Share This Article
Tink Albright took two showers a day and wore pressed, starched loafers to work. She did not feed cows. She did not know how many her father owned, where they were or what they ate.
Then her father got sick.
Almost five years later, Albright Farms is the 2026 Baxter County Farm Family of the Year. Tink and her husband, Richard Taffner, run 515 acres of pasture, a herd of registered Red Angus and three full-time employees from their kitchen table in Gassville.
“I really had no idea. I was just winging it,” Tink said. “It was a process that you had to learn real quick.”
A Walmart manager’s hobby
Tink’s father, Ronald “Ron” Albright, was one of the original Walmart store managers. He started with the company when Tink was seven months old and managed stores until he retired in 1994. Tink did not grow up in farm life.
Ron bought a couple of black steers in the mid-1980s, when Tink was in high school. He retired at 50 and bought more cows. His hobby kept growing.
Richard helped on his days off, fixing tractors and clearing brush. Tink’s involvement was mostly limited to bottle-feeding the occasional calf her father dropped off.
“Every once in a while we’d get a bottle baby and he would call and say, you know, do you want to take care of it,” Tink said. “I’d feed it on my way to work, and I’d feed it when I got home. And that was the absolute extent of my cow knowledge.”
That was where things stood when Ron went to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. He said he would be back in two or three days, and he left Tink some cash and a couple of signed farm checks.
“I was just supposed to pay the barn guys. That was my job,” Tink said. “I thought, oh, this is awesome. I get to take off for a couple weeks. I bought myself some golf clubs. I was gonna learn to play golf. This was gonna be great.”
It did not turn out that way. Ron was gone for months and made trips back and forth for nearly a year. The family almost lost him.
“Then I had to start feeding,” Tink said. “Didn’t know how many we had, didn’t know where they all were, didn’t know how much I was supposed to feed them. Had an outbreak of pink eye in one herd. Google was my friend.”
She called every friend who had cattle. Everyone gave her a different answer. Richard ordered her books off Amazon, and she read Cattlemen’s magazines.
Shannon and Luke Walker, who farm next door, had always delivered feed and cut hay for Ron. They became her first calls in those early years.
“I’d sat in Dad’s truck in the middle, and I cried a lot because I didn’t know what the hell,” Tink said. “I called Shannon, and I’m like, oh my God, I’m too fragile for this. I can’t. She’s like, you’re fine. You’re fine. It’ll all be fine.”
She also leaned on Kevin Litty, now Baxter County judge, whom she had known since school but never run with closely.
“Kevin stepped up. He found out I was out here feeding by myself, and he stepped up and offered the whatever you need,” Tink said. “I was too stubborn to take any help, and I wasn’t really sure if after I let him help me, if he’d send me an invoice.”
She and Litty have become close friends in the years since.
The new routine did not match the old wardrobe.
“I was one I didn’t like to get dirty. Pressed, starched loafers. This was not my thing,” Tink said. “Everybody quickly got used to seeing me in a ball cap and dirty clothes. And if you ever saw me going to one of those county meetings, I’d go, okay guys, I don’t know if this is mud. But if you smell something, it’s probably me.”
The big chair
Ron started buying cows from the Mayo Clinic.
“He called one day. I was at a stoplight, and he said, how many more mama cows can you handle?” Tink said. “I said, you already bought them, didn’t you?”
He had. The herd was registered Red Angus mamas, already pregnant. That purchase set the direction the farm has taken ever since.
Ron was a quiet, soft-spoken man who let his daughter run with her ideas only after he had consulted Terry at Griggs or one of his other contacts. He never sat her down for a formal handoff.
“He was a very quiet, soft-spoken man,” Tink said. “He’d just look at me and he’d point his little stubby finger, and you’d always go. You’ll have your turn.”
One day he walked down the hall to his office and told her to follow him.
“He pointed to his big chair behind his desk, and I never sat in that chair. I sat in a little chair on the side,” Tink said. “He handed me a pile of bills and a couple of checkbooks, and he just turned around and walked out of his office and walked back down the hallway.”
Ron Albright died Sept. 30, 2021, at age 77. Memorial donations at his funeral went to the Food Bank of North Central Arkansas. Tink’s mother, LaDella, died unexpectedly two years later.
Pure spite
Tink’s accountant told her to sell the farms and go enjoy her life. Family members said the same. Offer after offer came in from people who wanted to buy them out.
“Part of it was sentimental,” Tink said. “Part of it was because everybody was surrounding me waiting for me to fail, and I was just stubborn enough that that’s what I said out of spite. Pure spite.”
She listed what kept her in the chair. Full-time employees who depend on the farm for paychecks. Sponsorships for Junior Livestock and youth ball teams.
“We’re feeding people we will never meet,” she said.
Tink does not own a cowboy hat. Richard owns one, but Tink said she would look like Elmer Fudd in one.
“This is as cowboy as it’s gonna get right here,” she said.
Building the operation
Richard retired in recent years from a long career with the Arkansas Department of Health, where he served as a regional director and made a name for himself in Little Rock public health circles. He holds a Master of Public Health degree and spent 34 years with the agency, climbing from epidemiologist through emergency planning and district management before retiring to take over Albright Farms.
He brought the same data-driven approach to cattle. He tests soil, plans fertilizer applications, runs a vaccination program and tracks every calf on the ground from his phone.
“If they’re calm, they’re much easier to work and take care of, and they’re more productive and healthier,” Richard said.
“Dad was the luckiest man on the face of this Earth. He had never vaccinated, never,” Tink said. “And I was like, I am not that lucky. We need to get on a vaccination program.”
Tink was “terminated as the bookkeeper” for late paperwork, she said, and handed the books over to Richard. She does not pretend the upgrade was a hardship.
“I was keeping my stuff just on a spreadsheet on a clipboard,” Tink said. “I got him some software. He can pull it up on his phone and tell you exactly how many calves are on the ground.”
Where Ron baled a couple hundred bales of hay in a good year, the farm now cuts 600 or 700. The herd is on the fourth generation of the Red Angus bloodlines Ron bought from the stoplight. The last batch of calves drew a bidding war among seven or eight buyers.
“Dad was thinking ahead when he bought that,” Tink said. “He calls them the seed stock. We try to focus more on quality than quantity.”
Hay season is always the hardest part of the year, Richard said.
“You’re either growing it, cutting it, storing it or feeding it,” he said. “The whole process of growing grass and storing it to feed it is very expensive.”
The math is not friendly to newcomers.
“You have to have the capital outlay by the property first, and property’s not cheap in this county,” Richard said. “And we’re at the height of a bull market on cattle where you’re going to spend three thousand dollars a head. A one-year-old heifer that may or may not ever produce.”
He said equipment costs add up fast, and everything on a farm has a lifespan.
“If it isn’t a generational farm, it’s pretty hard for someone to get into cattle,” Richard said.
The animals you do not sell
A bottle-baby heifer named Abby lived to 22, well past the typical lifespan for a cow. Nobody had the heart to send her to market.
“Nobody had the heart to get rid of her,” Tink said. “I didn’t want to see her made into dog food. So she just went to the retirement pasture away from the bulls and lived her best life.”
Abby died last year in her sleep. She appeared in Tink’s campaign material when Tink ran for office.
Tink raised seven baby bulls herself this year, a cost-saving experiment Ron would have appreciated. She also has a zonkey, a zebra-donkey cross.
“Best fifty dollars I ever spent,” she said. “I don’t know if he actually does anything for the coyotes. He’s pretty worthless, but I love him and he’s cute, and he makes me laugh when he haws.”
She wants a camel for the front yard.
“They eat thistle,” she said. “That’d be cheaper than paying the guys to spray it.”
There is a bull in the front yard now that the family calls Donald Trump. His coat grows out into something that looks like a toupee. It bleaches blonde every summer.
“We can either run a cattle business, or we can have a petting zoo,” Tink said. “But we can’t do both.”
She is also the one who catches Richard in the pasture scratching a 2,000-pound bull behind the ears.
The crew that does the actual work is three full-time employees, though one is currently on extended military deployment. Bradshaw is the senior hand, and a young Marine veteran works the operation with his wife and infant nearby. Zach, a National Guardsman, is in the rotation when the Guard releases him.
“His orders keep getting extended,” Tink said. “I keep trying to ask him, do I need to write you, like, a mommy note? Please excuse Zach.”
Why she keeps going
About once a month, Tink said, she goes to bed thinking about selling it all and buying a house on the beach. The next morning she gets up and feeds cows.
“And then it’s like the next day, I’m like, yeah, I can’t do that,” she said. “This is home. Mom and Dad both had come from a farming background. They both grew up really poor.”
She has things she would like the country to understand. Family farms are going under, and the national cattle herd is at its lowest point in decades. She does not see why the United States should be importing beef.
“None of us are asking for a handout,” Tink said. “We just want help to make it easier to do what we do.”
She said the Legislature could help by cutting taxes on fencing and supplies.
“It’s hard, and they need to know it’s hard,” she said. “It’s not as easy as it looks. It’s not like TV. It’s not big belt buckles and hats.”
She has thought ahead about who comes next. Her 11-year-old granddaughter has already planned the succession.
“I said, well, where are we going to go?” Tink said. “She goes, well, you can stay in the basement, or we could go back to the other house.”
The granddaughter wants to be a large-animal veterinarian for horses. She has assigned her younger brother, who is 1, to run the cattle operation. The granddaughter is starting in 4-H.
“Those kids grow up with an amazing work ethic,” Tink said. “And the skills it takes to be leaders in the community.”
Wild ride
Tink said she was iffy about accepting the award when she was first approached a few years ago. She did not think she deserved it.
“There are so many really awesome family farms,” she said. “A lot of them are going out. A lot of them are going bankrupt. And I think that’s part of my stubbornness on to keep this going.”
She agreed to be nominated this year. She said the farm’s turnaround belongs to Richard.
“He’s the rock star of the operation,” Tink said.
Albright Farms now moves on to district judging in June. If selected, the farm will be in the running for Arkansas Farm Family of the Year, with the state winner announced at a luncheon Dec. 11. The Arkansas winner represents the state at the Swisher Sunbelt Ag Expo in Moultrie, Georgia, in the running for Southeastern Farmer of the Year.
For Tink, the trophy case is not really the point.
“It’s been a wild ride and an adventure,” she said. “You can have a plan all you want to, but you end up on, like, plan XYZ before you know it. It’s going to rain. It’s not going to rain. It’s going to snow. A storm’s going to take out your barn.”
She has learned to let it go.
“I shrug my shoulders. It’s irritating because we’re both control freaks, and you can’t do anything about it,” Tink said. “We’ll figure it out. We both say that a lot. We’ll figure it out.”
