About Us
The Hanging H is a small, family oriented ranch in a historically interesting part of Western Nebraska. Nestled between the rolling sandhills and several miles of the South Platte River, the ranch sits amongst historical crossings of the American frontier, including the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail, the Pony Express route and the Northern cattle trail.
In addition to raising a limited number of high quality Quarter Horses and registered Angus Cattle with the best genetics we can produce, we are interested in conservation of the natural resources and preservation of our Nebraska way of life.
The ranch is the result of three failed attempts to retire from a successful career in the data processing world. Ultimately, I decided the answer wasn’t retirement, but rather building a new career doing what I’ve always loved. I was born and raised in Nebraska and probably grew up dreaming about ranching a lot more than I ever dreamed of business. Today, we return to Nebraska by choice, because that is where the river bottoms and sandhills are, and where home has always been.
Patrick Stokey is our Ranch Manager and Foreman. Pat and his wife, Kylee, come from a long history of ranching and horsemanship in this part of the country and the Stokey “ranch kids” and others like them are an important part of carrying on the tradition. Patrick is responsible for all day-to-day operations.
We have just completed a significant project with Ducks Unlimited involving the cleanup and restoration of 3 miles of the South Platte River. We have also restored badly abused pastureland and taken marginal cropland out of production and turned it into first class upland game habitat. It has been a fascinating and ongoing project to be able to transform this resource back to an area that supports abundant wildlife, thousands of migrating waterfowl as well as effective farming and ranching operations.
We are proud to support our Nebraska way of life and we believe the best way to do that is to help create economic opportunities in our area. Most importantly, we strive to support young people and help expose them to and involve them in our conservation efforts and in activities like 4-H, local rodeo, land management and other positive activities.