MARION – The road to All Mosta Ranch is long and winding, an apt way to begin a trip to a place where everyone living there ended up out of a sheer determination to exist, with a little compassion and love thrown in for good measure.
It’s a hard-scrabble ranch in a clearing cut out of young pine trees, where a gigantic bull named Peanut lows and sings friendly greetings from his side of a fence and the turkeys gobble across the yard from mischievous goats and bleating sheep, where dogs in blaze orange vests wait patiently to roam, and floppy-eared rabbits have the run of the place.
It’s also where Kate and Brian Borton have made their home, among their rescued animal companions, who cover the gamut of farm animals, from fowl to livestock.
“Every animal here was either born here or rescued,” Kate Borton said.
The All Mosta Ranch is home to rescued farm animals that, were it not for this place, were most certainly headed toward death. Now, they have names and individual personalities, creating a safe place where animals are treated with respect and dignity, and people can learn how to treat them so.
Each critter has its own story of how it got here, but most come from neglect, abuse, or from owners who just couldn’t afford to feed or house them anymore.
“They give so much here to the community. They have a purpose,” Borton, who also goes by Granny, said. “When they have no purpose somewhere else, they do here.”
As she takes visitors on a tour of the farm, Borton stops at every fence line, a veritable celebrity among the animals, mostly because of how she’s cared for them, but a little bit because the pack buckled around her waist is full of treats for them.
Borton makes sure each creature lining up at the fence for a treat gets one, and she coos and chides as the crowds get rowdy. She’s the only one allowed into the pen with Gus the tusked pot-bellied pig, the only one he trusts.
In fact, it was a pig that started it all for Borton, years ago after she’d suffered a devastating head injury that stole her memories, her balance, and most of the life she’d built. She languished in recovery, struggling to find inspiration to go about the extremely difficult task of healing until she met Betty, the skinny pot-bellied pig.
Just saying Betty’s name causes Borton to choke up, a clear reverence for her animal friend visible in her weather-lined face. When she found her, Betty was very starved, Borton said, and she also found two tiny baby goats destined for the “death pile” at a livestock auction.
She picked up those goats and held them to her chest, knowing they deserved a chance to make it, just like she did. Borton carried those two in a baby pouch until they were big enough to be on their own, and nursed Betty back to health.
Her husband, Brian, took the reins when he saw his wife react to the animals.
“I’ve always been a caretaker,” she said. “And he told me if I didn’t feed them and take care of them, they would die. Nobody else was allowed to.”
Suddenly, Borton had a reason to get out of bed.
“I began healing,” she said. “They were my therapy.”
Since then, All Mosta has been located in Columbia Falls, Plains, and now its Marion location, where it has laid roots for the last eight years. In 2003, All Mosta received its nonprofit 501(c)3 status, and the Bortons receive more than 900 visitors to the ranch, which also serves as an education center, each year. These visitors either drop by for an afternoon to learn about the animals, or they stay days or weeks to volunteer. Vince and Rachel Williams of Missouri are living there to help out, now that the Bortons are aging.
Like any nonprofit, All Mosta is dependent on donations to get along. They were lucky to have locked in the amount of hay they needed, given the poor growing year, but there are still needs. Currently, grain is the hot ticket; donations can be made through the ranch’s distributor, Hedstrom, by calling 406-261-7545. The grain will be delivered to the ranch, and the donor will receive a tax-deduction receipt.
There are about 67 heads of livestock on the ranch, and they’ve each got their own story. There’s Olivia, the 800-pound pig who enjoys a good scratch with a broom and who has generously given up a corner of her heated home to a mother hen and her extremely late brood of chicks; Olivia helps keep the chicks warm, and has been known to knock over her own food bowl to feed them.
On the other side of the barn, 16-year-old goat Bailey holds court with an impressive set of horns, and the nearby pasture of horses are munching on a mountain of hay laid on top of the snow. If you aren’t careful while riding sweet Howie, a former racetrack and barrel racer, he’ll fall back to his barrel racing days and take you for a ride, winding around any available tree trunk.
The Bortons hope to adopt out the animals at the ranch, but if not, then to give them a full life until they die of old age. That, and living free from fear or abuse or neglect, is a gift they can offer their companions.
And in return, the animals give the one thing they were denied prior to living here: happiness.
“It’s an awesome feeling, making these animals happy,” Vince Williams said.
For more information on All Mosta Ranch, visit www.AllMostaRanch.org.