Editor’s note: Today marks the second installment of our two-day series on the Black Leg Ranch, one of the oldest working cattle ranches still operating today.

MCKENZIE, N.D. — It is a perfectly still fall day, with a sky so blue that not a single cloud dare smudge it.

Beneath that swath of blue sprawls a five-generation ranch that covers 20,000 acres, but which carries an even bigger legacy.

The Black Leg Ranch, located 15 miles southwest of Sterling, North Dakota, is one of the oldest working cattle ranches still in operation today.

It started as a small parcel of land homesteaded by George H. Doan in the 1880s, before North Dakota was a state. Over the years, it grew and grew — thanks to George’s son, Jewell Sr., a roll-up-your-sleeves risk-taker.

Jewell named the ranch as a winking tribute to the Angus he introduced to the area in 1930. The then-exotic breed were reviled by Jewell’s Hereford-owning neighbors, who claimed the cows were so wild that they called them “black-legged SOBs,” according to Jewell’s grandson, Jerry.

Jewell Senior’s son, Jewell “Babe” Jr., continued the cattleman tradition and passed on the spread to Jerry, a likable, no-nonsense guy with a flair for storytelling and his grandpa’s knack for thinking big.

“I don’t much like sharing numbers,” Jerry says, when asked about the size of his herds (3,000 cattle, 400 bison) or the total acreage of his ranch. “Too braggy.”

And Black Leg Ranch has become more than a cattle operation. About 400 bison also graze the ranch’s pastures, but that’s just one part of the ranch’s growing diversity.

Jerry has

worked to become a careful steward of the land.

During the 1980s, as he watched farmers fall to drought and the farm crisis, he vowed to make his pastures more resilient to weather extremes.

Now the family is committed to regenerative agriculture, meaning they look at what benefits the “whole” when managing their native grasslands, cropland, livestock and wildlife.

“If we lose these grasslands, the wildlife is gone,” Jerry says.

Today, Black Leg has won multiple environmental awards for using new soil conservation techniques and grazing systems, building soil health, and protecting the diverse wildlife communities that live there.

Now the fifth generation of Doans are shaping the ranch’s future. Jerry and wife Renae’s three sons all work at Black Leg, where each one channels his talents into businesses which complement the ranch.

That includes a

hunting outfitter business, a direct-to-consumer meats business, an events center and a microbrewery

.

It’s not always easy, when family dynamics get in the way.

“If you can get everybody working together, you can go so far. But I said, if we nitpick each other over little stuff like families do, we will self-destruct,” says Jerry, adding that professionals helped them work out the succession from father to sons. “So we’re working through that. I’m determined to not be a failure.”

When asked what it’s like to run a business with family, oldest son Jeremy puts it more bluntly.

“It has its ups and downs,” he quips. “the good thing is that you can trust them. The bad thing is you can’t fire ‘em.”

Then he and Jerry chuckle.

As the oldest son, it was long assumed that Jeremy would be the next in line. Like his dad, he graduated from NDSU in animal science.

“Jeremy is a real builder. All of these lodges — Jeremy built all this stuff,” says Jerry, seated at a table in the Grand Lodge, the main meeting center for guests at the ranch. “He has a real knack for building and a real business sense. He’s not a book smart kind of guy. He’s a hands-on, builder-type of guy.”

Jeremy also was the first son to introduce agritourism to the ranch. Over 20 years ago, while still at NDSU, Jeremy asked Jerry if he thought they could make money charging people to hunt on their land. After all, they’d already let hunters do so for free for years.

Jerry agreed to try it. “Dad put an ad in the Star Tribune back then and that was the first guest. And ever since then it’s been growing at an unbelievable pace,” Jeremy says.

Today, their all-inclusive hunting operation is known as

Rolling Plains Adventures

. They’ll pick up guests at the airport in Bismarck 25 miles away and provide everything — from full meals, cold beer and licensed hunting guides to equipment, dog kennels and bird-cleaning — to guests.

Guests can hunt waterfowl, pheasant, deer and coyote there, Jerry says.

They also offer buffalo hunting. A small number of cows, bulls and yearlings are culled from the Doans’ own herd for a “fair chase hunt” over 6,000 acres of rugged terrain, with hunters paying up to $7,500 to bag a trophy bull.

“We sell an experience,” Jeremy says. “The kill is a bonus.”

When the Doan sons were returning to the fold, they had many big ideas for fixing up the farmyard.

“They said, ‘We need a liquor license. We need a commercial kitchen. Let’s tear the old house down and get it out of the way,’” Jerry recalls.

He drew the line at that last suggestion. The old farmhouse was a 1917 Sears and Roebuck model home, built by his grandfather, Jewell Sr. “My dad was born on the kitchen table of this house. He died 80 years later, 10 feet away on the couch,” Jerry recalls. “My grandpa died in this house. It has all these stories of hired men living in the attic and people who come here, love to hear that. And if you take it down, that’s gone.”

With Jeremy as contractor, the family home was transformed into the ranch’s “Grand Lodge,” although its original floorplan is unrecognizable.

The 5,500-square-foot structure offers all the amenities a group wants, whether they’re stalking deer or scrapbooking: comfy furnishing in a rustic, log-home atmosphere, a commercial kitchen with on-site chef preparing three squares a day, big screen HD TVs, wrap-around deck, fire pit and room to sleep 14, including two private suites — one with whirlpool.

The Doans’ middle son, Jay, is the one Jerry thought would never return to the farm. “Jay is this PR, big-picture, vision guy,” Jerry says.

After graduating from Arizona State in business, he worked in financial markets and then joined Anheuser Busch. His career was going well, but he grew disillusioned with big business.

He called his parents. “He said, ‘I’m tired of the corporate world, I’m tired of this traffic and tired of the people,” Jerry recalls. “I miss North Dakota, I miss the ranch and I want to come home.”

Jay would introduce two other agritourism businesses to Black Leg. After Jay married his wife, Kari, on the ranch, he saw the ranch’s potential as a wedding venue.

The middle son had the perfect “event center” in mind: the barn. “I wouldn’t give it to him,” Jerry admits, grinning. “Again, I couldn’t get out of the way.”

Eventually, he came around. Jerry had argued the barn was needed to store feed, but with Black Leg’s switch toward grass-feeding, ample storage was no longer needed. And so the barn became a wedding/event venue.

“I would say agritourism is kind of a moving target,” Jerry says. “I never thought we’d have weddings here. It was kind of an accident. But it’s been sort of fun to watch.”

Again, the original building was expanded and now covers 13,000 square feet. And again, it includes historically rich details like beams salvaged from old ranch wood and SooLine railroad lumber, light fixtures made from wagon wheels and fruit jars, and barbed-wire chandeliers, which Jay made.

The Doans held a contest to pick a name for the barn and a neighbor came up with a winner: the Copper Jewell, which manages to incorporate the names of Jerry’s grandfather and father while also giving a nod to the building’s copper roof.

“It brought me a tear almost,” Jerry says of the ingenious name.

The completed center features room for up to 450 guests.

Jay’s background in the beer industry also fueled his interest in setting up a microbrewery on the farm.

Since 2018, a fully automated brew house has operated in the back of the barn, where craft beer is made with a 15-barrel, 30-keg system.

Black Leg Brewery has partnered with NDSU to make Bison Beer, “so we’re the craft beer of the NDSU Bison,” says Jerry, a proud NDSU alum. “It’s really cool, so we’re excited about that.”

The Doans’ youngest son, Jayce, “was born 100 years too late,” his dad says. “He’s a real compassionate thinker, much calmer than the rest of us. He has a real love for the tradition and the legacy and the ranch. He loves the cattle, he loves the buffalo.”

Jayce got a rodeo scholarship to attend Montana State, where he minored in Native American studies.

“I think I’m just extremely proud of how long my family’s been here and I want to learn everything about why they came here and endured all the hardships to stay,” Jayce says.

Jayce helps with the livestock, heeding his dad’s management techniques like planned rotational grazing to benefit the land and planting cover crops which can be grazed into fall and winter to reduce hay costs.

In fact, the cattle operation has been adapted to fit a more holistic and sustainable model overall.

“We calve later, like May and June, and part of that is holistic,” Jerry says. “We’re trying to get it so we can calve out in the hills. I spent half my life calving in the barn, which is fun when you’re young, but you work your butt off. So we changed all that.”

They’ve also adapted to breeding smaller cows, which better fit their grass-fed meat model. “We want 1,100-pound cows, not these huge cows that need a lot of inputs,” Jerry says. “And it has worked really well for us.”

Jayce’s wife, Kassy, oversees

Black Leg’s direct-to-consumer meat business.

They ship all over the country.

“There’s a growing number of consumers that are conscientious about where their food comes from and how that food was grown and raised,” Jayce says. “There is a larger segment than ever that wants grass fed and grass finished, so we’ve tapped into that market.”

People will sometimes approach Jerry and ask him how they can entice their own kids to join the family business. 

“Sometimes I’ll talk to them for five minutes and I’ll know why they didn’t come back to that place. There’s nothing positive,” he says. “If you don’t let them spread their wings and make some mistakes, they’re not going to stay there.”

Parents might also do a bit of internal marketing to get their children excited about a family business: “You’ve got to create some excitement and get out of the way.”

 Jerry says Black Leg Ranch operates on two holistic principles — bringing back profitability while also having fun running this operation together.

“Half my life I worked my butt off and didn’t really know why I was doing this. Now I’m trying to appreciate God’s beauty, the beauty of the grasslands, the beauty of the country, all those things we take for granted and forget about,”