Good beef starts with good land. Our 160-acre ranch sits outside Boulder, Colo., just north of Haystack Mountain, with the Flatirons standing watch to the south. Our ranch is the heart of what we do.

The land’s story starts long before we showed up. The Southern Arapaho used the rise around Haystack Mountain as a lookout, watching for bison moving across the plains below. Left Hand Creek flowed with water, and Haystack’s isolated height gave them a view across the plains.

Gold changed everything. Settlers poured in, and by 1859 several families had set up camp near Haystack along Left Hand Creek. One of them, the Arbuthnots, built a cabin there that winter and staked a mining claim. But panning for gold is a gamble, and farming isn’t. By 1864, they’d traded picks and pans for plows and claimed agricultural land around the mountain instead.

Those early settlers also dug the ditch that became the Left Hand Ditch system, Colorado's first inter-basin water transfer. The water rights fights that followed ended up in front of the Supreme Court, and the ruling helped establish the doctrine that still governs water in the West: first in time, first in right.

The Homestead

In the 1860s, a man named Daniel Johnson made his way to Colorado from Illinois by ox team. He worked the mines around Central City for a while, then in 1868 relocated to a farm near Boulder. We believe that farm is the one we now call home.

Two years later, on May 3, 1870, Daniel married Phoebe Ann Jamison in Boulder County. The Jamisons were already well established in the area; Joseph Jamison, an early figure in the family, had helped build the Left Hand Ditch and the agricultural community that depended on it.

Then, on December 13, 1876, just four months after Colorado became the 38th state, Daniel officially acquired the property from the United States government under the Homestead Act. The original document survives, signed by Ulysses S. Grant himself.

The federal government recognized Daniel's claim to four subdivisions totaling 160 acres, the exact acreage of Miraflora Ranch today. 

The Unknown Years

After nearly a decade in Colorado, Daniel packed up his family and livestock and headed north to the headwaters of the Big Laramie River, where he spent about 16 years as a stock raiser.

In 1895 he moved again, this time to California’s Santa Clara Valley, where he bought a ranch near Edenvale and became an orchardist. He retired to San Jose in 1907 and died there on January 23, 1920.

What happened to the Boulder homestead after Daniel left? That’s the biggest mystery in our ranch’s history. The ownership chain between roughly 1879 and 1907 is still a blank page, waiting for someone to fill it in.

The Behrmann Era Begins

The next chapter we can document well begins in 1907. According to a 2014 profile of longtime farmer Richard Behrmann, his father, August, bought 160 acres in Hygiene that year, and Richard would live and work there for the rest of his life.

The location, the acreage, and later Behrmann addresses all point to the same conclusion: August likely bought the old Johnson homestead.

Farming ran deep in the Behrmann family already. Richard remembered his grandfather and great-uncle running a dairy herd of about 150 cows near Erie back in the 1890s, milking early each morning and sending the milk to Denver by train.

Once August had his 160 acres near Hygiene, the family built a farm that did a little bit of everything: cows for milk, grain in the fields, pigs and chickens and sheep and turkeys in the yard, plus vegetables, eggs and dairy for the neighbors.

Richard used to say the farming of his childhood would be called organic today, though nobody used that word back then. There were no bags of fertilizer or bottles of pesticide in the barn, just horse and cow manure doing the work.

The pace was different too. Richard remembered cutting 10 acres with horses as a full day’s job. Decades later a tractor could do the same acreage in about an hour. His stories hold onto that whole shift: buck rakes, dump rakes, horse-drawn hay balers, grain binders, threshing crews, wheat harvests, and the slow trade of horsepower for horsepower.

Richard also gave decades of his life to the irrigation companies that made farming possible in such a dry place, serving with Left Hand Ditch Company and Table Mountain Ditch Company. His life tied our farm directly back to the water traditions the first settlers started around Haystack.

Richard kept milking cows until about 1990. After six decades, small dairies just couldn’t make ends meet anymore, so he sold the herd and turned to growing hay instead. Local directories from the era list Behrmann Farm for produce, fruit, flowers, alfalfa and hay, with old apple, peach, cherry and black walnut trees still bearing fruit on the property. Richard kept farming well into old age; in 2014, at 87, he was still putting in long days during haying season.

A New Agricultural Chapter

After more than a century, the Behrmann era came to a close on February 19, 2019, when we bought the ranch and started writing the next chapter.

These days, the farm is home to our Wagyu herd, plus goats, chickens, alpaca, pigs and bees. We grow hay, lavender and wildflowers, and we farm sustainably and vertically, treating our soil and animals with the respect they deserve.

Our land isn’t just a pretty backdrop for a modern ranch. It’s a living record that runs from the Southern Arapaho watching for bison at Haystack, through homesteaders and dairy farmers, all the way to the Wagyu grazing here now. Not many properties along Colorado’s fast-growing Front Range can say that. We’re just glad Haystack Mountain is still watching over us while we figure out what comes next.