Today, pastoralism is looking like an increasingly adaptive lifeway for people looking around the proverbial corners of climate, class, and wealth disparity. But we need to work out some kinks. As its stands, there are many aspects of a livelihood built around the care and managed movement of animals that are at odds with modern life and human need that can leave those of us attempting to live this way caught between the tectonic plates of time.
Photo by Brittany Cole Bush, Shepherdess Land & Livestock
First, I’d like to emphasize my use of “lifeway” and offer some caveats in the process. Many folks in agriculture will say things like “ranching is not a job - it’s a way of life.” This often generates collective groans from folks on the outside of ag circles, who see many farmers and managers as living relatively privileged lives. And most of us do, depending on the measure, but that’s a discussion for another time.
But setting aside such discussions as to its quality, pastoralism is a way of life. Agriculture is subject to forces beyond one’s control; add hundreds to thousands of sentient beings to the mix, and the variables increase many times over. Most ranching can be done within daylight hours if managers are strategic without their time, but it’s nonetheless true that in this work, our habits are significantly informed by the job we do. It’s physical and intimate in a different way from many other jobs. It influences the vehicles we drive, the clothes we wear, the dogs we keep, the friends we make, the injuries we sustain. These qualities are not exclusive to agriculture writ large or pastoralism specifically, but it’s nonetheless true.
But we run into trouble when we let "it’s a way of life” become permission to work inefficiently, to cling to tradition at all costs, and to exploit our family members or our employees or ourselves in the process. A lifeway should not be above reproach or critique. If it’s a way of life, it matters all the more that we get it right!
Here, I’d like to take a moment to explain my use of the term pastoralist. In some circles, a pastoralist is just a rancher. But I’m using it here to express a way of life that is not just ranching, but of being deeply involved with one’s animals, and keeping them regularly on the move so that their interactions with the land is positive. For example, I don’t consider most dairies to be pastoral ways of life, nor is a ranch that rarely moves its cattle except when it’s time to brand, wean, and ship. In my view and vernacular, to be a pastoralist is to live a life in movement with livestock.
I see pastoralism as adaptive to the future—after all, history indicates pastoralists were resilient in the face of change and instability. Having one’s wealth or sustenance tied to animals, instead of stationary objects or fixed fields of grain historically allowed pastoralists to move nimbly, many times evading conquest, excessive taxation, domestication, and tyranny. Granted, in many cases, pastoralists wielded the most power because they preyed upon vulnerable people and states who were bound to their farm fields and grain crops. Please believe me when I say that I don’t believe barbarism and raiding are necessary for successful pastoralism in the modern era; still, this historical tendency points to a nimble relationship to land and resources that benefitted them. And while the deep connection to land and animals theoretically deprives someone of the fruits of sedentarism, it offers in exchange many of the features of human life that sedentary societies have had to go out of their way to seek out - exercise, recreation, fresh air, nutritious food, a symbiosis between life and work, and deep connection. And in a climate increasingly characterized by instability, the ability to move with one’s animals—or take one’s skills with them to use with a new herd, in a new place—can support survival amidst uncertainty.
And I see pastoralism as benefitting not just the keepers and herders of livestock, present and future, but also the the broader public and the commons we share. Animals raised with dedicated herders and managers can be a force for good on the land, building biodiversity, sustaining soil, and keeping land out of the way of subdivision and plow.
Photo by Brittany Cole Bush, Shepherdess Land & Livestock
I’m not intending to conflate ranching with pastoralism, because not all ranching is pastoralism as I’ve defined it.. But scale needn’t detract from an endeavor’s pastoral points. I’ve been a part of moving entire cattle companies to new, multi-thousand-acre-leases before. We put every thing and every body on a truck. It took some time, but everything we own has wheels, legs, or fits on something that does.
Every year, my partner and I pack up and head north to Montana where we manage cattle that arrive and leave on trucks. We roll up our rugs, pack our books and records, our files and computers, our dogs, horses, and saddles; we move up and settle in. And when the season is up, we pack everything back up again (it takes about a day) and head south for the winter. There are tradeoffs to this way of living. We exchange stability for freedom, security for autonomy, and fixed community for a seasonal one. In lieu of the comfort of living out all of the seasons in one home, we’ve gained a real sense of aliveness by changing places twice a year.
Even at a large scale, this living works. Well, kind of.
That’s what I’d like to explore here, however so briefly and insufficiently. What about pastoralism doesn’t work, especially in this big, broad, western landscapes? And what can we do differently?
I’ll sacrifice style for practicality, and address these things in a bulleted form. In some cases all I manage to do is draw a circle around something I’ve identified as a sticking point, and in other cases I offer some suggestions. Take it all for what it’s worth, let me know what I’ve missed or you think I’ve got wrong, and let’s let this initiate an ongoing conversation.
So what are some of the barriers to pastoralism today?
Having children seems untenable to many of us - let’s figure out the challenge of childcare. To be a practical lifeway, people should be able to raise children successfully. To me, a successful family includes parents who are still able to grow as human beings and contribute to the operation in meaningful ways even as they raise children, and both parents are able to be deeply involved in their kids’ rearing. The children are able to grow up with the benefits of a life on land with animals, but also be exposed to other experiences (ie, they are not trained from wee tots to be just be exactly like their parents, or love only what their parents love). And parents should be able to get a break from their kids now and then, even—and perhaps especially—when they live in far-flung places.
As it stands, many ranching and pastoral families I know with young children are either struggling due to lack of nearby support, or are fortunate enough to have in-laws nearby. This is a tremendous privilege, and I am sincerely happy for those for whom that worked out. For the rest of us, especially those who did not come from landholding or ranching families and whose parents or in-laws are thus not just down the road from where we graze our animals, it’s time to think of creative solutions for how to support pastoral families. I’m not going to do that here, because it’s a big topic and this is already a bit long, so let’s put a pin in that for now.
Pastoralists are challenged by land and vocational access without inheritance or birthright. This is a big topic, and I don’t want to talk about every aspect of it, so I’ll keep this part brief. Similar to the matter above, pastoralism can be challenging to break into. Many of the first generation ranchers and pastoralists I know found entry because they had a windfall in the form of an inheritance or trust fund. If more people in skillful pastoralism yields any societal good—which I believe it can, many times over—we also need to think creatively about how more people can enter pastoral lifeways even if they were not born into land, money, or assets.
Many people can only afford to engage pastoralism at the hobby level, a scale that is awkward to maintain because it neither necessitates nor supports lifestyle changes that allows a functional grazing program at the scale I think we need to change land use patterns and watershed health for the better. Gaining access to capital in the form of loans and impact investments can be nearly impossible people who don’t look the part of a rancher, or come from an agricultural background. This includes people of every stripe, but the systemic removal and exclusion of people of color from owning or accessing land is especially egregious.
Thankfully, there are some good models and examples emerging to bridge this divide. These include the diverse examples and offerings of Agrarian Trust, Sylvanaqua Farms, and Cienega Capital. Fortunately, we seem to be at an inflection point for opportunities for first generation pastoralists, passionate people committed to the life and work but who have no family land to claim.
We can do good things with leases that incentivize and reward long-term stewardship. In a lot of the west, it’s pretty common to lease to the highest bidder with the most conservative business model. Higher payments squeeze a company’s bottom line, meaning that there is that much less to invest in practices and purchases that affect the health and long term value of the land. This type of future-discounting is common, and we need to overcome this tendency to move the needle.
Speaking in terms of conventional cattle leases, in many cases, a slight reduction in rent (say, a dollar or two per AUM) can be the difference between hiring a range rider to monitor for predators, or more day help to keep cattle handling nicely and grazing hills instead of creek bottom. Little changes like these, fostered by having slightly more economic cushion, can make the difference between a lease whose range health tanks during a drought, taking years to recover, and one that sails through a drought and grows a good stand of grass when the rains do come.
Multiplied across rangeland and the gains in conservation, sustainable profit, and quality of life would be immeasurable. Unfortunately, many landowners don’t connect the dots, and many lessees can’t quantify the value of having healthier range or can’t make a case for how they’d invest the savings.
Lease terms that offer reduced leases for a period to support restoring rangeland are another way of supporting conscientious pastoralists as they invest the extra work in building back an asset they don’t own, because even if they are paying less for degraded land because they are lightly stocked, in many cases the overhead remains largely the same.
Longer leases and rolling leases are also ways of helping pastoralists to make a living off of land in a way that benefits the long term health of the place. This will take some leadership from landowners and land owning institutions and organizations to initiate dialogue about exchanging reduced rent for better stewardship.
We should work together. We need more marketing co-operatives. Raising animals at scale amidst current market forces is challenging enough; add the ambitious work of mitigating conflict with predators and leaving the land better than we found it, and it doesn’t leave a lot of time in the day to also manage a direct marketing business. For a food system to be resilient, we need all kinds of aptitudes doing their thing, each contributing their skills to make something greater than any one individual or family could muster. Marketing co-operatives like LINC Foods in Washington and Sweet Grass Co-op in Southern Colorado are good examples actually making change, now.
Many pastoralists feel stuck. We need people who can watch an operation while pastoralists are away. This is a real sticking point for many operations, especially those who are managing livestock in “fussy” landscapes with insecurity around water, fences, and predators. Many operations are just one life crisis away from falling apart. The more people who can find a viable lifeway and career in pastoralism, the more help we can lean on when we want and need to get away for a little while. As with the childcare piece, solving for resiliency amidst crisis—and, you know, the ability to go to a workshop or take a vacation once in a while—allows the life and work of pastoralists to function on a higher plane the rest of the time, too.
Appropriate housing can be the difference between surviving and thriving. This is a fairly specific one. Many leases and short-term grazing opportunities have no suitable housing. Having spent a lot of time in various cow camps living in tents and campers of various states of (dis)repair, I see a market opportunity for inexpensive, stripped-down campers that allow pastoralists to make their own home within the warm walls of a home with wheels. Whereas most campers today are made with cheap materials and not designed to be lived 12 months of the year, sturdy, simple campers that have kitchen and bathroom amenities but would allow its inhabitants to customize and furnish how they see fit. Such campers would be easier to clean and last longer than most modern campers. If weight is an issue, furniture can be removed when it’s time to take the camper on the road and replaced upon arrival at the next destination.
We need to normalize creative partnerships organized around shared values and complementary skills. I’m lucky to be involved in some working partnerships that fit this bill to varying degrees, but what strikes me is how uncommon they are. In farming and ranching, the people who form partnerships are typically intra- or inter-generational family members (who have plenty in common, but complementary skills and values may not be among them), or married couples. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but it’s not the only nor necessarily the best way.
For pastoralism to be practical, we should be looking at partnering with people who value the same things and, perhaps more importantly, bring different things to the table. Forming a professional partnership with by-laws and written agreements brings everything above board, supporting people to be their best and providing accountability when things go awry—because they probably will.
Conflict is inevitable, and we can plan for it. Bill Zeedyk, the originator of the induced meandering concept for restoring streams and watersheds, does not try to stop the flow of water. Instead, he anticipates it. And in the southwest, where most of his work has been focused, water tends to flow intermittently, a little trickle followed by large flood events that can dramatically reshape the form and flow of a creek and its surrounding landscape. After over fifty years of experience working with wild water, Bill can look at a dry creek bed and correctly anticipate how the water will flow following a rain event. He then makes adjustments to the dry bed to translate the force of the flood into positive changes: he directs the energy towards a bank that will erode in a favorable way, and creates places downstream for the onslaught of sediment and debris to settle. Over time, soil builds, plants grow, banks stabilize, the water table rises, and a once sharp, sandy, denuded creek explodes with self-sustaining life.
Most of us are conflict-avoidant. And while we shouldn’t go seeking it out, we can anticipate that it will come, recognize that it isn’t good or bad - it just is - and set ourselves up to be enhanced by its force. We can design for conflict, and come out better for it.
On that note: We can learn from the hippies. Many of us in agriculture are energized by the idea of forging creative models of work that are achievable, fair, and resilient. We’d do well to acknowledge that a body of work already exists in helping people navigate the challenges of working—and living—in community. These works will not be visually or culturally familiar to many of us in ranching, yet their practicality will resonate. Two that come to mind Starhawk’s The Empowerment Manual and Diana Leafe Christian’s many books that are built on what works, and what doesn’t, from her study of intentional communities worldwide.
This analysis is not thorough—it’s only thoroughly incomplete. But hopefully it can generate some discussion that can result in positive change and a shift to norms and trends that serve us and the land. With thought, vision, and problem solving, we can pursue a practical pastoralism that achieves not anachronism but conviviality.
