It's an Old West fairy tale. A cattle rancher's daughter from the desert meets a ranch manager from the North (of California), marries him, and together they open a feed and livestock supply store.
Maybe not quite the stuff of Cinderella, but since marrying in 1989, Barbara and Tim Jackson have made a comfortable living for themselves in the agricultural world they both know and love.
The couple fits naturally among the farmers and cowboys who frequent Vaquero Feed & Livestock Supply — the I-10 store and warehouse opened in February 2002 as a retail complement to their then-12-year-old animal health mail-order business, Animal Health Express.
"I think we have some of the best customers. We get to deal with true cattle people, ranchers and horse people," Barbara said.
Aptly named Animal Health sells an assortment of health supplies, including antibiotics, insecticides, fence tools, and grooming and show supplies.
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The mail-order business, Tim said, targets primarily commercial farms and ranches in 13 Western states and Mexico, and makes the bulk of its sales in the form of wholesale orders.
Opened in the fall of 1990, Animal Health Express was originally a 50-50 partnership between the Jacksons and Walco International, a national animal health distributor.
"As a small, independent company, we couldn't get distribution agreements on our own. We needed to partner with Walco," Barbara said.
The business was the couple's opportunity to both remain in Tucson and continue working in agriculture.
For the previous 10 years, Barbara had worked as a veterinary pharmaceutical sales rep, while Tim was employed as a ranch manager in various parts of the Southwest and Mexico.
Asked why they didn't just start their own ranch, Barbara — whose father, Carl Stevenson, owns the Red Rock Feeding Co. — noted the rising costs of farming today.
Plus, she added, "my family has plenty of relatives in the ranch business in Red Rock. They didn't need another one."
In September 1996, Walco founder and CEO F. Willard Wall died. Soon after that, the Jacksons bought the remaining half of Animal Health and began developing a retail concept that would ultimately become Vaquero Feed. After a search lasting four years, they found their current location at 3301 N. Freeway Road.
Currently, the Jacksons employ six full-time and three part-time workers at Animal Health and Vaquero. They also have six "staff cats" that patrol the premises and keep uninvited rodents from dining on the plentiful amounts of feed in stock.
Carol Smith, owner of the nearby Shoestring Ranch and a longtime customer, was out at Vaquero one recent afternoon shopping for feed.
"They have what I want at fair prices, and they're very friendly," she said. "I pass by several feed stores just to get here."
Not even the construction on I-10 has given Smith a reason to shop elsewhere. Vaquero's proximity to the widening project had been a concern for the Jacksons, but their fears haven't materialized, Tim said.
"So far it has not been too detrimental," Barbara said. "The upside is there are more people driving past our store."
Business consultant Marie Miyashiro-Collins, president of Elucity Network Inc., attributes the Jacksons' past and present success to their marketing savvy.
Elucity was recently hired by the Arizona Department of Transportation to work with businesses along I-10, pairing them with consultants who would advise them through the construction.
The Jacksons are "very aggressive in their marketing," Miyashiro-Collins said. "Not just only in the I-10 situation but in general, as they've grown over the decades, they've done well because they're very responsive to their customers and the changing (business) environment."
Profile
Names: Tim and Barbara S. Jackson
Ages: 59 and 52
Job: owners, Animal Health Express and Vaquero Feed & Livestock Supply, 3301 N. Freeway Road, 888-0294
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