Investigative exclusive: The Goat Ranch has not employed a goat since Eisenhower
SOUTH GREENFIELD, Mo. — We drove to Dade County with a notebook, a camera, and the reasonable expectation that a place called The Goat Ranch would contain, at minimum, one (1) goat.
We found 2,500 acres, chuckwagon tracks, a swimming hole, a general store named Fannie’s, a year-round hall called the Reserve, concert lights, and a married couple — Josh and Jordan Spain — who built a week-long Wild West family stampede because the cattle market fell apart in 2016 and they refused to let the place go quiet.
We did not find a goat.
Jordan Spain’s one rule for visitors is “don’t open any gates.” Scoop opened the metaphorical one anyway.
“When was the last time goats were on this ranch?” a television reporter asked them this summer.
“Back in the ’50s,” Josh said.
There it is. The name is an heirloom. Josh’s grandfather ran the neighboring place. Josh did a cattle drive here at six, announced at thirteen that he would own The Goat Ranch someday, married the girl who thought the whole stampede idea was insane, and then proved the girl wrong at a scale of ten thousand visitors a year and nearly twenty events in a single June week, including two rodeos. Diamond Rio. A free night of Christian music with no hat passed. Glamping. Reality television: Building Spain, Cowboy Channel, season two incoming.
It is a good story. It is not a goat story.
Or is it?
Professor Gruff, editing this copy with the expression of a billy who has just been told the buffet is “plant-based,” appended the following:
A ranch that keeps the word GOAT on the gate after the goats have been gone seventy years is performing folk memory. That is caprine work. The Spain family did not steal the name. They conserved it. If ten thousand people come to a place called The Goat Ranch and leave happier than they arrived, the ghost herd has done its job. Also, someone should send them two Nigerian Dwarfs named Mayhem and Midway as a housewarming. I will not be taking questions.
Stampede dates this year were June 22–28. Next year the hills will still be there, the gates will still need leaving shut, and the ranch will still be named after animals who clocked out during the Truman-adjacent era.
Scoop’s official finding: zero goats, maximum goat energy.
The Bleat Sheet awards The Goat Ranch its first annual Honorary Herd Designation, which comes with no feed bill and no hoof trimming, only the obligation to keep telling kids why the sign says what it says.
Don’t open any gates.