90 years of Jack Varian, in a nutshell
Today (September 6th) we’re celebrating Jack’s 90th birthday, so here’s a summary of those 90 years in Jack’s own words.
Jack in his Cal Poly Days
My decision on how I wanted to live out my life was decided when I was 15 years old. A friend of mine asked if I wanted to spend the summer working on his mother’s cattle ranch east of the town of Milpitas in what is now called Silicon Valley in the summer of 1950. It took but a week on the ranch and I knew how I wanted to spend my life. I worked on the JG ranch for 9 summers. I spent my public school years going through the Palo Alto school system and upon my graduation I decided to attend Poly College in San Luis Obispo and major in Animal Husbandry to further my knowledge of cattle ranching. As each year passed my commitment to a rancher's way of life, I became evermore passionate about cattle ranching as my chosen profession.
I married the love of my life Zera Smith in 1958 who was among the first 100 girls to attend Cal Poly when this all boys school transitioned to co- educational. Zee had the same passion as I about ranch life. My parents helped me buy our first ranch west of Lake Nacimiento that was 2800 acres in size for $70,000. It was mostly all brush with a poor red soil supporting it. Three years of sweat and a very steep learning curve I sold this brush pile to a fellow who wanted to hunt Black Tail Deer for $150,000. Zee and I decided to take a look around the western part of our U.S. What we found was long cold and snowy months of feeding cows and the only snow either of us had ever seen was on the face of a Christmas greeting card. Back in California and being only home a week a friend of mine said his brother, a realtor, had a 8,000 acre listing on a ranch near the town of Parkfield. It took but two hours of bouncing around in the owner's Jeep with our two year old daughter Katy and Lilly eight months along in Zee to agree to pay $50 per acre or $400,000. I had $150,000 and an insurance company had $250,000. We closed escrow in November of 1961. Two boys would follow and in 1965 we registered the V6 brand for six Varian’s
Jack and his dearly missed friend, George Work
I ran the V6 in a pretty traditional way and with a lot of sweat and buying most of my needs at San Joaquin Valley auctions mostly for 10 cents on the dollar and my imagination of how I would continue to improve the ranch we made a reasonable living. The 1980s arrived and by 1991 times were tough and for me traditional ways weren’t working. I received a phone call from a friend of mine, George Work, who asked if I would like to go to a seminar in Paso Robles and listen to a fellow from Zimbabwe talk about better ways to graze my cattle and better ways to make good decisions. After three days I was sold on Holistic Resource Management as a better way to operate the V6. I was free to think for myself now and I had a method to test my new decisions to see if they were going to work.
Some of my more memorable decisions I’ve made have happened after watching the movie City Slickers in 1994. Upon leaving the theater I said to Zee “we can do that, we have a lot of horses that you have raised and trained and we’ve got a beautiful ranch to drive cattle over” we’ve been having cattle drives for 31 years add in a hunting club and I quit “dry farming” in 2001. I sold all those balers, Harrow Beds and most all of the cultivating equipment for it was a crop that was to hard on my soil but I did plant an orchard of Pistachios that the jury is still out if that is going to be a wise decision.
In closing I think most importantly a person needs to be passionate about your chosen profession, you need to like yourself and your fellow humans and Mother Nature’s ways. Be willing to live with risk taking, read the Stockman's Grass Farmer, and live by “my word is my bond.”
See ya,
Jack