Six years ago, Tori O’Neal faced a vexing choice – did she want to take over her family ranch in the Pahsimeroi Valley?
Her father, Ben, had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He died in three months.
“Yeah, It was completely unexpected,” O’Neal says.
The O’Neal Family hadn’t done any advance planning for how the ranch would be handed down to the next generation. It’s a daunting task, called Ranch Succession Planning.
“There’s nothing quite like going through one of the toughest parts of your life while you’re grieving and basically expected to go through all the legal paperwork and tax paperwork and planning for your future,” she says.
Tori’s Mom, Lynette, and her late father, Ben, on the ranch, with their dog, Bucky.
But in talking with her mother and brother, their priority was to keep the ranch in the family as a working ranch.
“It really is important if you value a place that you get on board with your whole family and try and figure out what the priority is, and for us, it’s keeping this as agricultural working land, it’s keeping this as open space, not seeing it turned into subdivisions and taken out of production,” O’Neal says.
Turns out that Tori would be the perfect person to take over the family ranch. She had grown up in the Pahsimeroi Valley, which cast a spell over her. “Nothing quite measures up to the Pahsimeroi Valley, if this is where you’re born and raised.”
She got a degree in political science from Boise State.
“I’ve always leaned more into maybe being able to speak and talk about where I’m coming from, and so political science and lobbying, and kind of the policy side, it really appealed to me,” O’Neal says.
After college, she followed a boyfriend to California and landed a job with Bolthouse Farms, focusing on food science for eight years.
Tori on her ranch with her dog, Nellie.
Then she returned to Idaho, creating new products for Basic American Foods in Blackfoot. “For the last year, she’s been working on inventing new ways to enjoy instant mashed potatoes,” former Local News 8 anchor Karole Honas says in a story on O’Neal at the time.
So when O’Neal had the opportunity to take over the family ranch, she was already thinking about “Pasture to Plate” – growing food to sell directly to consumers.
She joined the Desert Mountain Grassfed Beef Cooperative and dove right in, putting her own stamp on her family’s cattle-ranching operation. She switched to fall calving right away, giving her calves a full year to grow, and increasing marketing flexibility.
“They were marketing a product that I found really appealing on the grass-fed side, and really emphasizing sustainability, not just from building soil health, but also sustainability of our small operators. How do we demand a more premium price? How do we insulate ourselves from the ups and downs of the commodity market?”
O’Neal is diversifying the ranch, that’s how. She’s added a sheep herd, goats, ducks and chickens, creating new products like lamb, goat cheese, and pasture-raised chickens along with grassfed beef.
“The way I envision it, because I want to keep this sustainable ranch, it’s a small ranch. Instead of looking at one big endeavor to pay for everything, do I have another little endeavor that can bring in $5,000 to $10,000 extra dollars? What do I have here and there to develop?”
“These are my milking goats,” she says, showing us some cute little goats born less than a week ago.
What kind of cheese do they produce? “I’ve started with the soft cheeses, mozzarella, Colby Jack, Colby.”
O’Neal with two, week-old milking goats.
She also has a sheep herd, raising lambs for pasture-to-plate customers. “I found that sheep have a really, really unique and interesting niche,” she says. “And another luxury of being in Idaho, you know, and right, right below that whole Darby to Missoula area of Montana, and close to Sun Valley, is there’s quite a demand for meat grown, you know, in a local way, grown in a way that builds soil health, and then obviously tastes fantastic.”
So O’Neal is creating her own niche with her locally grown food – from the farm and the range. She’s also jumped into leadership roles to promote soil health, clean water and sustainability. She’s a supervisor on the Custer Soil and Water Conservation District Board, and she’s the current President of the Idaho Association of Soil Conservation Districts.
She’s stepping up to lead for future generations of farmers and ranchers in Idaho.
“Community service is such a huge thing that we cannot afford to pass on being in the agricultural community. It’s where you get your voice heard, it’s where you make an impact, and really, that’s critical to keeping your operation going.”
Tori speaks at the University of Idaho Rangeland Center Fall Forum meeting in Salmon, Idaho, Fall 2025
Serving in leadership has paid dividends in terms of learning from her peers, too.
For example, she was inspired by the wide variety of pasture-to-plate products at the McIntyre Farm in Caldwell while doing a conservation tour.
Their motto is “Your health starts with our soil.” That resonates with O’Neal.
“I think we understand the sustainability of our natural resources and soil health is key to sustainability of the operation,” she says. “I would say our agricultural community, more than ever, is committed to it.”
“Your health starts with our soil” is the message from McIntyre Farms in Caldwell.
McIntyre Farms inspired O’Neal about raising pastured chickens. “I love food, and I love good food, and I love seeing it raised right. So, we’ll give it a go.”She raised 50 chickens last year; she’s planning on doubling that this year.
An unexpected benefit is that the chickens do a great job of noxious weed control.
“Well, a cool thing about chickens is they churn up ground like nobody’s business, and will eat anything on it,” she notes. “And I found if you would just feed those chicks along your thistles … you’d pretty much annihilate your thistles, and you could replant behind them.”
O’Neal likes using her cattle to improve the soil at the home ranch and on their federal rangelands in Morgan Creek.
O’Neal cattle at the home ranch. The cattle spend the summer on the Morgan Creek range on Forest Service land.
“The cattle are fantastic for building up organic matter and putting nutrients in the soil,” she says. “I think the soil health started when I started kind of going down the rabbit hole of using livestock holistically as part of the carbon cycle. If we keep the carbon cycle completed like it’s supposed to be, you know the cattle put back not just your fertilizer, they put back microbes that the soil needs, and it’s more about responsible grazing and building that.”
On the Morgan Creek Range, O’Neal uses a rest-rotation grazing system for her cattle, resting one-third the range each year. Her grazing association hires range riders to keep her cows away from sensitive fish-spawning areas as well.
O’Neal enjoys serving on the Custer District Board and leading the IASCD.
“I realized these soil conservation districts are such a fantastic way to be an advocate and a voice for how we use state money, how we bring in funds from other sources, and we really protect working lands and natural resources,” she says.
Tori, second from right, is a member of the Custer Soil and Water Conservation District Board of Supervisors.
Last year, O’Neal partnered with the Custer Soil and Water Conservation District to install a mobile K-Line irrigation system to improve 30 acres of pasture on her ranch.
The new K-Line irrigation system is improving water quality by reducing sediment runoff by 17.3 tons per year. The project also is more water-efficient, saving about 9.8 inches of water per month.
The mobile K-Line irrigation system, funded with a Water Quality Program for Agriculture (WQPA) grant, restored meadow and pasture habitat on the O’Neal ranch.
It’s important for people to know how conservation districts are helping landowners install voluntary, non-regulatory projects that improve the environment, she says. “Because once you tell someone, they’re like, okay, we’re on board. This is a good model. So I’m really passionate about sharing that story and helping other districts.”
O’Neal appreciates all of the educational resources provided by the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission, too. She’d like to share those resources with conservation districts around the state. All of the Districts work on education outreach in their communities.
“I would love to work with the Rangeland Commission and conservation districts in a partnership to get that information out to folks because we live in a state where a lot of people moved here because they love it too, and we can’t expect that they know why we do what we do,” she says. “I think bringing other folks in and understanding the value of it is super important.”
Overall, O’Neal wants to make sure that we preserve working ranches and open spaces in Idaho for a strong and sustainable future.
“If we want to plan for the next generation, the next five generations, we need to start looking at how we want Idaho to look, and where we want to preserve these big open working lands now, because if we wait another 5 to 10 years, it might not be an option,” she says.
Steve Stuebner is the Writer and Producer of Life on the Range, a public education project sponsored by the Idaho Rangeland Resources Commission.
© 2026