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The double wooden gate marking the entrance to attorney Bob Bivins’s home in West Central Florida is embellished with an elegant “B” and “W” and the name “Bivinswood” in wrought iron lettering. Beyond the gate, which he likes to tell people is his own mini-version of the main gate to Jurassic Park, is a paved driveway that winds across Crooked Creek and past a spring-fed pond onto a 21-acre ranch where Bivins raises pygmy goats and Angus-mix cattle, specifically bred for the Florida heat. The smaller of his two ranch sites, this original location is the beating heart of the overall operation.
It's fair to say the ranch is where Bivins feels most at home outside of his commercial law offices in Valrico, a city just east of Tampa. He fell in love with the property at first sight as a young attorney in 1993 and raised a few eyebrows among his law colleagues when he bought it and moved out of the city.
"In those days, all the young attorneys were expected to live in South Tampa and moving to the rural eastern county was viewed as akin to having a mid-life crisis," he says. "Turns out, I was just a couple of decades ahead of my time."
Though originally developed as a horse ranch, his law practice didn't allow him quite that much animal husbandry time. But after a friend encouraged Bivins to raise a few head of cattle on the land in order to get a tax break, he bought six heifers that had aged out as roping calves, having no conception of what was in store. He was a kid from suburban Clearwater. What did he know about raising cattle?
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