OREGON — Growing up among the farms and woods east of Oregon, Michael and Joseph Ring had a pretty big playground. There was no shortage of places to play as they’d run and roam through the countryside, exploring nature’s nooks and crannies, making forts, and learning to appreciate all that the land had to offer.

Today, they’re still appreciating it, but in a different way.

The twin brothers raise Angus and Gelbvieh cattle from conception to market on rented land in Ogle County and sell the meat as Ring Brothers Beef. They also grow and raise crops, both for feed and sale, and have turned their talent for land management and equipment repair into a business, Nashua Ventures.

For Michael and Joseph, growth — not only in the land, but personally and professionally too — is a big part of their lives. So too is having agency in what they do: taking initiative, taking control and making their own choices. And it’s all built on a strong foundation, one they’ve each built with their families, with seven children between them. Their hope is that one day they’ll follow in their footsteps and into the field, tapping into their own talents to carry on the family farming tradition.

Joseph and Michael represent the fourth generation of cattle farmers in their family, and through the years have built a bond that could only come from the closeness of family. It’s a brotherly bond that’s served them well.

“We understand each other’s motivations quite a bit, and that is something that we’ve concentrated on in the past with different relationships in business that we’ve had, whether it’s partnerships with family or other outside deals,” Michael said. “One of the things that we’ve figured out: To make things functional, you have to have a lot of aligned incentives and understand how different people have different goals. If you have someone who’s pretty close to that, then I think it works better.”

The time the Rings spent growing up together, with their parents allowing them time to be left to their own devices, helped shape their drive to be successful in business.

“It’s taking the things that I have talent for and finding a market for them,” Joseph said. “Some of them aren’t terribly marketable, but some of them are, and I’m interested in being profitable in whatever pursuits I’m in. Finding that product market fit has been a big part of it — that and being able to do it with my family and friends.”

It also helps to get an early start. For the Rings, that meant raising cows when they were 6 years old.

The Ring’s grandfather, Roger Nordman, bought three head one day, keeping one for himself and gifting the other two to the twin grandsons. The cows were solely their responsibility — feeding and fattening them up, caring for them — and that served as a catalyst for a growing herd, paving the way for their future raising cattle. For a couple of grade-schoolers, it was a learning experience that added another building block on a firm foundation their family had already built for them, and one that Michael remembers “as clear as day,”

“It was one of those things where I felt a sense of responsibility,” Michael recalled. “It’s something that’s really common in ag, where responsibility at a young age is something that is just assumed to start being given to young kids. I think there’s a lot of things around that, that you have to keep track of. You can only give kids what they can handle. Now we have this cow, and every day we’re going take the wagon and go to the hay barn and you’re going to fill it and you’re going to put it in their bunk.

As the brothers grew, so too did their responsibilities, including property maintenance by the time they were in their teens. By then, the Rings were living with their aunt and uncle and their children after their parents died when they were young.

The twins rented ground for their growing herd when they were 15. Said Joseph: “We wanted to be able to manage it on our own, and we’ve continued to rent more land and build our cow herd in that way” — and it’s a good thing the brothers got an early start, he added: “Cattle are so capital intensive now, that I’m glad we started when we did. It would be very hard to get into it now.”

Of the two breeds they raise, Joseph puts his focus toward Angus and Michael on Gelbvieh. Their calves are grass fed until weaning and finished on grain to facilitate a high-quality beef taste.

Their experience growing up on a family farm proved invaluable, and the brothers have carried what they’ve learned with them as they raise their own families, including the lessons their grandfather taught them. Taking a page from their grandfather’s book, Michael put his young children in charge of raising their own chickens.

“Now you have this thing that you get to do, and you get to feel that responsibility that you need to fill that obligation. You also get to feel the pride in that,” Michael said. “I think it’s really important to start that at a young age, even if it’s not a cow.”

They may be just chickens today, but they’ll be memories and valuable lessons tomorrow.

“Kids are learning from you, and you’re being an example for them,” Michael said. “You feel a lot of responsibility around that. If you can work up into things like that, it gives you all of those practical skills for how to think about working in groups, developing as a person and dealing with conflict and all kinds of other things.”

One of the challenges they had to deal with was a global pandemic — but getting through the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 proved to be another opportunity for sibling teamwork. At the time, slaughter plants were shutting down due to safety restrictions, and shipments of livestock stalled. Not one head that was ready to go to market was shipped out for a two-month period; normally, cattle would have been shipped out every week or two by the semi load, Michael said.

As the disruptions put a financial pinch on the market, they managed to find processors and began Ring Brothers Beef to sell quarters and halves, first through Facebook and by word of mouth, and then on their own website (ringbrothersbeef.com) where they sell ground beef, steaks, sirloin tip roast and beef sticks, and even their own business apparel. Items are available for delivery or pickup at the farm.

Getting into the meat business when they did came during a rise in demand for dry-aged beef, which helped them turn an economic downtown right-side-up again.

“We had this product that we were either going to lose a bunch of money on, or add value to,” Joseph said. “We aren’t people who sit idly by and let the world happen to us, and we try to have a lot of agency in the things that we do, so we just said: ‘What are we going to do about this?’”

Expanding their business footprint to other farms, the Rings started Nashua Ventures in 2024 to help farmers with tasks such as land clearing, driveway maintenance, equipment repair, gravel hauling, snow plowing and heavy fence line clean up. The Nashua name comes from the former Ogle County township that part of the Rings’ land is on (Nashua merged with Oregon Township in 1995).

Joseph also owns Ring DJ Service, emceeing several wedding receptions in the area. He also ran for Oregon Township Road Commissioner in 2024, but lost the close contest on the counting of mail-in ballots after Election Day.

“I think that a lot of the things that we do are designed around lifestyle, and being able to have an area where we can raise our families in and can foster community in the next circle out with our friends and neighbors,” Michael said. “That’s how we think about a lot of things, having a certain amount of agency about the way that we choose what to work on, intentionally, to design those things. If we’re able to work in areas that allow us some degree of freedom in that, then we can prioritize those things and manage our time.”

Diligence and determination, faith in their abilities, planning and prioritizing, and a firm family foundation: The journey from the brothers’ budding bovine business as children to their own cattle operation as adults is one that’s been full of choices for the Rings, with each decision they make focusing on the future and on the big picture — and with the family’s budding young poultry producers already waiting in the wings, the future of farming is likely to have members of the Ring family in the picture for years to come.

Find Ring Brothers Beef and Nashua Ventures on Facebook, or go to ringbrothersbeef.com to learn more about Joseph and Michael Ring’s cattle operation in rural Oregon and to shop for meat at its online store.