Leonard Meyer is a rancher, author, and historian on the Southern High Plains of Colorado. His working life has run fifty-three years through the American beef sector — from a Kansas feedyard boyhood in the 1970s, through eighteen years inside Big Four kill floors at IBP, Cargill, and ConAgra, to corporate work at Safeway — before he and his wife Brenda started Luna Mesa Ranch in 2011. Today he raises registered Dexter cattle on forty acres near Avondale, and writes from the same ground about the American System, the covenant life, and the working ranch.
The Beef Industry
The American beef business has been the throughline of my working life. It started in Haskell County, Kansas, in 1973 — I was thirteen, my father was the yard foreman, and the feedyard was where the days went. From there the arc ran through eighteen years on Big Four kill floors: harvest maintenance at IBP in Finney County, Cargill down in Friona in the Texas Panhandle, and ConAgra in Garden City and then Greeley. There was a stretch of vendor work with Quadna industrial pumps out of Denver, a return to the plants at Caviness Beef in Hereford, and a final chapter in corporate at Safeway before Brenda and I turned toward the ranch. Thirty-eight years in the cattle and beef sector before Luna Mesa, and a formation that started at thirteen. That perspective sits under everything I now do on this ground, and everything I write.
Luna Mesa Ranch
Brenda and I started Luna Mesa Ranch in 2011. Forty acres of high prairie near Avondale, Colorado, in Pueblo County — the Southern High Plains, where the wind sets the terms and the grass tells you what the year is going to be. We worked toward what’s here now: a registered Dexter cattle herd finished on blue grama and orchard grass, laying hens for the family, and a working operation small enough to know every animal on the place. What we sell, we raise ourselves. What we raise, we know.
The Writing
I write from the ground I ranch — about the American System of political economy, the covenant life, and the working practice of raising cattle on forty acres. The catalog runs across four bodies of work: the American Sovereignty Trilogy, on the constitutional order and the City of London question; the American System Series, on covenant economics and the New Deal era; the Luna Mesa Method, on Dexter cattle and the working ranch; and the Luna Mesa Providence Series, on a rancher’s faith and daily labor. Everything is published through Luna Mesa Ranch Press and sold on Amazon. The full catalog is on the Books page.
Luna Mesa Ranch 