Who We Are

Hello everyone! We are a small family business located in the southeastern corner of Montana. We live in a town with a population around 300 people, known as Ekalaka, Montana. Yes, it is quite an interesting name and we highly recommend you look up the history of Ekalaka sometime; it’s a very cool story.

If you are ever in this area please stop by the ranch sometime and come take a look at what we are doing with our regenerative ranch. It’s called F & R Ranches Inc. named after Joe’s parents who have passed (Francis and Ralph Bruski).

Our family ranch is run by two families right now. Joe Bruski has been working on the ranch for over 50 years and his wife Sonja runs The Hair Affair in town for over 35 years. Their son Ryan Bruski moved back to the ranch in 2013 after he graduated from Bismarck State College with a farm/business management degree and a welding degree. He married his wife (me writing this article) Abbey in 2014 and we have two children; Bekka (4 years old) and Harper (15 months old). I work behind the scenes as a stay at home mother/ranch wife while my husband and father-in-law are the brains and the workers of the operation. I will however let you know that I am very capable of hooking up a stock trailer or driving a haying tractor during my “free time”.

It was the drought of 2012 that changed the entire operation of F & R Ranches Inc. Ryan came home from college with a completely different mindset after working for Gabe and Paul Brown. They opened his eyes and basically let him know we were doing everything wrong.

We used to use the conventional way of farming, such as summer fallow and tillage, spraying thousands of dollars’ worth of chemical, and fertilizers because “that’s the way farmers have always done things around here”. Clearly it was failing and we were losing money while being stressed to the maximum.

Ryan started out with some simple grazing changes and went out on his own to purchase some temporary electric fence to try it out and see if it would work for us. He rotated our livestock through adaptive grazing practices and we noticed a huge impact on our drought tolerance. That opened our eyes up to an even larger picture. (We are still learning every day, that’s what makes our job fun)!

We planted the entire place back to pasture, sold our farming equipment, and have put in major pipeline and permanent electric fences in. We are able to run more cows and it is really awesome to watch our grass regrowth when we are properly rotating our livestock and leaving a lower carbon footprint. We were also tired of calving out heifers in February and dragging them through the ice and snow, so we moved our calving date back to May 1st now for everything. We decided to go more with Mother Nature and it has made a tremendous difference. We only check the cows once a day and the heifers unless there is a problem, but it has helped out time management and stress load out a pile.

Our goal for this website is to reach out to people who are interested in regenerative agriculture and are interested in any of our products we have: