Pulled from Wreckage Ranch and Rescue repurposing their community

ELKO – Pulled from Wreckage Ranch and Rescue is making a difference for animals, veterans and the community.

Pulled from Wreckage is a women-owned ranch and farm animal rescue which offers various services. These services include canning, harvesting, animal care, gardening, group/co-op events, tours and photoshoots. It is currently a Georgia Domestic Nonprofit, soon to be a Federal Nonprofit.

The ranch also provides events throughout the month like Swine and Unwind, which is an anger management event where people can bring in pumpkins and smash them. People bring in other decorations as well. After letting the anger out, people can interact with the pigs. They also host yard sales selling homegrown items. 

The ranch part of the business raises pork, poultry and eggs. Owner Charlotte Mcgee said they are first generation farmers and wanted to bring food sources back home. 

“We wanted to bring things back into our community that make a difference,” she said.

There is also a market at the ranch which Mcgee describes as an “old country store market.” The market sells products from local vendors, artisans and producers. After attending an event, attendees can go to the market and shop for soap, candles and other locally produced items.

Mcgee shared she has a huge heart for veterans, and has always wanted to make sure no veteran is left homeless. One of her goals is having a ranch that can employ and house veterans. She wants to have a tiny community for veterans to rebuild and feel supported. Right now, they are saving their income to buy more land to start housing people on site.

The ranch’s rescue animals play a role as well. Mcgee said their animals are being repurposed to become comfort and service animals for veterans with PTSD. There are currently nine animals at the ranch that need to be sponsored.

“It does kind of come full circle to where if we can employ them on our ranch and we can allow them to live there with us,” she said. “[It] will be the push that they need to help them get into whatever it is that they’re wanting to get into after they get out of the military, but also getting them back onto solid ground where if necessary they can make moves but also have access to therapy animals and things like that on site.”

The business currently has an acre of land, and they had to pivot to find other ways to incorporate the ranch. Mcgee said right now, the ranch animals are the income, and the rescue animals are there to be trained as service animals. 

She said she takes those animals out into the community, like Myrtle May the pig. Myrtle May is currently in training, which includes exposure to loud noises and people. Once they are used to it, they will then be trained to do their job. Mcgee takes Myrtle May everywhere she goes, and she works one to two days a week. 

She also said they use Myrtle May to promote her business and other small businesses like Pulled from Wreckage.

Right now, the business is partnering with Habitat for Humanity to build a village for veterans. They have also partnered with the HALO group, and they are working on getting their garden harvested.

Mcgee said they also provide the business as an educational venue where children can visit for a field trip. The business offers home school classes where they learn about planting, gardening, learn how to process animals and food.

Mcgee also said they are out volunteering in the community. On Thanksgiving, they delivered meals to Women Reaching our Community, a faith-based organization in Perry. The business strives to network with local organizations to get their names and animals out into the community.

“Honestly, it’s kind of like marketing but it gets them [animals] out there, it gets our purpose out there, but it also makes it to where it’s helping us be a huge part of our community and bringing people into this side of it,” she said.

Mcgee eventually wants the business to be full service. After veterans are ready to go home, they want to work with the USDA to get veterans into their own ranches, farms or agricultural products. Mcgee wants to provide them with a safe place to leave after the military.

Before settling in Elko, they tried to build in Byron and worked with Home Port Veterans Transition Home, a nonprofit organization in Macon. Unfortunately, they could not find land but that is when the idea of a veterans village was born. Mcgee said one of her ideas right now is buying a hotel in Unadilla to house the veterans and then take them on the ranch to work.

Pulled from Wreckage officially opened on Jan. 1 of this year. Before its opening, they have been operating under an LLC selling merchandise, but they got the idea of having animals during the middle of last year. Mcgee said during that time, she had a pig named Wilbur and then later someone dumped a pig at her house. 

Then, they started getting calls from people needing to surrender animals. Mcgee took in three foster pigs and shared there is a network of fostering and adopting pigs. She also shared she wants to host a pig adoption event in the future. 

“The rescue part came when I started getting phone calls: ‘Hey can you take this animal?’ and then I was like, ‘I don’t know. Let’s see what we can do with it,’” she said. “I have to be able to have a purpose for it because even though we’re a nonprofit we’re still a farm but we’re also mindful of a lot of the stigma that’s with farming and also with animal rescue.”

Mcgee shared many people had an issue with her business being an animal rescue and eating meat.  

The business also rescued three miniature horses, Mr. Bill’s ponies, from the Perry Fairgrounds. The horses retired years ago when their owner passed away and was given to another rescue. However, the rescue eventually shut down and called Pulled from Wreckage to take them in, which Mcgee happily did. 

She said they have been out of work for a long time, and they were used to being handled. Mcgee said after training, one of the horses will be qualified to be a medical device able to go to schools, hospitals and overall be a service animal. 

“We have been incredibly blessed with surrenders that were very loved and taken care of and unfortunate circumstances happened, and they had to surrender their animals. We’re so blessed to just have those animals here to be a part of our journey and to also be a part of the people who had to surrender them and their healing,” she said.

Mcgee shared she enjoys being out in the community. She aims to create a village that she needed when she was younger, and she believes the world needs.

“You can’t do it by yourself. As strong as we are, we just can’t do it by ourselves it takes so much more than that,” she said.

Networking is also a huge part of the business. Mcgee shared currently they cannot take more animals in, but they know other places that can take in animals. The rescue only takes in farm animals and works with wildlife organizations to help take wildlife animals where they need to go.

Mcgee has been surrounded by veterans her whole life. She shared she is the youngest of her siblings and all of them joined the military. Her brother and husband joined the military after Sept. 11, 2001, to run away from terrible situations at home. 

Mcgee said they were already not in a good mental state to join the military, then suddenly thrown into war. She shared they did not come home okay, and it was hard for her brother and husband to transition back into their home because of what they encountered. 

During that time, Mcgee started working in the community, feeding the homeless and running outreach. She started noticing a trend of veterans on the street and said they are people who love their families and their homes. However, they can’t mentally get to a place where they can acclimate themselves back safely.

“I wanted to have a place for them to come and do that and then give them the opportunity to get everything that they need and to get back out there and to do great things,” she said. 

Mcgee believes agriculture is a dying art and wants to bring farming back to life.

“[There are] people who can’t harvest their own crops or people who just have gotten old, and their kids prefer video games rather than farming and they have nobody to take it over. We want to be able to do that. Pulled from Wreckage means so much,” she said. “It’s about making useful things out of things that were tossed aside, whether it be an animal or a human or a crop or a farm or whatever the case may be. Start getting back to the point to where we’re trying to fix things and make them better, versus throwing them away and just starting over.”

Mcgee also shared she enjoys supporting small local businesses because she knows their value. She said when things get hard and supply chains get low, like during the COVID-19 pandemic, people who needed food relied on farmers.

“That’s one of things that we need to keep to everybody’s forefront and [say,] ‘Hey, look if that happened once it can happen again,’” she said. “We need to make our food sources a little bit more local and stop depending on so much outside when you have a farmer that lives next door to you that has 2,000 pounds of meat that he needs to sell and you just bought garbage from Walmart that’s been sitting there for seven months.”

Mcgee said the best way people can support Pulled from Wreckage is getting involved. She encourages people to attend events like Swine and Unwind because they get rid of home decorations in a productive way. 

“It’s a fun way to be involved in what it is that we do here, and it helps us socialize the animals,” she said.

The rescue also provides volunteer options for people to help on the ranch, take care of the animals and other farm duties.

Mcgee also encourages them to support them when they are out in the community and booking them for events. 

Another way Mcgee said the support Pulled from Wreckage is donations of items people were going to throw away. They have bought items from Facebook Marketplace and repurposed them instead of putting them in a landfill.

“It doesn’t take money to support us. It takes your effort and your time. Materials and things like that I love those things. I love going around to businesses and seeing what we can make and how we can do things on our farm with the stuff that they were throwing away,” she said.

Mcgee said once their rescue animals are sponsored, they will accept more farm animals and go through the process.

Pulled from Wreckage Ranch and Rescue is located at 2977 Highway 41, Elko. The ranch is open on Thursdays and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. and reopens from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. It is also open on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. and reopens from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. To keep up with them visit their Facebook page.