Raising a 'True Cattleman’s Bull': The Iron Pin Ranch Story
- Dallas Duncan
- 7 days ago
- 9 min read
“How’d they do?”
It’s the first question cattleman Gary Harvin asks when Custom Livestock Solutions veterinarian Dr. Faith Chamlee, DVM, steps into his office after testing bulls. All but one passed their breeding soundness exams, which leads to his next question.
“What do I need to do different, so he’ll pass next time?”
That’s the spirit behind every ounce of beef produced at Iron Pin Ranch in Comer, Georgia: find what works and home in on it, even if it’s not what everyone else in the industry is doing. The quality is something Dr. Tyson Strickland, DVM, large animal veterinarian and CLS founder, admires about Gary and his wife, Stephanie.
“They do a good job with being progressive-minded and not being closed-off to new ideas,” Strickland says. “I think Gary and Stephanie both do a nice job of challenging some of those things and really testing those hypotheses out through their management systems and through their cattle operations.”
Both Iron Pin Ranch and CLS turn 10 this year, and both the Harvins and Strickland say they’ve learned a lot from one another in this first decade together. They met when Gary found a CLS ad in Georgia Cattleman magazine.
“I reached out to him. Said, ‘Hey, we’re completely green at this. We’ve got this herd of cows that we bought. We’d like to look at maybe making some of them recips. We’d like to work them, vaccinate them, see what we got, evaluate them, see if they’re even pregnant,” he says.
They had one head gate in the middle of 40 acres on their first farm in Jackson County. Strickland came out, assessed the situation and the herd, and came up with a farm plan. He feels God had a hand in putting them together.
“It was a great opportunity because I was a new veterinarian, new graduate, wanting to get out and prove myself,” he says. “They were eager to learn, but wanting to develop their own program with their cattle operation. It was a really neat fit to come into, the timing of it all, for both of us. I felt like it was one of those things that we were both put in each other’s lives at the appropriate time.”
This relationship played a part in Iron Pin Ranch relocating to Comer. Shortly after Strickland purchased Comer Veterinary Hospital in 2018, the Harvins found themselves in a legal dispute with neighbors who didn’t want to live next door to a beef cattle farm. On top of all that, one of their beloved dogs had passed away and was to be cremated through the small animal clinic. Stephanie had to drive to Comer to pick the ashes up. She rode around the city for a while, and was sold. Gary was easily convinced.
“All of the cards are stacked in the deck. We’ve got great people out here. We’ve got a great vet right here next to us,” Gary says. “It’s like I’ve got my own vet supply store five minutes from my house. I can go the night before I’ve got to do something, go the morning of, and get what I need.”
The CLS vets aim to support the Harvins’ goals by providing quality animal care and herdwork.
“We try to plug in our services where they match their goals, so really a lot of it hinges around reproduction, embryo work, genetic selection, discussing things there, then again providing some management services along with that, that gives them the data they need to make decisions and continue to move their herd forward,” Strickland says. “I feel like I’ve really seen them progress from doing [direct-to-consumer sales], really swinging back into the cow side of things, the cow genetics, and really looking at fertility and longevity, and still tying all that within the Angus breed and cattle that work in the Southeast.”
The Date That Wasn’t
Iron Pin Ranch’s story began more than 20 years ago, when Gary and Stephanie were in high school. They knew of each other peripherally — Stephanie was friends with Gary’s sister — but didn’t formally meet until Stephanie’s sister called her with a proposition.
“She said, ‘So-and-so wants to go out on a date. I don’t wanna go by myself. Will you come with me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I guess I’ll third party,’” Stephanie recalls. Her sister promised to have her date bring a friend, too.
That friend, seated across from Stephanie at Applebee’s, turned out to be Gary.
“Haven’t been apart from her a day yet,” he says.
Six months later, the two were married, and their first son was on the way. Even then, with respective careers in surveying and real estate, neither Gary nor Stephanie could have predicted where they’d wind up a quarter-century later.
“I don’t know that either one of us wanted to get in the cattle business first. It hit us like a brick wall,” Stephanie says.
They’d been purchasing land in Jackson County, and intended to buy a 45-acre tract.
“It had a commercial herd on it of Limousins and black-and-whites and dairy cows. It had an Angus bull on it. Basically, the old fellow that had it said, ‘Yeah, I’ll owner-finance it to you’, and gave me a sweet deal on it,” Gary says. “He gave us this great opportunity and he said, ‘Oh, by the way, you gotta buy the cows, too, and I’ll finance those to you as well.’”
First came the cows, then came the brand name.
“We live and die in the land surveying industry by finding an iron pin. It kind of represents the integrity of the property, the integrity of the core, the integrity of the man that put it there,” Gary says. “We joked around about it, that we paid for the ranch by finding iron pins. It became Iron Pin Ranch.”
It did have to be “ranch”, not “farm”. For someone who spent time in Texas growing up, Gary thought “ranch” was more apropos for a cattle operation.
Despite their marketing prowess from the start, the Harvins admit they had no clue what they were getting into. At one point, Gary was tossed in the air “like a rag doll rodeo clown” and run over by a mama cow that didn’t want him tagging her calf. That’s about the time that they started reaching out to registered breeders for some guidance, and landed with Rocking W Angus in Commerce, Georgia.
“They really mentored us,” Stephanie says. “I think that’s how we just naturally turned to being mentors, too. It was never really in our mind to do that. It was just a natural thing. Somebody taught us; now it’s our turn to teach somebody, too.”
She and Gary have taken on multiple interns and embraced the Madison County High School’s job shadow days, determined to engage more youth in agriculture before they, too, find themselves blindly becoming first-generation cattle raisers in their mid-30s.
A Brief Foray into Beef
In 2020, when the ranch was 4 years old and newly relocated to Madison County, they sent some bulls out West for a production sale. A few failed their semen tests, which helped persuade Gary and Stephanie to pursue a different way of marketing those bulls. Instead of selling them to fellow producers, they’d try out the direct-to-consumer beef market.
“We had a lot of carcass-grade cattle here and we needed to feed through them, and find the best way to make money with them,” Gary says.
Stephanie says the best part about that experiment was the friendships made. It was a lot of labor and a lot of love to make something as successful as it was, and it filled a gap caused by store closures and high prices during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Selling beef brought more folks out to the farm and helped put the Iron Pin name on the map in Comer, but ultimately the Harvins decided to pivot.
“After the beef business, we were kind of lost. We knew we wanted to stay in the lifestyle — like, this was what we loved! — but we didn’t know what direction,” Stephanie says.
She asked her husband to niche down on what he really wanted to do in the cattle business, and told him that’s where they needed to go.
“What we always wanted to do was sell the genetics. The problem was that we were following other people’s leads on it. We had to make our own,” Gary says. “We didn’t want a bull that would top Select Sires’ roster. We weren’t interested in the studs coming to buy from us. We weren’t interested in another Angus breeder coming and saying, ‘I gotta have this bull.’ We were interested in the guy that’s got 30 cows, or the guy that’s got 300 cows, that we can help put money in their pocket and that we can develop a relationship with.”
In true Harvin form, they invested in the crème de la crème and hired Dr. Allen Stateler, Ph.D., as a beef cattle nutritionist. Stateler reportedly arrived in Comer, took one look at the feed program, and told the Harvins they were in trouble, and it might take years to rebuild.
“It was kind of disheartening,” Gary says. “He had worked with some really top-name Angus, registered outfits across the country, and I know he’s seen the good. He’s seen the bad, and we were definitely ugly.”
Also in true Harvin form, they dove in on following Stateler’s advice and invested in embryos from a Nebraska outfit he recommended. They dialed in on nutrition and had the CLS vets get their breeding and herd health protocols streamlined.
“I worked my butt off. This is do or die,” Gary says. “I mean, I was taking pictures of cow manure and sending it to Dr. Stateler daily. When we had CIDRs in, when we were getting ready to implant — ‘What do I need to do? How can I do this the best I can?’ I’ve got the best team around me, but If I don’t perform with what these educated people are telling me, then it’s gonna be a trainwreck.”
In 2022, the embryos went in. In 2023, those calves hit the ground. Two years later, those bulls went to market, and several found acclaim at the 2025 Georgia Bull Test sale in Tifton.
“When we changed this dynamic, the focus was always to sell the bulls to just hardworking individuals that would keep them on the land, put more money in their pocket, and keep this whole deal that we’re trying to keep going — meaning ag in Georgia — from disappearing,” Gary says.
The Iron Pin-nacle
Something unexpected happened recently when the Harvins dropped off a bull to its buyer.
“As I go through the bull pen when we delivered, he’s got two bulls he bought from Coleman in Montana. He’s got two bulls from Connealy in Nebraska. These are top Angus producers. Two bulls he got from Partisover through The Source sale down there. And then my bull,” Gary says. “So, my bull’s good enough to go sit side-by-side by these top Angus breeders this guy’s buying bulls from? That was pretty cool for me to see.”
The buyer told Gary instead of artificial insemination this year, he plans to put the Iron Pin Ranch bull on his heifers.
“That’s pretty rewarding to me that my genetics were good enough and bold enough,” Gary says.
Those genetics have brought Iron Pin Ranch, ironically, back to where it started. In 2016, knowing that good bulls needed “jam-up” cows behind them, he added 10 females to the herd from a dispersal sale. Reflecting on that time, Gary says a part of him wishes that he’d invested in more quality than quantity by only purchasing animals that would enhance Iron Pin Ranch’s reputation.
“God had given us those tools in 2016, but we didn’t know what we had,” he says. “I decided to go buy other cows in other places when really I had all I needed from the first place.”
A strength Strickland sees at Iron Pin Ranch is the type of cattle in the herd. Sure, they’re primarily Angus and they fit the Harvins’ production goals, but they’re also cattle bred for Georgia’s environment: moderate type with good feet, good udders, good confirmation, and selected for fertility.
“If these girls don’t work, they don’t stay there,” Strickland says. “[The Harvins] are really wanting to maximize the true value of these animals. … Part of that is, obviously, you gotta have a calf every year. Otherwise, there’s no data to measure, no traits, no beef to consume.”
The Harvins credit their success with a cultivation of industry relationships. On that list are the Finch family, whose owner-financing got them started in the first place; the team at Rocking W Angus; fellow Angus producer Johnathan Wells of Berry-Wells Farm; and a whole host of cattlefolk that have spent decades building their legacies.
Right now, Gary and Stephanie are growing their own legacy in multiple directions. Their surveying business, which Gary still oversees and is as hands-on with as possible, is going through an expansion period. Balancing that with trying to be just as hands-on in the cattle business isn’t ever easy, especially with most of the cattle work falling to Stephanie and part-time staff these days. But they make it work as best they can, and are busily planning ahead for the next calf crop. They’re breeding for 2027 babies that’ll go to market in 2028, and hope those bulls are viewed as powerhouses for the Harvins’ target audience.
“What would I wish for? Top the market at Tifton next year and just keep making those statements,” Gary says. “It’s a never-ending journey trying to figure out what the commercial cattleman’s willing to buy.”
Custom Livestock Solutions is Georgia’s proven source for premiere herd health and management services. Our vets serve large animal herds, show barns and stables in the Peach State and nearby neighbors in South Carolina. Visit us in Comer Monday through Friday from 9 to 5, or call 706-783-8128 to learn more.
