Date: 10/09/26
Time: 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. (Registration: 8 a.m.)
Location: Leo Ranch, Decatur, TX
This country taught itself what to grow.
North Texas evolved under intense grazing followed by long recovery. Wolves kept the buffalo bunched and moving; the buffalo hit the grass hard and left; the grass and the soil organisms beneath it did the rest. That interaction — pressure, then rest — built one of the most abundant and resilient landscapes on the continent.
Regenerative grazing and Holistic Management work by mimicking that process with livestock and adaptive management. The results are well documented: lower input costs, higher production, more resilient land, and often a good deal less misery in day-to-day work.
But here's the part that gets skipped. Mimicking nature gets dramatically easier — or dramatically harder — depending on the animal you're asking to do it. The wrong cow will fight you every step. She'll need feed you didn't plan to buy, shade you don't have, and treatment for parasites the environment was already sorting out. You can run a textbook grazing plan and still lose money to genetics that were never selected for your place.
This day is about that question: what kind of animal fits the management you're trying to run?
Three producers will walk through how they answer it. Jerry Addison breeds Mashona and Boran cattle near Bowie, selecting for animals that hold condition on no inputs. Jonathan Cobb breeds sheep on converted row-crop ground in the Blackland Prairie. Jake McNamara runs cow/calf and lamb production together across the Dixon Water Foundation's ranches. Different species, different scales, different country — and a strikingly similar logic about what to keep and what to cull.
Come ready to argue about it. We'll get into selection criteria, culling policy, and the phenotype each of them is breeding toward — and why. Bring your questions about your own herd or flock.
Your Presenter(s):
Jerry Addison
Jerry Addison came back to ranching after years away from it — and came back determined not to run the business the way he'd watched it run growing up. That decision has shaped everything since.
He has spent the years since as a deliberate student of two things most operations treat separately: how animals behave, and how rangeland responds. His work centers on mimicking natural processes rather than fighting them, and on handling livestock in ways that build growth and confidence in the animal rather than stress and flight. Out of that came a low-stress handling practice refined on his own ground near Bowie, Texas, and a breeding program built around one question: what kind of cow actually thrives in these conditions, under this management, without being propped up?
His answer has been Mashona and Boran — two African breeds shaped by exactly the pressures he's selecting for. The Mashona carries over a thousand years of history in Zimbabwe and arrived in the United States only in the mid-1990s, as embryos imported from top Zimbabwean herds under a USDA germplasm protocol. Breeders value them as compact, heat- and tick-resistant, efficient grazers with a strong herding instinct that hold body condition on no inputs. The Boran, from Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, is a composite of Bos indicus and both European and African Bos taurus lines, adapted over a millennium to local conditions and parasites.
Jerry will speak to what it means to select for adaptation rather than for a catalog number — and to the link most producers miss: that how you handle an animal and how you select an animal are the same conversation.
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Jonathan Cobb
Jonathan Cobb is a fourth-generation steward of his family's land in the Blackland Prairie of central Texas. After earning a business degree and several years away from agriculture, he returned to farm alongside his father — and five years into row-crop production nearly walked away, seeing no future for himself in the commodity model. Exposure to regenerative agriculture changed that. In 2013, Jonathan and his wife Kaylyn started Green Fields Farm on a 450-acre parcel of the family homestead, which they comanage with his sister and brother-in-law. What was once row-cropped ground is now fully pasture-based, producing grass-finished beef and pastured eggs.
Jonathan runs sheep, using diverse cover crops and adaptive grazing management to build soil and forage. His experience running a flock that does what he wants them to do — and what happens when the animal doesn't fit the environment and management. He speaks widely on regenerative transition and has been featured by NRCS and in national coverage of the soil health movement.
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Jacob McNamara
General Manager of Ranches | Dixon Water Foundation
Jacob McNamara is the General Manager of ranches for the Dixon Water Foundation. He lives at and runs the everyday operations of the North Texas ranch. Growing up, Jake raised sheep and showed club lambs. After high school, he attended Angelo State University where he received a bachelor's degree in Animal Science with a minor in Range and Wildlife Management. While attending college, he worked for the Texas AgriLife Sheep and Goat Research Station on their various sheep and goat ranches across West Texas until his graduation. Following graduation, he was hired as a ranch manager for the Bird Dog Cattle Company in Bronte, TX. There he managed about 15,000 acres of pasture and 2,000 acres of farmland with cattle and a small herd of sheep. In 2021, Jake was hired to manage the North Texas ranch for the Dixon Water Foundation and has been doing so ever since.