by
Hannah Farber
| Aug 04, 2026
Mike and Kali Smith did not go looking for a full-time ranching life. They went looking for a break from one.
After years of running a refrigeration business with 150 employees, seven days a week, around the clock, they bought 300 acres in Burnet, Texas. Kali’s father was reaching the point where he could no longer run cattle on his Kansas farm, and he was planning to move down with them. Kali took his last seven heifers. That was 2018.
Her father passed in 2019. Those seven heifers are still on the ranch. They live in their own pasture now, separated from the Longhorns and bred back to the Longhorn bull each year. They are not going anywhere.
“It’s a cool part of the story,” Mike says. He still remembers watching those small heifers walk off the trailer behind his father-in-law’s motor home, none of them knowing what they were getting into. “We thought we had it all figured out,” he says. “We come to find out that it can be a whole lot more complicated.”
How Contagious It Got
Seven years after leaving refrigeration, Cold Copper Ranch runs a little over 100 registered Texas Longhorns, a pasture-finished beef program, and two locations of Cold Copper Commodities, their feed store serving Burnet and Marble Falls.
None of that was the plan. Mike describes the move from refrigeration to ranching as something that just happened. “Once we started spending time out on the ranch, that’s when we really started falling in love with it,” he says. “We didn’t know how contagious it was going to be out here.”
They also did not know the math. “40 can turn into 80 pretty quick,” Mike says. “Getting all the infrastructure in place to handle something like that was a curveball.” They are working on bringing the numbers down now. The calves keep arriving as fast as they can move animals out.
Sweet Maxi and the Guinness Record
The most recognizable animal at Cold Copper Ranch was not on the original shopping list.
Mike and Kali were at a sale with other animals in mind. Sweet Maxi EOT 605 was in the back corner of the pen, big horned and a little ornery, and they were actively steering around her. Then she walked into the ring and became a giant puppy dog. Kali felt she was not getting the attention she deserved. They bought her on what Mike describes as a fluke.
Sweet Maxi is a Guinness World Record holder for the largest horn spread on a living cow. In the Longhorn world, that measurement carries weight. Everyone else is mostly just impressed by the size of a cow that keeps producing and still walks out into a rainstorm to graze while every other animal on the ranch stands under a tree.
"To be a champion out there, you really never got to stop," Mike says. "She still continues to grow and does well."
She has six progeny on the ranch already. Her daughters and granddaughters are starting to show what she can pass down, and that is where Kali's excitement about the genetics lives.
Put a Ring on It and Tessa Bella
Before Sweet Maxi, there was Put a Ring On It BCB, the first Longhorn Kali bought at auction. She was a Bolen-bred cow, and Kali saw her walk off the trailer and knew immediately this was what she wanted to do.
"I thought it was like a unicorn being delivered," Kali says. "I knew from that, that cow will probably be here forever."
Then there is LLL Tessa Bella, the oldest cow on the ranch and the twistiest. She came from the Hansen herd and was the first animal out of the whole group to walk up to Mike and let him approach. He still has her phone number, he jokes. He can brush her down today and she will cross the pasture to find him.
“She has produced some really nice animals,” Kali says. “And the progeny that you keep around speaks volumes about which cows you love.”
From Refrigeration to Hay Science
Mike grew up working alfalfa fields in southwest Kansas, thinking about the crop, not the cattle it fed. Now he runs Cold Copper Commodities and thinks about hay and nutrition from the feeding side.
The shift away from grain has been intentional. The beef program is pasture finished on coastal hay, alfalfa, and forage, with no grain finishing for the breeding herd. Their Longhorn beef goes to consumers through the feed store, and Kali calls it underrated and overlooked.
“It’s just really not a time that you can be too picky,” Mike says about sourcing hay in a region that has seen drought, flood, and wildfire hit supply and quality in recent years. His advice: find a reputable supplier, get the hay tested, and keep a backup plan, because quality changes from cutting to cutting.
The feed stores are also where Mike and Kali are working on passing along something less tangible, what good customer service looks like to a generation that has mostly never seen it firsthand.
The Next Generation Is Already Hooked
Mike feeds the cattle. Kali runs the website. Their daughter Jacey, who is involved in both the feed store and the ranch, browses every Hired Hand website she can find. Mike says if you open her phone browser, they are all open.
"Once we saw one site and saw the capability and what it did with the pedigrees and all that, we knew that's what we had to have," Kali says. "We wanted it so we could get our name out there. People found us through our website. I get a lot of emails through there. It works very well."
They put one animal a month into the customer online sales and have moved a bull, a heifer, and a steer that way. Kali’s takeaway is plain: good photos, and a willingness to market the animal yourself once it is listed.
Seven years in, a hundred head strong, and the most enthusiastic browser in the family is the youngest. Find Cold Copper Ranch at www.coldcopperranch.com.
This article was written based on a podcast interview on From the Pasture with Hired Hand. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or learn more about breeder websites at hiredhandsoftware.com.