There may be life off the ranch, but any Fremont County farmer or rancher will tell you – The #aglife is “the good life!” #Aglife is a County 10 series, brought to you by Wyoming Community Bank, that pulls the curtain back on farm and ranch life in Fremont County.
You might call him a “Wyoming Renaissance Man.” A Renaissance Man, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a person who is well-rounded, gifted, and talented in many diverse areas. Paul Downey of rural Shoshoni is all of that.
The 1983 graduate of Shoshoni High School lives on the family farm in Missouri Valley, just a few miles west of the intersection with U.S. Highway 26.
Joe and Lillian Downey homesteaded the original 160 acres in 1936 after moving from Anselmo, Nebraska, a small town near Broken Bow.
Paul’s father, Louis, was born in Anselmo in 1929 and moved with the family as a seven-year-old.
Louis married Esther Romero of Riverton, and the young couple took over the farm.
Paul has a younger brother, Richard, and a sister, Lillian.
“We’re all adopted,” Paul said.
Louis and Esther added another 320 acres to the original homestead, and that is what Paul farms today.
There are 390 irrigated acres planted in corn, oats, barley, and alfalfa.
Paul Downey is a man of many talents, a gifted machinist, welder, fabricator, farmer, and a wizard at the smoker and grilling meat.
He’s never had formal training in any of these trades. He is entirely self-taught.
“Dad broke his back when I was 12, in early spring,” Paul said. “It was our responsibility, mine and Richard, who was 11, to do the farming.”
Louis fell off the roof of their home, adjusting the TV antenna while trying to bring in a better signal from KTWO in Casper.
He has welded in the oil field from 1986 to the present day.
In 1993, Paul began fabricating fire trucks with his business, Wyoming Fire Equipment Fabrication, Inc.
“I built the first shop, then started building firetrucks for the Fremont County Fire District,” Paul said. “I eventually built everything they had.”
He built equipment for other fire departments as well, across Wyoming and into Montana.
A cab and chassis with an engine would arrive, and Paul would do the rest.
“Every one of them was engine specific, some had commercial Dodge, Ford, and GMC,” Paul said. “I worked on a few Freightliners and Army Surplus deuce-and-a-half trucks.”
Paul designed, built, and installed pumps, plates, tool boxes, and the controls that firetrucks utilize. A firetruck is a complicated piece of equipment, and he designed, built, or added every feature.
“My first firetruck was built off three bar napkins,” Paul shared. “The Chief and Assistant Chief of the Kemmerer Fire Department sat down with me in a Kemmerer tavern, drew the design on the napkins, and we built a fire truck.”
Paul fabricated fire trucks from 1993 to 2000.
“I got tired of the politics. A lot of the fire districts were being formed and didn’t get along with the fire departments,” Paul said. “The oil field was taking off, so I started welding on the rigs.”
Paul’s shop is a full production facility with an overhead crane and a large powder coating station. He custom designs, builds, and welds a variety of implements, tools, stands, and overhead cranes.
He built the shop with the help of his friend Cory Clemetson, who has a farm about six miles southwest. Cory is a shop teacher at Shoshoni High Schoo,l but previously ran a company creating individual kitchen counter tops. Cory and Paul played basketball together in high school for the Shoshoni Wranglers.
“If I don’t answer the phone, the neighbors just drop off a piece of equipment in front of the door and contact me later,” Paul said.
Paul has two daughters, Sarah, who graduated in 2006, and Miranda, a 2009 graduate, and a son Mike, who lives in Casper.
Sarah works for UPS in Chadron and has a hemp production operation. She grows hemp, then processes it into CBD oil in her own facility.
Miranda works as a nail technician in Riverton. She and her husband and three children live behind Paul’s shop on the north end of the place.
The grandchildren are Mason (16), a student at Riverton High School, and the six-year-old twins Maverick and Harrison.
Paul’s son, Louis, lives with him. The 14-year-old takes classes from the farm through the Wyoming Virtual Academy.
Oats and barley are grown for feed, and corn is combined into shell corn, also for feed. There are 68 acres in alfalfa.
“I custom grind chicken and cattle feed for customers,” Paul said.
His custom chicken feed is prepared in a tub grinder attached to one of his tractors. He mixes oats, barley, corn, and leafy alfalfa to produce a protein-rich poultry feed.
That’s not quite all that Paul Downey does on the farm.
He has two pet Holstein cows.
“They were sold as steers, but I told the guy, ‘Nope, they’re female,’” Paul said. “I intended to breed them, but by the time I got around to it, they were too tall. They stand 16 or 17 hands (almost five feet), so now they’re just pets.”
He also has a herd of eight yaks. One bull, named Case IH, four cows, and three calves.
He sells the calves and has processed the market steers. They’re smaller than beef cattle, weighing around 600 pounds when they’re grown.
“I like the flavor,” Paul said. “They taste like lean beef.”
Paul knows something of flavor as well. He smokes and barbecues for family reunions, weddings, and funerals. He’s prepared 32 hogs so far this year for various functions.
Paul raises hogs in a separate section from the cows and yaks.
He has 16 sows and produces between 270 and 300 pigs each year.
“My dad told me a long time ago that you better go to school and be diversified,” Paul said.
Diversified he is.
His operation is a good mix of old and new technology.
He grows about 120 acres of alfalfa and corn under one pivot, but throws tubes, 140 of them twice a day from a cement ditch to irrigate a new stand of alfalfa planted with a mixed cover crop of oats and barley.
Midvale shut off the water in early September, but Paul’s third cutting of alfalfa is tall and just beginning to bloom.
“I’ll cut it after the first frost,” he said.
He is combining grain in one field, but the recent rains set him back. The top is dry but it’s still wet underneath.
The field has a lot of kochia.
He windrows first, then combines after it’s dry.
“The weeds dry out and break up a lot better this way,” Paul said. “It makes the grain a lot cleaner.”
That grain is fed to his hogs and sold to customers.
Paul has a mix of older, well-maintained equipment in his New Holland swathers, tractors, balers, and other implements.
Being as adept and skilled at metalworking as he is, he can take a broken piece of equipment and return it to functionality in his shop. He purchased a New Holland 1112 swather earlier this summer that had one of the PTO shafts torn up in an accident. Paul purchased it at a low price and will fabricate a new PTO shaft on his metal lathe, creating a part that is as good as new and that isn’t available any longer through New Holland.
If that wasn’t enough, he runs a truck around the state and into Nebraska.
His mainstay is fabrication, metal work, and welding, but farming has been good for the last couple of years.
“The farm has paid for itself,” Paul said.
From 2015 to 2019, during a boom in the oil field, he had 49 people on his payroll full-time and another 19 part-time workers.
In the fickle world of energy production in Wyoming, you have to ride the good years with the bad.
Diversification has made Paul Downey’s operation a unique, profitable enterprise.
Market hogs, firetrucks, rig welding, hay, grain, smoked meats, all delivered with a grin and a can-do, helpful attitude.
Fremont County’s “Renaissance Man.”