Little Pitchfork Ranch owners named ‘Farm Family of the Year’

LAZY MOUNTAIN — Todd Pettit is not your average farmer.

Pettit runs Little Pitchfork Ranch with his wife, Roxann, and 10-year-old daughter, Kyra, out Wolverine Road, on the near side of “the canyon,” as locals call it. He took over the ranch from his grandparents, Jack and Jane Seemann — who had been on the property since 1950 — in the mid-1990s.

Although Todd had lived in Anchorage all his life until then, he and his siblings and cousins often came out to work on the Mat-Su ranch in the summers.

“The farm always had an interest to me, even when I was a little, little kid,” Todd said. “Their interest(s) lied elsewhere and mine was always here, so I did my own thing for a couple years out of high schooland then decided this was where I wanted to hang my hat.”

Todd had returned from working on the North Slope, exhausted, to an expired lease on his Anchorage apartment at the time, so the switch to full-time farming was “good timing,” he said.

But it wasn’t a matter of being the next willing and available “heir” to the ranch. The Seemanns were looking to retire from the cattle-raising game when Todd stepped in and volunteered to keep the ranch going.

It certainly wasn’t a matter of money.

“It’s definitely a lifestyle choice because you’re not gonna get rich farming,” Todd said. “You have a lot of fun farming.”

He planned to have fun farming a different breed, however.

“I wasn’t that interested in raising cows but I did wanna try with these bison,” Todd said. “They were coming on line, becoming more popular as the red meat to raise … it just sounded like the right thing to do.”

His grandparents gave him the go-ahead – with raised eyebrows.

“I wanted to try something different, and they were like, ‘Well, that’s really different,’” Todd said.

Jack Seemann had grown up in “the country” of western Chicago, and came to Alaska in 1949 to work for the Alaska Railroad as a lineman. He also worked for a fish cannery before being drafted to fight in the Korean War.

“When I came back from my Korea deal, I came back up (to Alaska) but the telephone crew wasn’t gonna be going, and this was in February, and (my supervisor) said, ‘Well, you can go back to work on a section crew,’ and I said ‘No, no thanks. I learned all I wanted to learn,’ and I said, ‘Well, I think I’ll become a farmer,” Jack said.

In 1954, he built his first log cabin on what is now Little Pitchfork Ranch. After clearing enough land for cattle to roam, Jack planted oats and barley to feed his future herd of heifers. In 1958, he married Jane.

Forty years later, in 1998, their grandson Todd was flying to Canada to scope out some much bigger animals than cows for the farm. Finding a healthy crop of young bison for sale, Todd arranged for his grandfather to drive down and pick up five calves for the farm that winter.

But the transfer didn’t go quite according to plan.

“The good news is, your bison are in Alaska,” Todd remembered his grandfather saying. “The bad news is, they just rolled down a hill, and they’re headed back to Canada.”

Jack well remembered the beginning of their “bison adventure,” as Todd called it.

“I hit some ice coming down a hill north of Glennallen, and the trailer started whipping, and I thought, ‘Well, I think I’ll ease it over into the snow bank the next time it comes back on my side of the road,” Jack said.

When he came to a halt at the bottom of the hill, he got out of the vehicle with a flashlight to punctuate the dark of winter and check on the calves. But when he made it to the back of the truck there was one big problem: no trailer.

“When I fishtailed it, it went off the road and I didn't feel anything,” Jack said. “And about that time a guy drove up and stopped and said, ‘I don’t know what you had in that trailer but they went that-a-way.’”

The brand-new horse trailer had rolled 1 1/4 times, he said, and a hole had been punched through the fiberglass roof to form an escape hatch for the calves. It was the middle of January, and Jack wasn’t about to go chasing after the young bison on foot. But he had some recently purchased corral panels and hay with him, and was able to set up a corral in the woods just off the road, with a trail of hay leading into it, to lure the animals back.

Weeks later the bison — along with Todd and his new wife, Roxann — were settled in at Little Pitchfork Ranch, readying to make hay while the sun was shining.

Roxann grew up in Alaska with ties to farming families in Connecticut, but hadn’t had much experience with farm life before joining Todd’s endeavor.

“Stepping into something like this was a big adjustment,” she said. “I had to work for a few years to find my niche.”

But now Roxann is a “professional tractor driver and equipment operator,” she said, with an understanding of the “whatever it takes to get the job done” mentality.

“If the animals get out and my husband’s gone, I’m up,” she said.

Roxann also works as the activities secretary at Palmer High School, from which she graduated years ago, so most of her work on the farm occurs during the summer.

That hasn’t stopped Roxann from packing her schedule, however. Even with bison and, more recently elk, to feed, the Pettits have invested their time and hay products in horses. Though Jack once used horses for logging, Roxann has brought up horses for riding, too.

“I wanted to challenge myself to learn something new and to train them,” she said.

She also has developed a hobby of harvesting bison wool, which, once devoid of the stiff guardhairs, is comparable to qiviut, or musk ox wool, she said. (Although Todd manages the nearby Windy Valley Musk Ox Farm in addition to Little Pitchfork Ranch, neither he nor the farm owners are in the business of harvesting qiviut just yet.) Roxann and her mother send the wool out for processing, then spin their own garments, experimenting with different dyes. They’ll sell what they can, but with Roxann working full time, spinning is not a priority. Especially when she also has a 10-year-old with a penchant for creative writing and adventure to raise.

“My first job is mom and everything else has to fit into the schedule of life,” Roxann said.

There’s no telling yet whether Kyra will take over the farm some day, but Roxann and Todd both emphasized the necessity of someone continuing the lifestyle. An award like the Alaska State Fair’s Farm Family of the Year, they said, brings exactly the right kind of awareness to their profession.

“It is something that I personally have gotten excited about because I’m just thankful that (families are) being recognized for farming, ’cause we’re losing it,” Roxann said. “It’s fine that more people are moving to the Valley, but when great farmland is being by consumed by housing development, it’s painful to watch.”

Her husband agreed.

“My passion is farming in this state,” Todd said. “We don't have that much to start with, you know, and I wanna be able to see my kid be able to farm. I wanna see a younger generation come in and be able to farm.”

For now, Todd is content to watch his daughter experience the life she has now, not so different from the life Todd had growing up.

“All my firsts in life happened on this farm,” he said. “It’s great to be able to now have a kid and experience her firsts on this place too — there’s something special about that.”

The Pettits will be honored as the 2015 Alaska State Fair Farm Family of the Year on Thursday, Aug. 27.

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.