Alfred Helmers Has Ranched
Girvin Country For 55 Years

By Colleen Schreiber

GIRVIN – For a young man just starting out in ranching, paying interest and feeding through a drouth can be an expensive way to learn the business. Alfred Helmers says the lessons he learned under those difficult circumstances have remained with him a long time.

Helmers has survived more than a handful of severe drouths, years at a time of depressed prices, and constant predator problems. He did it on leased land, some of the hardest country in West Texas, and in the process he raised three children and sent them to college.

Girvin, Texas, not likely a place familiar to many, has been Helmers’ home for the last 55 years. Located at the intersection of U.S. Highway 385 and Farm Road 11, near the Pecos River 32 miles northeast of Fort Stockton, Girvin was named for the late John H. Girvin, a local rancher who came to the area in the early 1900s.

Helmers has lived on that original land settlement, "the Girvin country," since coming to Pecos County and he’s leased the ranch from members of the Girvin family for a large part of those 55 years.

Helmers’ family originally farmed in South Texas, but when they heard about raw land going for a cheap price in West Texas, Helmers’ father moved the family to Roscoe. They farmed there for a couple of years, until a dry spell put them on the move again, this time to an irrigated farm on the banks of Spring Creek at Sherwood, west of San Angelo.

That was back in the days when most farming was still done with horses and mules, Helmers says. He himself baled hay with a team of horses. The hay was cut by horse-powered mowers. Every time the horse made a round it made two chips in a bale of hay, he explains, and the wire that held the chips together was tied by hand. It took four men to bale at a cost of seven cents a bale.

"Like most of those kinds of places, you didn’t make a living, you lived on what you made," Helmers remarks. "That’s the way we grew up."

One of five children, Alfred Helmers was born in 1917. He’s proud of his 80 years and attributes long living to good genetics. After all, he says, his great grandmother lived to be 92. "That’s old for them days," Helmers remarks. "It’s said coffee killed her."

In addition to farming, Helmers’ father, like most at that time, also had a little bunch of sheep and a few head of cattle. He was also a county commissioner and the justice of the peace at Sherwood for many years.

By the time Alfred was 13, he did most of the farming for the family. His brother was old enough to day work, and that left the younger Alfred to do the farming. Alfred started day working himself by the time he was 16 or 17. One of his main responsibilities was checking livestock for screwworms.

"The ranch community couldn’t exist today if we hadn’t eradicated the screwworm," he says. "In the summer all the time you could find to put in, you rode for screwworms. Back then we didn’t really break our horses. We would just ride them once or twice and then started roping wormies off of them."

Helmers also helped build many of the roads in the area. All of the roads back then were built using a team of mules attached to a fresno.

"We could build a road as smooth as one today with four mules and a Fresno," Helmers says.

Knowing how to handle the mules, he adds, was a skill all its own. Those who were especially good at working the mules were called finishers. He made 40 cents an hour working 10-hour days.

Helmers went to work for San Angelo rancher Fred Ball around 1941, and in the fall of the following year he came to Girvin as foreman for Ball and Swayne Dudley, who were leasing the Girvin ranch from their father-in-law.

During that time all of West Texas was sheep country. In fact, Girvin was one of the largest shipping points for sheep. "That was before the Southern Pacific," Helmers says. "The Santa Fe Railroad hauled lots of livestock out of Texas during that time."

Helmers says one of the main reasons he went to work for Ball and Dudley was that he got tired of baling hay. In addition, he’d always had a desire to get in the sheep business.

In 1951, he and his older brother began leasing some of the Girvin country from Ball. It wasn’t the best time to go into the ranch business full-time, but Helmers had no way of predicting the devastating drouth that would hang on for seven years.

"We were making out a loan application from the Production Credit of Midland," he recalls. "The banker said, ‘ya’ll ought to be paid out in 12 months.’ Shoot, we lost more money in that 12 months than we did in the whole drouth put together."

During the drouth, Helmers always lambed in the pen. "It’s hard to raise a good lamb crop if you don’t have any grass," he explains. "When the ewes and lambs got to going good we’d turn them out, but we always kept feeding them."

At one point during the drouth, Helmers bought some yearling ewes for $30 a head. He fed them at the Girvin place for a year and then hauled them all over the country looking for feed. One year he pastured them at Richland Springs for $1 a head. That fall he sold lambs for 16 cents. The next two years were just as dry at Richland Springs as in West Texas. He finally sold some of those $30 yearling ewes in 1956 for $12 a pair.

Like so many, Helmers wasn’t able to hold it together, and he sold out in 1956. "I guess you could say the loan company sold them," he says, "but we agreed to it. It was sort of a volunteer liquidation.

"There just wasn’t any end to that drouth," Helmers continues. "In 1956 when we finally sold out, if we could have found a place to go with the sheep, the bank would have still financed it."

After he sold out, Helmers continued to live on the Girvin lease. He worked odd jobs, raised a few dogie lambs and bought some old ewes along the way. He started restocking the place sometime around 1958.

Helmers says the drouth provided him with a great education.

"The two main things I learned had to do with overstocking and paying interest. Those are two things you don’t want to do if you don’t have to," he says. It’s those lessons that he’s tried to pass on to his two sons.

"Since then, if I couldn’t pay for something I just didn’t buy it," Helmers remarks. "Some people can sure borrow money and make money, but it never did work for us."

As for stocking rates, Helmers has this piece of advice:

"You have to run this country like a hard country. If we could get an average rainfall, you can without a doubt run 50 ewes to the section or about five cows, though three would do better.

"These people who come out here because they can get a cheap lease," he continued, "need to be aware of what this country can stand. Usually about one year does them in. Some might make it for two."

Helmers is a sheepman partly because of his love for the business, but mostly out of necessity.

"If you’re going to ranch in this part of the world, you have to have some sheep to make it work. We don’t have a lot of cow grass. I certainly can’t make a living running cows," Helmers says, "and in the end, more times than not, the sheep bail the cows out."

After the lessons of 1950s, Helmers immediately started cutting back any time a drouth set in, and when the drouth ended he gradually built back.

Helmers had to sell out again in 1983 because of drouth. His two sons, Ellis and Sammy, had 35 percent interest in the business at the time. They kept a few goats and a few heifer calves. Luck was in their favor this time, however, because the following spring, it started raining in his country before it did anywhere else and he was able to buy back those sheep, even some of the same ones he had sold, just as cheaply as he had let them go.

The most recent drouth, which appears to have broken late last summer, forced Helmers to sell down but not out. He retained 400 yearling ewes and 400 ewe lambs, and now is rebuilding their numbers slowly.

The lamb market this past season was the highest he’s ever experienced. "I guess that’s about the only time that it’s ever been up close to parity price," he remarks.

For many years, Helmers has been on the fringe of the sheep country and predators have been and continue to be a battle.

Early on, neighboring ranches often had coyote drives that helped keep the problem in check. Helmers says he had no coyote problems for the first 10 years or so, but then sheep numbers started going down and the neighbors’ predator problems moved in on his country as they got rid of their sheep.

Helmers says he had a one-track mind when it came to predators, and that one track focused on coyotes. One year he trapped 157 coyotes.

"We were losing probably around 20 percent every year to coyotes before we really started trapping heavily. We eventually got that cut back to around five percent."

Helmers used some kind of scent bait. A rabbit buried between two greasewoods usually worked best, he says. There wasn’t any significance in the greasewoods, Helmers says, just that in his country greasewood is about all that grows.

For a couple of years coyote furs brought a good price. He sold most of them to a fur buyer out of Ozona who would buy them from him unskinned for $2 less than the going rate. Helmers says it was worth giving up the $2 to have someone else do the skinning.

Bobcats have been particularly troublesome the last several years. About three years ago they trapped some 200 in his area, and today bobcats are a bigger problem than coyotes.

In addition to his full-time ranch job, Helmers has been actively involved with area youth. From 1948 to 1965 he traveled to all the stock shows with the Upton County 4-H and FFA youth, helping the county agent trim and fit the show animals. For that he was recognized as an honorary member of the Upton County 4-H club. Helmers is also an honorary member of the Texas Sheep and Goat Raisers Assocation.

Today Helmers and his two sons have a three-way partnership. Both sons are retired from the Extension Service, and Sammy and his wife, Donna, now live on the Girvin place as well. Ellis and Linda continue to live in Sanderson.

"Two things I said I wasn’t going to do any more was shoe horses and milk cows, and I’ve done both in the last couple of years since I retired from Extension," Sammy says. Like their father, Sammy and Ellis have plenty of experince dealing with drouth. After Sammy retired and returned to ranching full-time he fed livestock every day for three years straight.

Despite that hardship, returning to livestock production full-time was always one of his goals, Sammy says. And like his father, he believes sheep have the most potential in their West Texas country, though in recent years he has been building a meat goat herd as well.

"Sheep may be more labor-intensive, but they’re more profitable," he insists. "Plus, the turnaround on sheep is a lot quicker. Five sheep don’t cost near as much as one cow."

As for the elder Helmers, Alfred says he doesn’t have any plans to change his address or his occupation anytime soon. After all, the Girvin place is the only home he’s known for 55 years.