COVER STORY: N.D. ranch wife builds a rural life dream

Mikkel Pates,Agweek
Published: 09/21/2009

MCLEOD, N.D. — The welding helmet flips up, and the brown curls come out.

You can almost hear the song “What a Feeling,” from the old 1983 flick, “Flashdance,” that depicted an orphan, blue-collar welder woman from Pittsburgh, who danced in lounges at night and longed for a career on the ballet stage.

Deb Sagvold is surely a lady, and she’s a welder, too.

“I can remember seeing that movie back then,” says Sagvold, who operates D&D Welding and Manufacturing on the family ranch in Ransom County. “My family almost never went to movies, but one we saw was ‘Oh, God,’ and the other was ‘Flashdance.’ It just made such an impression that a woman could be a welder.”

Deb, 43, and her husband, Daran, have been married for 16 years. They live the Rocking S Ranch near McLeod, N.D., on the edge of the famed Sheyenne National Grasslands.

Daran and Deb raise 300 head of beef cows on the grasslands and maintain a feedlot with about 1,000 head, including some custom feeding. They raise corn for combining and silage, and alfalfa and millet — all mostly for feedstuffs.

This is a story about a welding, yes, but it’s also about a circuitous route to happinesss.

“I have a wonderful life,” Sagvold says. “It’s far from perfect, but I love it. It shows you can turn around from hardship and learn from it. That’s what I live by.”

Fiddling around

Deb was born in 1965 in Oregon and raised in Washington. At age 11, she moved with her mother and stepfather to Benson, Ariz., east of Tucson.

Her stepfather was semi-retired. Her mother was a state fiddling champion in New Mexico and Arizona. Deb played guitar and fiddle, too, and from ages 12 to 17, she traveled to perform with her mother on a competitive circuit in the Southwest. The two also went on lengthy trail rides with the National Old-Time Fiddlers’ Association — from Arizona to Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

“I don’t want to encourage kids to drop out of high school, but that was a fantastic experience,” Deb says. “There are people in the group from all walks of life: doctors, lawyers, teachers and a few professional musicians. We cut a couple of albums and sold cassette tapes. I met people across the country in the music industry — production, radio, television.”

At age 17, Deb left the show and went back to Arizona. There, she obtained a graduate equivalency degree and married Steve, a local copper miner whose family was in the ranching business. Steve was killed in April 1988 in a motorcycle accident.

“I left Arizona,” she says. “I couldn’t stay.”

She moved back to Oregon to be near her maternal grandmother, who had been ailing with emphysema. Two weeks after Deb’s return, her grandmother died.

She was doubly deflated.

What a feeling

At first, Deb stayed in Oregon.

She worked in a cabinet shop and then got a job playing guitar and singing at a bar and grill. While there, she met a building contractor from Kathryn, N.D., who was working in the area.

They married and moved to Fort Ransom, N.D. She took a factory job at Bobcat and eventually trained as a welder. The marriage ended in 1992, but Deb came out of it with two daughters. She continued her welding job and car-pooled to Gwinner, N.D.

At the time, she found welding to be a good fit with being a young mother.

Initially, Bobcat didn’t require welders to work mandatory overtime, so she could more reliably be available for children’s schedules. The job paid relatively well and Deb kept her nose to the grindstone.

Through mutual friends, she met Daran Sagvold, a rancher from nearby McLeod.

“I don’t believe in love at first sight, but something was there from the first time we met,” Deb says. “It was just there.”

As a bonus, she immediately liked his parents, Ron and Marge, whose family has ranched in the area for 100 years. The home place had been known for its Herefords 1971 but shifted into registered Limousins in 1971. Today, the Sagvolds also cross Limousins some red Angus, to create “Lim-Flex” bulls for hybrid vigor, and another market outlet.

In 1993, Daran and Deb married.

Daran had a daughter from a previous marriage. Deb brought her two daughters and eventually they added Daniel, who now is in the sixth grade.

Early in the marriage, Deb continued at Bobcat. The girls attended a one-room schoolhouse in McLeod and she commuted to Gwinner.

Deb soon started a side enterprise when a neighbor asked her to weld some corral panels for him. At that time, there nothing on the market that was “worth a dang,” she declares.

“Most of it was cheap, 16-gauge steel panels that wouldn’t hold up. The neighbor asked me if I could come up with something. Daran and I discussed it. We settled on square tubing.”

She did the panel work in her spare time and on weekends.

One day, Deb asked to get off a couple of hours early from Bobcat to attend a daughter’s kindergarten graduation ceremony. No, she was told, they couldn’t make an exception.

That day, Deb started thinking seriously about going into business for herself.

The ranch side of the business was growing, too, so she decided to take the plunge and get into the welding business.

“I gave my notice at Bobcat and walked out the door,” she says. “It was the best move I’ve ever made, and I’ve never looked back.”

Seeing things square

Deb and Daran financed the new business through the ranch and started with old welding equipment. Eventually, they upgraded. The niche was continuous panels, which were new on the market at the time.

She built the panels from 1-inch square tubing, with 14- and 11-gauge thicknesses.

One-inch square tubing steel is formed in the press, so it lays across all of the interior bars and “folds” on the top and bottom. The uprights have a curve and she makes a vertical curve on either side.

“You don’t have to worry about raw steel edges at the top to damage livestock,” Deb says. “It makes it really, really strong — really stout. If you use round tubing, you’d generally lay a flat bar across it, but the flat steel is flimsy and there’s no strength in it from the side, which is where livestock stress them.”

Further, the continuous panels are provided with a 9-inch-long connectors. Deb used to crimp the connectors but later went to a spot weld.

“It’s more labor-intensive, but better,” she says.

The panels easily can be clipped to a wood post. They build two kinds of clips — one with three-eighth-inch holes for wood posts and one without for welding it on pipe.

D&D has refined its designs over the years. The vertical bars now have caps to prevent moisture getting into the leg bottoms on portable panels.

Each span between vertical pieces is 4 feet long, and the panels are built in 24-foot lengths. She’ll custom make end-panels to a specific length, when necessary, and custom-build gates of any size.

“We try and keep the panels as affordable as possible, so people like ourselves — cattle ranchers, struggling to make a living — can afford to have them.”

She follows the steel market closely and makes sure their prices reflect the cost of materials.

In mid-September, the price of a typical panel was about $155, based on a six-bar panel.

“It’s an affordable price. You can find panels more expensive; you can find them cheaper. But you’re going to get what you pay for,” she says.

Deb goes through about 12 to 20 loads of steel in a year. Each load is about 1,800 “sticks” and includes 18 bundles with about 100 of the 24-foot-long sticks.

D&D started in a 40-by-40-foot farm shop.

About six years ago, the Sagvolds built a new, 60-by-80-foot shop that has an overhead crane and an air cleaning system. Deb has two large metal-cutting saws a milling machine and a metal lathe. She has two big welders and a smaller, portable welder.

“It’s made all of the difference in the world,” she says of the improvements.

Passing the torches

The Sagvolds incorporated D&D Welding in the mid-1990s, largely to keep it separate from the ranch business.

Daran is the prime manager of the ranch, and the welding shop is Deb’s baby.

“It’s been wonderful for our family and friends. Our kids grew up out here. All of them know how to weld. It’s been good — good for our family,” she says.

Today, Kathryn, is 18, and Nicole is 17. Daniel is 10.

Daniel already has said he’s interested in continuing in the welding business, but Deb says she wants him to get an education and see a bit of the wider world first.

“If this is what he wants to do, we’ll be sure and keep the doors open,” she says.

Father-in-law Ron Sagvold retired from ranching and now makes deliveries for the welding business. Customers are in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana. Marge comes over to the shop and makes clips for Deb if she gets behind. The kids earn spending money by working in the shop and punching clips. She taught neighbor Adam Martinson to weld when he was in high school, and he now works part time when he is home from North Dakota State University.

Daran is active as the Ransom County (N.D.) Fair president in Lisbon, N.D. The entire family is involved in the fair, and D&D gets involved in buying 4-H premium animals.

“We pull a camper and live there for a week,” Deb says. “The kids of all of the fair board members have a kind of club of ‘fair board brats.’”

Deb also is passing the music torch to her kids. All three kids play piano and guitar and sing. Kathryn plays the flute and taught herself trumpet. Nicole plays the saxophone, and both girls dabble with the fiddle. The family is involved in productions at historic Lisbon Opera House in downtown Lisbon.

Two years ago, the Sagvolds saw a need for a rodeo, so they started one themselves. The McLeod Stampede falls on the last Saturday in June.

Ron and Daran had been bull riders. Daran and Deb had done team roping until a few years ago.

“It’s kind of been in our family for years,” she says.

Deb says she’s gone through a lot of heartache to get to this place in life, but quickly says she’d “gladly go through all of it again if it would get me where I am today. It’s a good place to be.

“Looking back, there was a plan,” Deb says.

One of the best parts of the enterprise is that she gets to be with her husband, 24/7.

“Daran’s my best friend,” she says. “We get up in the morning, plan the day, feed the cows. We’re calving calves, planting corn. We’re a good team, partners in every sense of it.”

If her business story could encourage others, she’d be pleased.

“Farmers and ranchers: Don’t be afraid to jump in to try something new, to diversify,” she says. “To any woman out there: Just because it’s a man’s world doesn’t mean it has to be a man’s world. Get your hands dirty and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t.”