The Spade Ranch legacy began more than 120 years ago, in 1889, when DeKalb, Illinois, natives Colonel Isaac Ellwood and his son, W.L. Ellwood, made a simple business trip to West Texas. In 1874, Ellwood became one of the original patent holders of barbed wire when he and his neighbor developed an economical way to keep livestock out of the area’s many farms. The invention quickly changed the Midwest farmland, but the Ellwoods saw a flourishing market in the vast expanses of the West Texas plains. Among the ranchers the Ellwoods met in West Texas were the Snyder brothers. The brothers must have been shrewd businessmen themselves because not only did they resist Ellwood’s sales pitch, they convinced him to buy their 130,000-acre ranch. By the 1960s, the Spade Ranches began a planned crossbreeding program in the cow-calf operation that continues today-although adjusting with changing market demand. Today, the ranches use composite bulls (Simm/Angus and Balancer) crossing the heifers from one mating to the other composite. This maintains a high level of heterosis while producing a uniform calf crop, a stable breed composition and eliminating the need to buy replacement heifers from other sources. Today’s horse breeding program crosses the daughters of their own son of Dual Rey with their son of High Brow Cat and vice versa. The objective is to use unrelated bloodlines to produce functional ranch horses with lots of cow sense and bottom. The Spade ranches today consist of seven outfits: the original Renderbrook Spade in Mitchell, Sterling and Coke Counties; Borden Spade in Borden County; North Spade in Motley and Hall Counties; Panhandle Spade in Roberts and Hemphill Counties; Alpine Spade in Brewster and Presidio Counties; Slaughter Spade in Garza County and Mendota Spade in Hemphill County, totaling about 300,000 acres. Wesley Welch is the President and C.E.O. of Spade Ranches and the board of directors include five great-great grandchildren of Isaac Ellwood along with outside directors. WESLEY WELCH 4412 74TH STREET, SUITE A101, LUBBOCK, TX 79424 | 806-687-6005 | SPADERANCHES.COM SPADE RANCHES LOTS 111-115 12
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