On May 18th, 2019, my wife, Alaira, and I got married. The beginning of that year was amazing. We started our journey together, financially we were doing okay with decent paying jobs, and we had bought a house. We did all three things that they say will cause the most stress on a new couple. Within about 3 months we bought a house, got a puppy, and got married. I also had a small herd of about 10 Kiko goats that I was unsuccessfully attempting to graze around my in-law’s property. I was still in the Air Force as a member of Security Forces at this time and we were preparing to roll out on deployment to the middle east in October. Just to add to all the craziness.

The goats were, for us, the steppingstone into regenerative agriculture. We knew about this practice, and I had been researching it, but we never had the chance to put it into play. We didn’t choose goats because they are better than others at this specific agricultural practice. In all honesty, they were just cheaper than other animals. One would think that chickens are cheaper than goats. While that may be true with the initial purchase price, it isn’t the case in the long run.

Boy oh boy, if I would’ve known the amount of stress goats would put on us, I might have reconsidered getting into it. I honestly wouldn’t trade that experience for anything though. The plethora of mistakes that I made with those goats were only lessons. One of the biggest issues we had with our goats was moving them. We didn’t have a trailer at first, so we borrowed my grandparents’ trailer to go get them. That wasn’t really an issue. Moving them from my in-laws’ property to my aunts’ property was very interesting though.

We ended up using my father-in-law, John’s, truck with an eight-foot bed. We put metal stakes in the stake holes on the bed and then, with the help of some redneck ingenuity, fastened a role of woven wire on all sides. Now we have the “Redneck Goat Hauler”.

My plan to load the goats was to lay a piece of plywood down as a ramp for them to walk up . . . You can imagine how that worked out. We ended up having to catch each one individually and lift them into the truck bed. During this process, we had one of my problem goats jump the fence. Along with her, followed two more goats hopping over effortlessly. John went after the first jumper. My wife and I went after the other two. The goat that John went after decided she was going to run all over the county and eventually onto a National Wildlife Preserve nearby. Each time John tried to walk a wide loop around her she would just figure it out and run further away. John called me and told me to grab the truck with the rest of the goats and bring it closer to where he was. She had probably gone over a mile through large row crop fields to get to this preserve. I pulled over on the side of the road and saw the goat coming toward us from across the field, keeping a good distance away from John. He had roughly 500 yards of muddy field to get across before making it to where we were.

She finally got close enough for John to just get in the truck and follow her. She ended up getting stuck in a muddy ditch. At this point Johns brother Jason was helping. John hops out of the truck and attempts to head down the ditch to grab this goat, but his legs must have taken a beating from the hike because he ended up falling and rolling into the ditch next to where the goat was stuck. Just seconds after John gets done rolling, his brother Jason just simply reaches down from the roadside, into the ditch and grabs the goat by the horns. He made it look like the simplest task in the world. Let’s just say, John doesn’t really enjoy goats anymore.

Outside of the comical headache of having goats, it seemed like nothing could go truly wrong in our lives. Of course, that would make for a short and boring story, wouldn’t it? We weren’t, even in the slightest, prepared for what was to come.

In August of that same year, my mother’s health took a massive turn for the worst. She had been battling breast cancer, and it seemed that the Lord would be calling her home soon. On August 31st, the day came when my mother left to be with God. It was a day that I will never forget, and I am very grateful to have been present with her in that moment. That event created a numerous amount of short- and long-term stresses in my wife and I’s lives. My wife loved my mom more than I expected a wife to love a mother-in-law and she leaned on my mom for a lot of advice (a lot of it being how to deal with me and my shenanigans). Our family was struggling, to say the least. She was 46 years old when she passed.

That loss was a real eye opener for me in many ways. At that time, I was working as an EMT on a full-time ambulance service and volunteering on my local fire department. My wife was still working as an active-duty military member in the Air National Guard, also volunteering on the local fire department. With the obvious duties of my job, I was seeing sickness and injury every day, but never really thinking further than the care of my patient in that moment. I wasn’t thinking about the long-term process or processes that may have led to their illness. Not until my mother passed.

Then came November. At this point, life was just pressing on about as decent as it could, considering the recent loss. On November 12th, I got a call from my Stepfather, Troy. It’s strange to call him my “Stepfather”, as he had and still does, so much for me and my family. He is the father – figure that stands out most in my life. Normally, a phone call from Troy starts off with, “What’r you doin Boy” or “What’r you up to Boy”, but this was different. After I said, “What’s up Big-T?”, with an upbeat tone, there was an eerie silence for what seemed to be forever. I knew that something was not okay. I became serious and asked if he was alright. Finally, I heard a sniffle, and he said, “Your sister is dead.” . . . My instant response, being caught off guard, was, “What?!” knowing full well what he had said. “She’s gone buddy. Taylor is gone”.

After a few minutes, he informed me of the details and that she was involved in a vehicle accident. He reassured me, I believe possibly both of us, that it was quick and that she didn’t suffer. I then asked what I needed to do. If there was anyone that he needed me to call. I went into a reactive “I need to do something” type of mode, if you will. I wasn’t crying at that point. Not because I didn’t want to, I just felt like I needed to react. I’ve been told that it was a combination of shock and the lack of finished grieving with the passing of my mother. I wasn’t sure whether to be mad or a crying mess and in turn I was just numb to it all. I had my moments, but the reality of the situation really hit me when we went to see her prior to the funeral. In those situations, there isn’t anything you can do except be with your family and grieve with one another. Taylor was 25 years old when she left us.

While this is a very depressing start to our story, this is the beginning of our ranch’s foundation. This is where our faith and our marriage start to become stronger.