Texas Cattle Feeders Association members are invited to join any of the following webinars, presented by the TCFA Finance and Taxation Committee. You can register here. If you have questions, please contact Josh Winegarner at josh@tcfa.org or Savanna Barksdale at savanna@tcfa.org.

By: Carmen Fenton, Director of Communications

No two days are ever the same for Armondo De La Cruz. He has learned to expect the unexpected.

“If a truck breaks down, everything stops,” he says.

The feedyard depends on De La Cruz to keep machinery and vehicles operating. He has worked at the feedyard for 35 years doing a number of jobs from throwing hay, batching and loading, to calling feed. But he thrives in work that requires meticulous and steady hands.

“We run the shop department,” he says. “We do the maintenance on the trucks, brakes, water pumps, anything that we need to do. The feed trucks, the corn haulers and the vehicles here in the yard.”

His dad, a mechanic by trade, moved his family from Laredo to Hereford when De La Cruz was a young boy. It was his dad who gave De La Cruz his first lesson in mechanics. That is something he has passed on to both of his sons.
 
“My dad was a mechanic, and that’s where I learned,” Cruz says. “And I got my younger son here now, and he’s learning. And my older son, he also worked here with me.”
 
Hereford is home for De La Cruz and his family. He and his wife raised three children (two sons and a daughter) in the area. Now, they have grandkids, which De La Cruz says is “awesome” since you can sugar them up and send them back to their parents.

When asked what advice he would give to a young man or woman wanting to get into the mechanical field, he smiles and says, “Just love what you do, and the rest will take care of itself.”
 
It is clear that advice helped Cruz along the way.

​“I mean it sounds corny,” he says. “But if you like it, that’s good. And then if you can crack a smile on your face every day, it’s probably better stuff.”