Zurich man honored for 60 years with Livestock Association

ZURICH, Kan. (AP)--Darrell and Joy Sutor intimately are familiar with the cattle industry.

The grand champion ribbons, trophies and pictures of cattle--prize-winning and otherwise--that adorn their rural Rooks County home are a dead giveaway.

That familiarity with livestock has been passed down the generations as well, and now several of the Sutors' children and grandchildren themselves are stalwarts of the livestock industry.

The Sutor Hereford Farm has been a fixture in Rooks County since 1885, and Darrell Sutor was among a handful of cattlemen honored recently by the Kansas Livestock Association for their long tenure with the group.

Northwest Kansas had a strong showing in the exclusive club of members with more than 60 years of participation.

The member with the most longevity, in fact, is Jansonius Farms, Phillipsburg, which joined in 1918. Farm Credit of Western Kansas, Colby, is another long-standing business member.

Individual members who were recognized for 60 or more years of membership in KLA, in addition to Sutor, were Harold Frasier, Sharon Springs, Fred Pratt, Hoxie, L.D. Morgan, Goodland, and Harold Carswell, Osborne.

Sutor said he joined the KLA "when I got married in 1943."

He joined to stay abreast of what's happening in the cattle business.

"If you don't keep up a little bit with what's going on, you're out in the cold," he said.

Sutor made the trip to Wichita for the annual KLA convention, riding along with daughter Darla Moore, who now lives in Scott City and is also heavily involved in the cattle industry.

Another daughter, Lorna Pelton, College Station, Texas, operates a company that performs ultrasound on cattle and frequently is a livestock judge at cattle shows.

The Sutors' third daughter, Linda Sutor, lives in the Lindsborg area and has her hands full with those duties, Darrell and Joy Sutor agreed.

"I'm glad we were in the cattle business," Joy Sutor said. "It gave my girls an occupation."

Darrell Sutor got his start in the cattle business early.

"I was born in it," he said.

Sutor's father, Earl, was a cattle buyer for many areas in northwest Kansas. Cattle he purchased were put on trains bound for Kansas City and that community's bustling livestock market.

The ranch was first started in 1878, built on school lands between Ellis and Kansas Highway 18. The Sutor family also had a small ranch near Geneseo, but the primary focus was on the Rooks County area.

At its peak, the Sutor ranch had four or five hired hands and ran cattle on nearly 18,000 acres of grassland stretching from Plainville to Hill City.

Much of that land was owned by his father's sisters, and Sutor rented it.

"When I think of my dad, he wasn't an angel," Sutor said. "But he knew how to do more things than I ever imagined."

While the Sutor ranch has a strong Hereford background, 300 head of Angus cattle are on the ranch that is cared for by the Sutors' granddaughter and her husband, Dana and David Pieper. The Piepers currently manage the ranch.

"I got too old to worry about details," he said of the cattle operation. "I've got too much to do trying to stay alive."

Sutor doesn't mind saying that he's 87 1/2 years old, and will turn 88 Aug. 1.

"I always had horned (Herefords)," Sutor said. "The last bull I got was a polled."

That bull is Napoleon.

"He's a nice bull," Sutor said. "I like him."

The lineage of that bull can be traced to cattle that daughter Darla has in her herd.

Even though cattle is his business, Sutor stays well aware of current events.

"It's an intriguing thing," Sutor said of events going on worldwide. "We're fiddling while Rome's burning."

He's not at all impressed with any of the presidential candidates.

"Who am I going to vote for?" he asked. "None of the above. None of them have a personality I care about."

Sutor has seen plenty in his years in the cattle industry.

He made it through the bangs--brucellosis--scare of 1935, the problems with dwarfism and a bout with leptospirosis, a bacteria that first hit the local cattle industry in the 1950s because of abundant rains.

"It was pretty serious," Sutor said of leptospirosis. "Now, it's vaccinated for right along with black leg."

In addition to the cattle business, Sutor spent 40 years serving on the rural electric board, allowing him to travel and attend conventions.

"There's so many places to go, and I haven't been everywhere I'd like to go," he said.

While they have focused on the Hereford operation, the Sutors said they also tried to help people along the way.

They told of young people who came to live with them, learning the industry or staying out of trouble.

"I've tried to help people every time I could," he said. "Sometimes, I helped them more than I did myself."

Sutor isn't standing still.

He's still out looking things over, attending sales in the area.

Last week, they installed a generator that kicks on automatically when the power goes off.

"So many of us are getting old," he said. "We can't just go outside and start the tractor."

But he doesn't regret a moment of it.

"I tell you, it's been quite a life."

3/3/08
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Date: 2/22/08

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