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You can only spread the shit so thick. That’s the headache, Tyler Graham was saying, getting the shit spread evenly across every acre, so the regulators who test the soil don’t accuse you of overshitting it. Spread too little and you end up with excess shit, which is a problem when you shovel fifty tons a week. Spread too much and something will set the regulators off—if not the nitrates, then the potassium; if not the potassium, then the sulfur. It’s always something with “the environmental people.”

Tyler was talking a lot about shit. He was doing an interview with a food journal called Southern Foodways Alliance about his grandfather’s cattle-feed yard, one of a handful of livestock businesses his family owned in the rolling hills east of Austin, Texas. The feed yard was an hour south in Gonzales, but luckily Tyler and his interviewer were on his family’s thirteen-hundred-acre horse farm in Tyler’s hometown of Elgin. Even with their heyday receding in the rearview, these stables remained the jewel in the Graham dynasty’s crown. They smelled better, too.

There wasn’t much to Elgin. The area had been settled in the 1800s by members of Stephen F. Austin’s “Little Colony,” who received land grants from the Mexican government to help make something of the Coahuila y Tejas state. The settlers escaped Comanche raids and survived the Texas Revolution, and in 1871, after a flood forced the Texas Central Railroad to alter its route, their colony became one of the few rail stops between Houston and Austin. Elgin, named for the area’s land commissioner, was born.

The population boom in trendy Austin, twenty-five miles to the west, eventually spilled into town some, finally giving the big-box stores reason to open out here. But even by Tyler’s day, downtown Elgin still consisted of just a couple of blocks of red-brick storefronts, including the train depot–turned–history museum and the musty offices of the town newspaper. The rest of Elgin was mostly covered with small, simple homes, some strip malls, and a lot of gnawed-on grassland.

Tyler seemed to love his hometown, and why not? He was a star here. His last name got that ball rolling.

Tyler’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Charles Graham, founded the Elgin Veterinary Hospital in the 1960s, catering to the cattle and horses that grazed central Texas. From there, Doc Graham built a livestock empire. Down in Gonzales, those thirty thousand cattle Tyler was talking about were fattened up on a mix of brewer’s grain and steamed flake corn, then sent off to slaughter. There was also a cattle-trucking company, a cattle-auction house, and a horse-auction house in Oklahoma.

But it was this ranch, Southwest Stallion Station, that really made the Graham name ring in the ears of central Texans. Doc Graham had started it back in the 1960s, and over the years his horses had been responsible, as runners or breeders, for $65 million in racetrack winnings.

The Texas ranching business wasn’t always kind. After cattle prices soared in the late 1980s, an oversupply of beef sent them plummeting, forcing ranchers across the country to thin or liquidate their herds. At the same time, peso devaluations in Mexico forced ranchers there to sell their beef for cheap, further flooding the American beef supply. The cattle industry limped through the 1990s; when Doc’s company applied for a $7 million credit line, the bank expressed concern about the business’s negative working capital. But things always rebounded. And Doc himself was well positioned to pass his wealth to future generations of Grahams. By the time his grandson, Tyler, went off to college in 2002, Doc Graham could list more than $30 million in assets on a personal financial statement.

In turn, Doc Graham always made sure to reinvest his money in the institutions that supported his interests. He donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates from both parties in Texas. After watching New Mexico and California become quarter-horse racing meccas, he successfully pressured reluctant Texas lawmakers to approve racetrack gambling. He also pledged enough money to his alma mater, Texas A&M, to get a campus street named after him. He was a member of the Texas Horse Racing Hall of Fame and the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame, and soon he would be inducted into the Texas Cowboy Hall of Fame, alongside Nolan Ryan, Tommy Lee Jones, and George Strait.

Like a lot of successful cowboys, Doc Graham was feared, too, and always game for a fight. He’d sued a neighbor over a road that their properties shared, and he’d sued two business partners. Just recently, he’d sued his own bankers, over some seemingly private and vaguely derogatory comments they’d made about his cattle operation. (The parties agreed to dismiss the case.)

Doc’s intensity even appeared to affect his prized stud farm. During the 1980s, Southwest Stallion Station had been the dominant quarter-horse breeding farm in Texas, a page-after-page presence in sales books and industry publications. As Doc bragged to clients, its success was in no small part owed to the farm manager at the time, David Graham, who was Doc’s son and Tyler’s father. David was a workhorse, springing into action whenever a potential stud showed itself on the track. But by the 1990s, David Graham had left Southwest Stallion, a split he attributed to the difficulties of working for Doc. He now ran a small feed-and-supply shop in Elgin. According to David, he and Doc rarely spoke.

“Being a Graham ain’t easy,” Tyler’s daddy liked to say, but for better or worse the Graham name went some distance in paving the way for Tyler. To his credit, though, Tyler didn’t just live in the shadow of Doc Graham’s big white hat or David Graham’s commanding personality. From a young age, he formed his own shadow, in the best place a central Texas kid could: under a flood of Friday-night lights.

Tyler went to Elgin High, the same school where his dad had played quarterback and been a champion roper. Tyler had a thick neck, and he could muster a stern, don’t-fuck-with-this glare on picture day. He played receiver and cornerback, the positions dictated by his six-foot-tall, 165-pound frame.

After high school, Tyler moved on to Texas A&M, just like his granddaddy, and studied animal science. He graduated and came back to Elgin. With Tyler’s dad out of the family business, the Graham empire was Tyler’s to inherit if he wanted it. Now, at twenty-four, he had become the manager of all of Doc’s businesses. It was a big enough job that he’d been asked to give this interview to Southern Foodways. “We’re double-stacking cattle,” he was saying now. “We’re building pens as fast as we can build them, buying land—every piece of land we can pretty much put our hands on.”

Along with managing the cattle business, Tyler longed to return Southwest Stallion Station to its former glory. But it had been four decades since Doc Graham founded his stallion business, and things had changed. Breeding had modernized. Without Doc’s son, David, to keep up with the technology—to keep up with the times—Southwest Stallion Station had fallen behind.

Every stud farm needs a stud to hang its name on. In California, First Down Dash anchored a famous ranch called Vessels Stallion Farm. In Oklahoma, Lazy E was the dominant breeder, thanks to a topflight stud called Corona Cartel. In Texas, Mr Jess Perry had helped turned the Four Sixes (6666) Ranch into the state’s new top dog.

Southwest Stallion Station, meanwhile, had next to nothing. And for Tyler, the simple reality was that as much fun as it would be to run a major stud farm, it was fattening up those thirty thousand cattle that paid the bills. Feed ’em, shovel their shit, and on to the next. “This is where I started and that’s where I’m at,” Tyler told his interviewer.

At least until a good stud came along.