“Humility Is Always Key”: Business and Stewardship on an Oregon Ranch

A Free and Virtuous People Story

Editor’s Note: This article is the second (see the first) in an occasional series that will tell the stories of “ordinary” people who have flourished and contributed to their communities through the practice of everyday virtues such as courage, perseverance, compassion, thoughtfulness, and generosity. In the face of diverse and sometimes challenging environments or circumstances, they have demonstrated true freedom—the capacity to choose the good and strive toward the end for which they were created. They may never be featured on magazine covers or collect millions of social media followers, but they are at least as deserving of emulation as the entertainers, athletes, politicians, and other “influencers” who dominate the headlines. They are the backbone of a free and virtuous society.

“We are cattle ranchers.” That’s the way Liz Cunningham summarizes her family’s identity, and why not? Her husband, Sean, represents the fourth generation of his family to raise beef on their spread in sparsely populated eastern Oregon. Their family life “revolves around our ranch lifestyle. Riding horses, checking cows, irrigating, and spending time at our mountain cabin are some of the things we do together as a family.” The couple’s six children (the seventh is on the way) are homeschooled and trained in the practical necessities of life—besides the ranch there is a “well-supplied woodworking shop for the kids to use.” Sean’s parents live nearby and help as needed. “Most of our life is centered around the home and family,” Liz says.

It may seem like an idyllic—and old-fashioned—way of life, and in a way it is. But every way of life has its challenges. And raising a family and running a successful ranch in the twenty-first century require more than old-fashioned skills. Liz and Sean engage the modern economy with a combination of timeless virtues and entrepreneurial flexibility. By striving to be good stewards of the land, time, and talents God has given them, they are supplying their community with quality food, quality jobs, and an exemplary model of family life.

“It Was Just Meat”

Liz is in an unlikely rancher. She grew up in suburban St. Louis, where she ate like everyone else: “Food came from the grocery store, and to me it was all the same.” She met Sean at college in Ohio, and after marrying they settled back on his family’s ranch in Oregon. When she had meat “directly from the source” for the first time, “the difference was amazing! I had never thought twice about the flavor of meat; it was just meat.” The ranch-raised beef was different. “I had never known that it could be so flavorful and good for you.” One trait of being a good salesman is believing in your product, and Liz checks that box.

In the first years of the marriage, while Sean worked to make the ranch go, Liz struggled to find her place. She had assumed that she “would be content being a housewife and helping my husband on the ranch,” but “not too long after having our first baby I realized that helping my husband on a daily basis was not possible with a young child in tow.”  Sean’s work sometimes meant “being gone from sunup to sundown and not seeing him all day.” The nearest grocery store and gas station were thirty miles away, and getting together with friends required an even longer drive. Liz found herself “at home lonely and longing for something to do. I had underestimated the loneliness that can come from living rurally and not having a close community to draw upon.”

At college Liz studied business and marketing, and she soon found a way to put her education to good use—and at the same time escape the ennui produced by rural isolation. Grass-fed beef was just beginning to make an impact on the market, and the Cunninghams were selling some of their cattle to a local retailer. An obvious question presented itself: “Why don’t we sell directly to people?” Liz was already writing a blog about ranch life, so she began by offering their product to her readers and the families in her homeschool group. “That was the humble beginning of our meat business.” Slowly but steadily, their customer base grew. They added pigs and sheep. After four years, they began offering individual cuts in addition to bulk orders. “That is what really launched” the business, Liz says, transforming it from a hobby into a “viable business that could stand on its own.”

As the family grew, the business grew with it. Liz juggled managing children with managing business operations. She rented space in a cold storage in downtown Boise, Idaho, and hired the company’s first employee. During the pandemic in 2020, “our meat home delivery business exploded and we grew exponentially.” Liz spent most of her time “answering phone calls and emails.” After 2020, the business plateaued, and it continues to hum at a steady pace.

But Liz is always looking for opportunities, and another one presented itself two years ago. Liz had approached the owner of a small grocery store in a nearby town about carrying their products. He wasn’t interested. She offered to buy the store. Still not interested. Later she learned that the owner was confronting health problems and the store was on the verge of closing. “I couldn’t bear to see this iconic family-owned grocery store that had been in business for twenty-five years go out of business,” she explains. So she tried one more time. This time he said yes. In August, Liz gave birth to number six, and the Cunninghams’ two-employee meat marketing business expanded by adding a fifteen-employee retail storefront.

“A Servant Leader”

Unsurprisingly, Liz identifies the couple’s biggest challenge as “balancing family life and the businesses.” The work “can become all-consuming.” Liz “really enjoys doing business,” so she doesn’t mind continuing her work into the evenings. As the businesses’ growth has stabilized, she says, “we have gotten better about managing our roles and the amount of time we spend” on them.

Another challenge is managing employees. “People are the blessing and the hardship of business,” Liz says. She places a priority on building a good team and creating a positive environment in which they can flourish. “Providing a stable, quality job for people to support their families” is the “greatest reward” of her business work. Parents of younger employees can be sure that their teenagers won’t be influenced negatively by “inappropriate” older employees, she asserts, because “we don’t have those types of people on our team!”

The culture of the Cunninghams’ businesses flows from the culture of their family. While both were raised Catholic, Sean’s family was more intentional about integrating the faith into their daily lives. “Morning bible reading and daily rosary were a part of their everyday life,” Liz says. As they began their own family, the couple chose “to raise our kids more along the same lines that Sean grew up. Our Catholic faith is the center of most of our activities and friendships.”

Family values and a Christian understanding of the virtuous life are at the center of business operations, too. Liz believes that “all the virtues are necessary in business,” but she stresses that “humility is always key when working with people.” She and Sean both “try our best to be a servant leader, which means humbling ourselves and not believing we are more important or above doing certain tasks.” They see their main job as serving their customers and their team members. Liz describes how this works in practice: “If something goes wrong, I always ask myself, ‘How have I failed as a leader, which then in turn has caused my team to fail in a certain capacity?’ When you pose this question to yourself every time there is a major problem, it causes you to not immediately blame another person but get to the real root of the cause of the issue.”

Liz points to the inclusion of many teenagers on their team as providing an opportunity to help inexperienced workers grow. There are frequent “problems with them not knowing how to handle certain situations with customers.” Instead of falling into facile complaining about “kids these days,” the leaders look to themselves first. “Most of the time when we dig into the issue, we find that they were not appropriately trained because we were in a rush or didn’t cover all important aspects with them.” Humility dictates the first step in the resolution: “We typically start by apologizing to them for not giving them the tools they needed and then go forward by training them properly.” Liz finds that “most teenagers are super eager to please, they just need the proper training and guidance.”

When asked about strengths and weaknesses, Liz observes that she and Sean have complementary talents and interests. Sean “has a beautiful gift for animal husbandry and stewardship of the land. He takes pride in managing the land that he has been given to steward, and he can raise some delicious beef!” Working the same land as his predecessors has instilled in him a sense of responsibility for what he’s inherited; and working with his own children underlines the need to care for this trust so that it can be conveyed to the next generation.

Passing on his hard-won knowledge is Sean’s challenge. He “can struggle to communicate his needs to our ranch employees, which makes it difficult to take things off his plate.” Communication, meanwhile, is one of Liz’s specialties. As the visionary and entrepreneur, she has “big ideas and big plans” and knows “how to assemble a team to make it happen.” But her enthusiasm has to be tempered by Sean’s practicality. “I have a tendency to underestimate how much time and resources it’ll take” to realize those visions, she admits, and that can put “extra stress” on her family and employees.

“A Steward of the Things God Has Given”

The purpose of working so hard to create and maintain successful businesses is “to build wealth for our family,” Liz frankly admits, but the motivation is bigger than that. “We don’t simply want wealth just for our family,” she explains, “but to be able to serve others with the wealth we have.”

In many parts of the United States, rural areas are struggling to remain vital and attractive places—for younger people in particular. Some lament the loss of the farming culture and its historically central place in the national identity. Liz sees her community as resistant to these trends. There, “ranching is very much deeply engrained in the culture and family structure,” families are larger than average, and most families are able to hand their legacy on to the next generation. She characterizes the last twenty years as relatively prosperous ones for the ranching industry, which has made it a viable profession for heads of families. She is conscious of the way contemporary ranchers have benefited from the sacrifices of the pioneers. “The ‘dirt poor’ beginnings of our ancestors have finally paid off,” she notes, “and most ranchers in this area live comfortably, making it an appealing place for children to want to return to.” This makes her “very optimistic about the future of . . . this part of the West.”

In some places and among some groups, the overarching and longstanding trend of increasing urbanization has reversed, as remote workers move out of cities and families take up “homesteading” on rural acreage. Liz sees the “back-to-the-land” impulse as “a positive one,” but is also realistic about the challenges facing enthusiasts who are new to the world of livestock and crops. “The main issue is the lost knowledge,” she observes. “There are so many things that people do not naturally know anymore because they have been removed from agriculture for generations.” Things that are intuitive to Sean may be “completely unknown” to a novice, and this ignorance carries risks. “Starting a farm from scratch and learning about animals is an extremely steep learning curve that can be incredibly costly.”

But Liz and Sean want to support those who are interested in recovering their agricultural roots. Liz muses about a “dream” to “teach young people who have a desire to be in agriculture and did not grow up on a farm or ranch.” Specifically, she envisions “an apprenticeship program that’ll allow us to train groups of young adults in the basics of ranching and livestock management.” She hopes these kinds of programs can provide the personnel needed to replace retiring farmers.

Closer to home, Liz and Sean hope that their children will be interested in continuing their businesses, but “we are more focused on them doing the will of God and not ours. If it is God’s will for them to follow in what we have begun, then that’s wonderful, but if he calls them to serve him in another capacity, then that is what we want for them.” The central concern is not the businesses per se, but what the labor they require instills. “We wish to form them to know how to work hard, how to be a servant leader and a steward of the things God has given them.”