It’s one thing to be born with a cattle herd, it’s another thing to build one. That’s precisely what Larry Hafer of Hafer Cattle Company did. But more importantly, he built a life on handshakes and helping young people find a passion for cattle.
Those handshakes led him back to his lifelong friend, Del Ficke of Ficke Cattle Company, and founder of the Graze Master Group. Now these two men, who most definitely built their herds from the ground up, are ramping up their efforts to build even more community and confidence in the cattle business again. They are doing it with a handshake between them like they always have and through a new business venture under the umbrella of the Graze Master Group – The Graze Master Genetics® Certification Program. The program is a complete systems approach to genetic improvement and profitability backed by 80 years of combined expertise in real world cattle solutions.
It’s cow sense and common sense combined. The following are key points to the certification program:
We provide genetic recommendations that will make herds excel in the real world with practical traits suited for your farm and ranch.
We can help you fine-tune your genetic resources and turn them into market opportunities.
We use your quality genetics as a base for building a profitable herd that is best suited for your farm and ranch.
We also want to extend an invitation to be part of the Graze Master Group family and powerful ag solutions network.
“We get it, any cattle business endeavor can say they have real world cattle solutions,” said Hafer.
“But anyone who knows Larry and I in the cattle industry, knows we have actually lived in the real world,” added Del Ficke. “And we know who else lives in the real world too. People with our backgrounds just get it.”
“He has an eye for the great ones,” Ficke added about Larry’s cattle acumen. “It’s not just individual cattle that he can identify like few others can, it’s his ability to identify the farms and ranches that have the great ones and the great mindset to really ramp up their profitability.”
“Larry has no preconceived notions about what great cattle are,” Ficke noted adamantly. “Right away when I met him when we were teenagers, I noticed his ability to identify animals that were elite. We were often too close to see them, but Larry could. To this day, Larry can pick salable qualities in both form and function to win in the show ring or work on the ranch. And, because the cattle he selects are already working in real world environments, they are problem free and prolific.”
Larry’s story:
To understand Hafer’s “eye for the great ones,” you have to understand his background.
“I guess you could say, you don’t get to where you’re supposed to go without doing it,” Hafer said. “Because you have to.”
Hafer grew up in Seward, Neb. on an acreage. His family didn’t farm themselves, but they worked tirelessly with farmers and livestock producers all over the area, “My grandpa on my mom’s side also ran a farm west of Seward as a tenant. He fed cattle, hogs, and farmed for a guy who lived in Iowa. My mom fed the harvest crews, and dad helped quite a bit. You know how it goes for a lot of kids growing up in the 1980s, our grandparents back then were our daycare, before school, after school, and during the summer. So, I had a lot of experiences early on in the farming industry.”
Surrounded by people willing to do what they had to do, he watched his mom work nights for years at a restaurant in Seward and his dad was a television repairman, eventually buying the business he worked at for several years. When television repairmen became more obsolete, Hafer said his dad worked as a maintenance man at the Seward Hospital until he retired.
The values of doing what you had to do were woven deeply into Hafer. He knew, in order for him to make it in life, he was going to have to earn it.
“I started helping my neighbors more and more. I remember one summer I had a neighbor pay me $50 for an entire summer to help them. Those were the times and that is what people had to pay me,” I was really rolling in it back then, he laughed. “But I truly appreciated the experience. I did everything that summer, from putting up silage, to working with the cattle. They were super good people. They never had kids of their own so our family and others in the community were their kids.”
Larry developed a true love for agriculture and his rural neighbors. He was excited to be involved with 4-H and FFA and to be around the other kids who were showing cattle with him. From the time he could barely drive, he was willing to help with everyone’s chores, “I wanted to be responsible, and I wanted to help.”
Sometimes that meant helping when people were going to be away from their livestock for an extended period of time. Those opportunities meant even more responsibilities and more management skills were being developed, “I called on a lot of the veterinarians and worked with them. Then the vet clinic in Seward offered me a job when I was 12 or 13 years old. They paid me in cash until I was like 16, and I helped them until I was a freshman in college. I did a lot of small animal work, helped with surgeries, ran the phones, made appointments, and manned the office on Saturday mornings. I honestly always thought I was going to be a veterinarian.”
The course of life would take another path though, to building his own cattle herd, “I started being around the show cattle world when I was 14 with some friends who were showing and I was helping them. I would travel with them and showed the livestock no one else wanted to show. My family couldn’t afford to buy animals or keep animals yet because we didn’t have a place for them where we lived.”
Hafer may not have been able to afford the best animal to show when he started, but he had something far more valuable. He was developing an eye for the best cattle across the nation and that talent led to the rest of the story, “I got to travel the country and meet thousands of people, movie stars and musicians with cattle, and most importantly salt-of-the-earth awesome people. I was very fortunate to be around good people who were incredible and had integrity and were doing things the right way. But as a young person, you would see the other side of things too, people who weren’t honest. It was a good gauge for your moral compass if your eyes and ears were open to understanding that.”
A keen eye for the best cattle, led to Hafer breeding even better cattle to show and also an opportunity to be a livestock judge, “In 1982 or 1983, the Hereford Association had their junior field day, and they used to hold those on people’s farms and ranches. The first field day I went to, I signed up for the judging contest. People didn’t think I knew anything yet at that time and I wasn’t a member of the association. I ended up winning the contest over everybody and the prize was a heifer. They didn’t let me have it because I wasn’t a member. That was a pretty devastating part of it. The great part of it was one of the families I helped, went to Oklahoma at a National Junior Gelbvieh show, won the contest, and did win a heifer.”
A real shot in the arm, he noted, was when another man he helped with livestock helped him secure a loan from the bank when he was 16 to purchase his own heifer, “That’s when I started to have a few more cattle here and there. I was always keeping cattle at other people’s places and helping them too because I didn’t have my own land yet to put them on.”
Also during this time, Hafer met Del Ficke when he was with his 4-H Club at the Seward County Fair, “That’s when I started helping Del and his dad Kenny. That’s how it started. They just let me do my own thing. Del’s dad was super particular, holy moly, I mean if you wanted to learn the life lessons about just doing it right the first time, you learned from Kenny. Del gets a lot of those attributes from his dad. I also spent a lot of time with his Grandpa Adolph. Adolph was always imparting his wisdom and stories. Then there was Del’s mom Beverly who made sure we ate ten times a day. The conversations around the kitchen table were so super interesting. I am very grateful for them.”
At Ficke Cattle Company, Hafer’s responsibilities included checking several pastures, where their nearly 100-head cow/calf operation was grazing, “I helped them calve cows on the weekends and worked cattle. And, I got involved with them from a breeding standpoint.”
“It all goes back to the theme, you have to surround yourself with good people. The folks that got me started showing cattle, in large part Del’s family, were honestly just like my family,” Hafer said with gratitude. “I pretty much lived with the Ficke’s. I think I was at every family event they ever had. That drives a guy to do better.”
With a wealth of experiences with neighbors, friends, and the Ficke family and his own hard work ethic as a foundation, Hafer excelled greatly in the livestock judging world and continued at the collegiate level building his own herd, “When I got to college at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln and was earning my degree in Agricultural Sciences, that was like 1991 and 1992 and through that, our college livestock judging team went to the National Western Stock Show College Livestock Judging Class in Denver. There are 12 classes, and I had 596 points out of 600 in placing.
Hafer aced all 12 classes, and no one had done that since the 1940s, “I ended up being third or fourth overall out of 200 kids. At the American Royal in Kansas City. In 1992, I earned the high individual spot and won the entire contest out of everybody. Another one of our team members placed fourth at that contest and another one in the top 10. Our team in Louisville ended up in the top 10.”
Today, Hafer’s cattle herd is as solid as his mindset was when he started building it, “I enjoy staying in the network of farmers and ranchers I enjoy being around, while helping to pay the bills and raise my kids. Our herd has never been super large, but it has always been focused on quality. I learned a lot about functional cattle and cattle doing things on their own from Del and his dad and how they did things. They were always trying to improve and everyone I was trying to help was trying to improve their animals too.”Hafer said his family operation today, with the support and help of his wife Julie and their kids, is really based on many decades of pursuing that perfect animal that has the makeup and ability to thrive anywhere they send them, “Our base of Red Angus genetics are the cornerstone of our program. We market bulls and females across the US, as well as offer a diverse selection of semen and embryos to our customers.”
“The focus has always been on the cow and those real-world cow traits that come from those proven cow families. Fertility, udder quality, soundness, phenotype, and built-in longevity are the basis of everything we do,” he explained. “As we continue to advance that superior animal, we have been focusing on more crossbreeding systems to not only enhance our product but to have our customers benefit from the heterosis that comes with these systems.”
“As we look to the next chapter, we are excited to add foundation Graze Master Genetics as well. These efficient, prolific genetics will help our customers compete in this ever-changing landscape that will help improve the soil and the profitability of those who wish to join in the journey,” Hafer said.
The story is certainly coming full circle in terms of the friendship and synergy between Ficke and Hafer’s dreams too, “At 50 years old, it may seem crazy to move Hafer Cattle Company to the Sandhills, but that’s what we’re doing. It’s where we should have been 30 years ago, but I couldn’t at the time. It may seem like a pretty bold move to do that at this stage of the game, but in the middle of where the real cow action is in the world, is where we want to be.”
Where both Hafer and Ficke want to be is where they have always strived to be, doing better, for their own herd, for their families, and for the industry. Now it’s time to really ramp up the helping of neighbors through a business: the Graze Master Genetics® Program. It’s about what they can keep giving others through their knowledge and expertise. But most of all, both of them say it’s this:
“The Graze Master Genetics Program is an opportunity for livestock producers to benefit from improving their genetics with a solutions approach, based on years of development that not only improves the animals that roam your farm or ranch, but also improves the soil beneath them while putting more profitability in those operations,” Hafer said.
“This program is mostly about people,” Ficke said. “It’s about their potential first, and then how that potential can exponentially grow on their farms and ranches. The right cattle genetics is one piece of a much bigger story. The rest of the story, and most important, is about maximizing our journeys while we have time left on earth. Larry and my roads and all our group’s life stories led to this moment. Now we want to take the power of the Graze Master Group ag solutions network, and combine it with the power of the Graze Master Certification Program, and see that power unfold in dreams on the farm and ranch that begin to take shape in their vision for their future.”
Learn more about the Graze Master Genetics® Certification Program by calling or texting:
Del Ficke - (402) 499-0329
Larry Hafer - (402) 937-2585
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