John R. Davis
Nature's Blessing
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| Grazing right: After venture in “chips” and “oil,” it's cow units and computers on the HalfFast Ranch. Photo by Susan Young |
In many ways, John Davis is a typical businessman. He works long hours, keeps excellent records, and focuses on using resources wisely. He often brings work home, and his trade is ruled by the laws of supply and demand. But Davis, fit and tanned, wears a cowboy hat and jeans instead of pinstripes. He calls the hood of a rusty Chevy truck his “conference area” and the passenger seat his “desk.” His part-time help is his fiancée, whom he first recruited to his 1,400-acre Achille, Oklahoma, ranch with the promise of fresh blackberries. Davis has no office phone, his cell phone connection is unreliable, and if you call his home number, you're likely to get the machine because, as his message says, he's “out ranching right now.”
Davis works seven days a week, sometimes starting out at home in Denison, Texas, with several hours on the computer. Then, from around 8:00 a.m. until “dark-thirty,” you'll find him on his ranch twenty miles north, just across the Red River. While he has playfully named the spread he bought at auction in 1991 the HalfFast Ranch, his routine is anything but “half fast.” A day's work might include herding cattle; plowing a pasture, baling hay, or planting seed; and accounting for all 800 “cow units” (a standard measurement that in this case means about 1,175 actual cattle). Calving season calls for constant monitoring of the pregnant cows and helping them give birth — including stitching them up if necessary — and is followed by castrating the males and tagging and immunizing all calves.
In the decade that he has run the ranch, Davis has increased production fourfold. He uses a method of “rotational cell grazing” that takes advantage of cattle's natural ability to harvest the land by using their weight and hooves to till the soil and having them eat every strand of grass. “I like to work with nature instead of against it,” he observes, confessing to a philosophy that is part business economics, part animal-loving naturalist. He documents his business better than most ranchers, but he admits that running the place takes priority over keeping records. “If a cow is calving, you are going to stay with her rather than go put numbers in the computer,” he notes.
A native of Blue Ridge, Texas, Davis took a job at a major accounting firm after graduating from East Texas State University (now Texas A&M–Commerce) and applied to HBS because he “wanted to play in the big leagues.” Two years after earning his MBA, he returned to Texas and joined Frito-Lay, where he learned enough about the oil business — vegetable oil, that is — to partner with some friends and buy an oil manufacturing operation. When the group was bought out, Davis thought it would be a good time to purchase some land.
“I figured I'd better do it while I was still physically able,” he says, hopping out of his truck to unlatch one of the gates connecting the 125 miles of electric fences that divide his land into 72 parcels. “I really had no idea what I was getting into,” he adds, springing back into the driver's seat. Someday, he acknowledges, he will not be able to manage the work on his own. For now, he says as he takes in the expansive view of rolling hills and the peaceful soundtrack of mooing cattle, “I feel blessed.”
— Susan Young (send e-mail to the author)
PROFILES FROM THE CLASS OF 1977
John R. Davis: Nature's Blessing
Michael F. Cronin: A Focus on the Fundamentals
Ann M. Fudge: Enhanced Perspective
Steven C. Watson: Course Change
Karen Gordon Mills: Her Excellent Adventures
Amy S. Langer: Fighting the Good Fight
