When Cattle Empire downsized from five yards to two yards totaling 51,000 head in 2018, many assumed the story was about contraction. For sisters Trista Brown Priest and Becca Brown Wright, it became a chance to sharpen their focus.
With 75% of the ownership held by women and all four owners living within 3 miles of the yard, the Brown family has built what they call “a big‑yard skill set with small‑yard attention” — pairing deep experience with new tools like camera‑based sorting, resale cattle programs and flexible financing to keep pens full and customers profitable.
Today, the family‑owned custom feedyard located near Satanta, Kan., is led by CEO Priest and Wright, an agricultural journalist turned marketer and customer recruiter. Roy Brown, their father, remains actively involved in the operation, offering wisdom to the next generation from his years as CEO.
Both grew up in the shadows of the pens and left the area to attend Kansas State University with no plans to return to the family business. The sisters today have a clear mission: Keep a rural community alive, give customers big‑yard expertise with small‑yard service and make sure the next generation has a path into cattle ownership — without needing $15 million to get started.
A Legacy Built on Integrity
The roots of Cattle Empire trace back to the family’s patriarch, Paul Brown, who started the operation as a natural extension of his wheat farming in southwest Kansas.
“Irrigation was becoming a thing, and cattle were kind of a natural hedge for farming at that time,” Priest explains.
What began as a buy-in to a 4,000-head grow yard in 1978 grew steadily over the decades, eventually expanding to five yards under Roy’s leadership, making Cattle Empire the fifth-largest feeding company in the U.S.
But it wasn’t just growth that defined the company’s reputation. It was a moment of crisis.
In the 1980s, Paul discovered that a backgrounding partner in Alabama had essentially defrauded the company and its customers. Where there should have been 6,000 head of cattle, there was one pen — guarded by armed bank representatives.
“Paul went to the bank and got a loan, paid back all of his customers within 30 days,” Priest recounts. “Word of mouth spreads, and that story really set Cattle Empire on a big growth trajectory.”
Roy served as CEO of Cattle Empire from 1997 to 2018. His daughters credit his leadership for the growth and technological advancements the feedyard implemented during his tenure.
The company’s current form was shaped by another pivotal moment. When Paul and his wife, Evelyn, passed away in 2017 and 2018, the family had to make some hard decisions. Roy and his wife, Laura, along with their two daughters, decided they wanted to continue the legacy of Cattle Empire and maintained 25% of the former operation.
Sisters at the Helm
Priest, 39, returned to Satanta after graduating from K-State in 2008 with a business degree — timing that coincided with the recession.
“I looked for another job until spring break of the next year and didn’t have any luck,” she says with a laugh. She took over management of the family’s dairy repair company, helped build a calf ranch and gradually grew into a corporate strategy role before becoming CEO in 2018.
Wright, 37, took a longer road home. After K-State, she spent years in radio sales, event planning, association work and freelance contracting. The pull to come home grew stronger when she started a family.
“I didn’t want my kids to grow up in Denver,” she stresses. “I wanted them to grow up how I grew up — around cattle, in a small town. I think it’s the best way to grow up.”
In 2025, she and her husband relocated back to Satanta.
Now the two sisters work side by side, with Wright focusing on marketing, customer recruitment and education while Priest leads overall operations and strategy.
Lowering the Barriers to Entry
One of the more unusual threads running through Cattle Empire’s operation is a genuine commitment to bringing new customers into the feeding industry. With an aging producer base and steep entry costs — “it’s like a millionaire’s game,” Wright acknowledges — the yard has developed programs specifically designed to lower the barrier.
Cattle Empire’s “resale program” involves purchasing calves at the sale barn, backgrounding them at a neighboring facility using Cattle Empire’s nutrition and health protocols and then reselling them to customers.
“It takes out a lot of those input costs,” Wright explains. “You don’t have land; you don’t have cattle at all — no problem. You need financing? OK.”
Customers can also enter at any ownership level.
“You do not have to come in full-bore and buy 110 head of cattle,” Wright says. “You can start with 25%. The entry cost is a lot lower. We can partner with you or other customers. We can finance you.”
The yard also offers full risk-management assistance — with a dedicated staff member who handles hedging and Livestock Risk Protection (LRP) guidance — and charges no interest on margin for customers who hedge through their account.
Feedlot Technology That Pays Off
Innovation is a point of pride at Cattle Empire, and perhaps no investment has delivered more measurable results than their adoption of Elanco’s PenPoint system, a camera-based sorting technology mounted above the processing chute.
“It measures along the back of the animal every half an inch, including the slope of the back, to help us make sort groups and more uniform marketing groups of cattle,” Priest explains.
By identifying which animals will reach market weight sooner and which will take longer, Cattle Empire can sort pens and market cattle more efficiently, reducing feed costs while maximizing carcass value.
The results have been striking.
“That has helped our customers sell 30 to 40 more pounds per head on average over the last two and a half to three years,” Priest says.
Wright adds a practical dimension: “We’re getting the cattle that can get to those carcass weights everybody’s talking about — the 1,400s, the 1,450-lb. heifers. But those that aren’t going to perform, they’re not sitting in that pen eating feed without gaining any weight. You’re saving on feed because we’re pulling them out. It’s a twofold savings.”
The yard also operates a water reclamation system that cycles overflow water from cattle tanks through six stages of filtration, including sand filters and UV lights, before returning it to the herd.
“It’s actually cleaner coming out than what’s replacing the water in our tanks right now, because it hasn’t been exposed to birds or cattle noses,” Priest notes.
The system saves approximately 20% of the yard’s annual water use — a critical advantage in a region where the aquifer is projected to support irrigation for about 25 more years.
Looking ahead, the company completed a new feed mill in late 2023 specifically designed to pivot between grain types as water availability evolves.
“We can easily flake two grains,” Priest explains, “so that if we’re going to feed wheat or milo instead of corn, whatever that looks like, we can hopefully pivot to feed the best feed we can no matter what the aquifer situation looks like.”
A Family That Employs Other Families
At 51,000 head, Cattle Empire occupies an interesting middle ground in the industry.
“We can give small-town, small-yard attention, but we’ve been a big yard; we have big-yard connections, big-yard know-how,” Priest says. “We’re able to spend more time with our customers and have more hands-on things.”
That philosophy extends deep into how the company treats its employees, a focus of Roy’s that both women hope to continue. Most of the team has been together 15 to 20 years, representing a cumulative 150-plus years of industry experience. Husband-and-wife pairs, siblings, cousins — family dynamics of every kind are represented on staff.
“We employ other families, and that impacts our community,” Wright says. “We never want to forget that. Anyone that we’re able to hire and give a wage to — money that we earned can filter back through our community and keep it thriving. Rural communities are struggling, and we grew up here. We don’t want these communities to die.”
As a family-owned operation with no corporate approval chain, Cattle Empire can also move fast when opportunity knocks.
“We don’t need to go through a large corporate approval process,” Wright explains. “If a cow-calf producer comes to us and says, ‘Here’s what I need from you as a feeder,’ OK, let’s talk about it. If we can figure it out, we’ll do it. It’s family to family. If it works for you and it can work for us, we’re going to do it.”
Planning for the Next Generation
Having watched their grandfather’s succession plan unravel — despite Roy’s legal experience, but from changed hearts — the sisters are deliberate about building something more resilient.
“Everything can be buttoned up really nicely, but you have to account for humanity and people’s free will to change their minds,” Wright emphasizes. “You don’t want to pigeonhole anybody, because the last thing you want in a business is somebody that doesn’t want to be there.”
Their current plan ensures that either sister, or their children, has the financial ability to buy out the other without forcing a sale of the business. All four owners use the same estate attorney, and all documents are transparent and coordinated.
“We all know what’s in them, and they work together,” Priest says.
She also reflects on a lesson learned from watching Cattle Empire’s restructure, which is the importance of diversification: “Instead of being 100% Cattle Empire all the time, which is noble, one thing I’ve been doing is making sure my family has retirement accounts, outside investments, so that if our business goes away, we’re not starting from zero.”
On a more personal note, she adds: “I’m Trista from Cattle Empire — that’s fine — but that’s not my whole identity. [I’m] trying to make sure my kids are not internalizing that either; they can be their own person. The option to be in Cattle Empire when they grow up is there if they want it, but they don’t have to want it, and that’s OK.”
After more than four decades, Cattle Empire endures not because it got lucky, but because the people running it know exactly who they are. They paid back customers in 30 days when it would have been easier not to. They’re planning for a future without reliable water. And two sisters who once swore they’d never come back to southwest Kansas — well, here they are, building something worth staying for.
