My Story

I'm CJ Lembke, owner of 70 Ranch Performance Horses. I was born in Denver, Colorado and I grew up in a "non-horsey" family, just south of Denver. My Father introduced me to horses at a very young age. He hoped that it would create a hobby that we could learn together and do on the weekends. Little did he know that the "horse bug" bit me hard and I was hooked for life. I started running barrels in gymkhanas when I was 8 and finally convinced my parents to buy a horse. I competed in rodeos throughout high school and I was on the rodeo team in college.

Once I graduated, I decided to try my hand on the pro rodeo circuit, so I moved to Texas for a few years and studied under some of the best trainers in the business. This is where I began training barrel horses from cutter "rejects" and completely fell in love with the mind and ability of cow bred horses.

After a series of horrible injuries that ended my career, I was forced to stop training horses and rodeoing professionally. In the Fall of 2017, I teamed up with professional cow horse and rope horse trainer, Chris Anderson of CA Performance horses.

After a generous loan from my extremely supportive parents, the breeding business was created in December of 2017. We have a very nice set of cow bred horses and one nice race bred mare. in 2019, we added a son of Metallic Cat, KR Fantallicka, AKA, Cadillac as our first stallion and I'm very excited about him. With the help of Don Ham, we also added the very popular stallions Metallic Malice, Just Winnin and Feel the Sting in 2021. My journey brought me to Gainesville, Texas, where we are building a state of the art facility to raise the best horses possible. We intend to keep just a few foals per year and sell the rest. The ones that we keep will be trained and shown under the 70 Ranch name. I have had an absolute blast in the breeding industry and I'm very thankful for the crazy road brought me to this point.