Glenda Humiston is vice president of the University of California Ag and Natural 
Resources, and she told American Cattle News that she grew up on a cow-calf operation in Mangus, Colorado
“It’s been in my family since right after the Civil War. My great-great, grandfather, arrived in Mangus while in the cavalry and was stationed at Fort Lewis in Durango, which is now a community college,” she said. And right after his service was up, which I think was maybe 1868, he went over to Mangus,” Humiston said.
Humiston noted that her family was one of the first to homestead in Mangus. “I grew up on the ranch that was homesteaded. And my dad was actually born in the dining room of the house I grew up in,” she said.
Humiston said that when she was a kid, her family had both a small cow-calf beef operation, mostly Hereford at that time. “Eventually, my grandpa kept the Herefords because he was madly in love with them. My dad started moving towards Beefalo, and he had Beefalo for almost 20 years. He loved them because Beefalo are actually a little easier on the landscape grazing and have no calving problems whatsoever.”
“The Beefalo is three-eights buffalo, five-eighths cattle, and it could be almost any cattle breed. Typically, it was one of the larger, leaner ones because they seem to work better, like a Limousin or a Charolaise, something like that,” noted Humiston.
Humiston invites a memory of what she did on that ranch before she left it to go to school. “We would take animals up into the San Juan National Forest and let them graze up there from the spring through the fall. And it’s time to get them down out of the mountains before snow comes.
“The cattle would overwinter on the homestead ranch, which didn’t have the best soil for farming but had a couple of lovely, little small canyons, Humiston said. “The animals could get down in the winter and get out of the weather a bit, and dad’s still running it, and he enjoys it. He loves farming, as do I, if I were back there,” she noted.
by Patrick Cavanaugh, American Cattle News
