which eat less are also more efficient in terms of methane, Jensen added.
“So, we’re creating cattle that now can live longer, less sickness, death, loss, and eat less to produce a pound of beef,” he said. “Which becomes a very big issue, especially in today’s world, where everybody thinks that the cattle farts are killing the world.”
That might not be true, Jensen added, and isn’t something he believes himself. But it does give his cattle a marketing edge in agricultural markets with buyers who do.
Beef For Everyone Again
American ranchers aren’t alone in the challenges they face, Jensen added. While he was in the UK, he heard from other ranchers who are having similar problems as ranchers in the United States.
“In the United States, the average rancher’s age is right at 60 years of age,” he said. “In the UK, the only difference is about six years older. So, they’re like 66.”
Aside from the challenging economics, a steady drumbeat about all the problems with agriculture hasn’t done much to encourage youths to choose ranching as a profession, Jensen added.
That makes what he’s doing critical, he believes, for the future of food security. Producing better cattle, with resilient genetics instead of “glass bubble” genetics, creates better economics for beef. Better beef economics will make ranching a more attractive career opportunity again and also lower the price of beef for consumers.
“We can have cattle that are better environmentally, cattle that are healthier,” he said. "At the same time, we’re going to be able to create more meat, more beef, to where the whole entire world can become healthier. Make America healthy again comes through beef.
“Let’s have everybody in the United States eat 5 to 10 pounds of beef a week,” he added. “Let’s create that. We can do that with these kinds of cattle.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
