One provided the voice for a McDonald’s commercial promoting Canadian beef, one juggled a baby on her hip as she promoted her industry and the other managed a working guest ranch while travelling the publicity trail.
Patti Scott, Erin Butters and Lenore McLean were the RancHers, selected to represent three generations of working female ranchers. Alberta Beef Producers recruited them in 2001 for one of Canada’s most successful beef advertising campaigns.
Now they are retiring and for each, it was the experience of a lifetime.
The three replaced the original “If it ain’t Alberta, it ain’t beef” campaign that was launched during the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988 and featured three men. The RancHers’ campaign went on to win international advertising awards and took the three women across North America.
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Seeing themselves on thousands of postcards and bigger-than-life billboards on busy city streets across Alberta was jarring at first. Yet they grew into the job of beef celebrities who often had to convince the public they were not models but ordinary working women passionate about an industry their families had worked in for generations.
As the youngest of the trio, Butters of Cochrane started as a 22-year-old university student and newlywed. She has since had two children and will be defending her master’s degree thesis in counseling psychology this summer. She relied on her husband and parents for help, shuffling jobs at home and keeping her beef commitments at trade shows, media events and promotion activities.
“My babies have been to a lot of Alberta beef events,” Butters said.
Her first child, Katie, was dressed in a matching red check shirt and travelled with her mother to meet the public.
The women found themselves on the front lines of public opinion when BSE was discovered in Alberta in 2003.
“Most of the comments we got, 95 percent, were along the lines were, ‘we love Alberta beef. We are so proud of it and we’ll get past this,’ ” said Butters, who is a fifth generation rancher.
“The general public rarely had negative things coming our way. It was mostly responding to their positive sentiments and their pride in the industry. It was really incredible.”
People wanted to talk about beef and life on the ranch and expressed pride in Alberta’s ranching heritage, whether they had roots in the history or were newcomers to the province.
“Ranching and farming might be quite far away from a lot of folks and yet I think we really embrace it as part of our culture here,” she said.
The public also fully embraced using women to promote ranching and beef production.
“I was very proud that it could help represent the countless hours my foremothers put into ranching and raising beef,” she said.
Scott also approved of promoting women’s contributions. She said women are the main grocery buyers in most families and are often responsible for keeping families running smoothly.
“Almost every ranch from one generation to the next is a partnership where the men were recognized but women had a major role in keeping the family farm together,” she said.
As a single mother of two running her own Red Angus ranch at Sundre, Scott found the job took plenty of time management.
“When my kids were small it was probably a lot easier,” she said.
Now they are busy teenagers with hectic lives and she is heavily involved in their activities while still raising cattle.
“The cows looked after themselves. I am just going to keep ranching and running my kids down the road.”
Scott also has a long-time ranching heritage. Her grandfather and father managed the Glenbow Ranch but she wanted to be independent and bought her own place 19 years ago.
McLean ranches south of High River and is a third generation rancher who grew up on the Bews Ranch southwest of Longview.
“Cattle and horses were my first love.”
Besides promoting beef, she was able to use her position as a RancHer to build on a lifelong interest in environmental stewardship.
She took her own experience from life on the land and spoke at the first Alberta women’s grazing school held in Pincher Creek.
She and her husband, Roy McLean, who is also reeve of the Municipal District of Foothills, run a guest ranch. She is an active volunteer with the Glenbow Museum in Calgary and Bar U Ranch national historical site, works to preserve Alberta heritage sites and supports her grandchildren’s horse events, including raising Welsh ponies imported from the United Kingdom.
Being a beef ambassador was the icing on the cake for her.
“People are very interesting and they were all very receptive to wherever we travelled,” she said.
She said she was proud to represent women’s heritage.
“There were so many other women who worked hard like my parents on the ranch. I feel privileged that I am representing them.”
