Guest ranch offers variety

Doug Lindamood of SonRise Ranch in Grass Creek has several focuses for his business and operations.

Lindamood was recently awarded a county liquor license.

For Hot Springs County residents and tourists traveling through the area, Lindamood said his guest ranch is a place that attracts agritourists. According to the USDA, agritourism is growing at 600% annually. So, what is agritourism? 

Lindamood describes dude ranches as “cowboy hats and horse rides.”

But for Lindamood, agritourism is much more. He said visitors to his ranch can experience things that many urbanites do not get to do. Such as moving cattle, fixing a fence, learning how chickens lay eggs and collect the eggs, watching a baby calf being born, and a variety of other real-ranching-world experiences. Lindamood said he provides tourists with hands-on encounters. 

When it comes to those from outside the area who visit the ranch and experience agritourism, Lindamood said, “that’s a whole other kind of world. And those folks are the ones that come out and really want to focus on agriculture and tourism, and they’re broken into a couple of different categories, A, they are either just curious about it, or B, they’re serious about it.”

For example, Lindamood told a story about a visitor. He said, “A bank president came out. He and his wife, they’re getting ready to retire. They’ve always wanted to live on a farm, but they don’t know the first thing about farming, right? They’ve never been exposed to that. They’ve never been on a ranch. They’ve never been around live animals. They just really think it’s interesting and they want to do it. So they’ll come out and we’ll put them through, say, a five-day course of, hey, here are the basics, right? Here’s how a chicken lays an egg. Here’s how a cow grazes grass. Here are those who are not curious, but serious. And they’re really going to go get five acres and put a couple of cows and chickens on it and maybe a pig or two and start off that way.”

Next, Lindamood described the other kind of agritourists he serves and said, “Then there’s the curious, which are more like somebody who’s maybe writing a paper. I think of him as a college student. They were told by their professor to go look up, write a one-page paper or 15-page paper or something on regenerative agriculture. The student says, ‘I don’t even know what that is. I don’t even know how to spell regenerative.’ So they find out and they’ll come out and they’ll say, ‘OK, show me what this is all about.’ And we take them through our whole ranching method. And it’s a holistic management style of managing grasses, cattle, and land and holistic, bi-holistic. What we mean is looking at a whole, which is kind of like a circle in the sky, kind of an arc, and it takes into account all aspects of your soil microbiology all the way to your cow.”

Lindamood added, “Our output is cows here, but we don’t focus on the cattle, we focus on land, we focus on minerals, soil, biology because if we grow crops properly, we get the cows thrown in for free. If we look only at the cows, then we could actually short our ecosystems in an effort to produce a cow. It’s the opposite way of thinking.”

The other area of business, Lindamood and his operation work is in providing freshly butchered meat from their ranch’s cattle and sending it mostly to customers in Southern California. Lindamood described his customers and said, “the typical meat customer of ours is an urbanite, college-educated, usually a female who’s seeking to source directly food from a ranch.”

The customer can order the meat and use the typical butcher’s pattern of how the meat is divided up, or they can customize the cuts.

For more information about the ranch visit: https://www.son-riseranch.com.