Eleven in a Row: Frontier Rodeo Just Tied the All-Time PRCA Stock Contractor Record

I want to talk about hay. Frontier Rodeo grows its own. Ten thousand acres in northwest Oklahoma, four hundred head of bucking horses, seventy bulls, and five hundred beef cattle for cash flow. The beef is not the business. The beef pays for the business. That’s the part nobody outside the contracting world writes about and it’s the reason we are having this conversation at all.

In December the PRCA named Jerry Nelson’s outfit Stock Contractor of the Year. Again. Eleven years running. That number ties the all-time record shared by Stace Smith’s Powder River program and the late Harry Vold out of Pueblo West, Colorado. For most of the last twenty years catching Harry Vold looked like the kind of thing a program would chase for a while and then quietly stop chasing. Frontier caught him last December.

Then they bought Kirsten Vold’s remaining string outright and folded it into a new line called Double J. Harry’s daughter had been running the Pueblo West program since her father’s death in 2017. Some of the most recognizable Vold broncs in modern rodeo were on that roster. That genetic history now lives under Frontier’s roof. The sport has seen consolidations. This one is bigger than any of them.

The 2025 Wrangler NFR ran seventeen Frontier animals on its stock roster. That’s not a typo. That’s nearly half the country’s December stock supply coming out of one ranch in Freedom.

Jerry Nelson started the program in 1991. Ranch manager Heath Stewart has been in the saddle since 1997. General manager is Don Gay, as in the same Don Gay who won eight PRCA bull-riding world titles before most of this year’s bull riders were born. He joined Frontier in 2000 and has been there since. Continuity is the word. Nothing about Frontier’s result is an accident.

The athletes notice. “They’re not just good guys, they’re good cowboys,” saddle bronc rider Weston Patterson told Twisted Rodeo last month. “They’re all-around good people.” Wyatt Casper, a five-time NFR qualifier, was more technical: “They’re working at it every day to get better.”

You can hear the difference when a Frontier horse steps into the chute.

The mare they call Gun Fire is twelve years old. Ranch-raised. Daughter of the foundation stud Big Medicine out of a mare named Smoke Gun. Gun Fire was the 2022 PRCA Bareback Horse of the Year. She tied for the win at Spanish Fork this spring with Jess Pope aboard. Cowboys who draw her come off with a score in the high eighties or they come off in the dirt. She does not produce much in between. That’s what a champion bucking horse is supposed to mean and the number of animals who actually produce it consistently is very small.

The last one to come out of Freedom at that level was Medicine Woman. Four PRCA Saddle Bronc Horse of the Year honors between 2011 and 2016. Horse of the NFR in 2010 and 2015. She died in December 2021 at nineteen after her last NFR appearance at Globe Life Field the year before. ProRodeo Hall of Fame 2022. Anyone inside the sport who watched a Wade Sundell ride in the middle of the last decade can still describe what she looked like out of the gate.

Gun Fire is the active one now. Maple Leaf, 2013 PRCA Saddle Bronc Horse of the Year, is working the 2026 circuit. Full Baggage too, another year-end honoree. The 2025 NFR stock list is the place to go if you want the full depth chart. Seventeen animals out of the ranch’s own breeding program at the biggest rodeo of the year.

None of this happens without the ranching side working. They raise the hay. They run the five hundred head of beef separate from the bucking program. They train young horses for two or three seasons at smaller rodeos before any of them see an NFR chute. The 2022 PRCA video interviews with Heath Stewart are on the Cowboy Channel if you want the day-to-day. The summary is that the program has a hundred small rules about what gets bred to what and which colts get another year. There’s no shortcut to a number-one stock string. You do it by getting the calls right, one horse at a time, for thirty-five years running.

Frontier is in year one of the next ten.

The 2026 run hits Guymon Pioneer Days in late spring. Frontier has supplied the Guymon pen for years. Gun Fire has helped cowboys take the bareback title three years running through 2024. Watch who draws her there. The list of riders she’s put in the money is still being written.