CARLY IS UP AND RUNNING!!! The Quivira Coalition and the San Juan Ranch are thrilled to announce that the CARLY Ranch Apprentice Program is UP AND RUNNING! We hired our first Apprentice, Amber Reed, in April of 2009, and have brought on our second Apprentice, Sam Ryerson, in December of 2009. Please help us in welcoming our first two CARLY Ranch Apprentices!

IN AMBER'S OWN WORDS...
My interest in agriculture started early. At three years old, my mom found me lying in the dirt under a goat to help her kid nurse. This seems to be a pattern. Lately, I've been kneeling in manure, mud, and snow while trying to get calves to suck their mothers here at the San Juan Ranch. Just today one of the calves that we've been nursing along danced around throwing out his back legs. That is a beautiful thing. I am thrilled to be the first CARLY apprentice at George and Julie's. I knew from the moment that I visited nine months ago that this was the place to learn how to become a conscientious, resilient, and sustainable rancher. I plan to use the knowledge that I gain here in the San Luis Valley to start my own place in the next five years. I expect to spend these two or three years learning how to create a sustainable and economical operation from dedicated ranchers and farmers. Through the CARLY apprenticeship, I hope to become an ambassador and leader for sustainable ranching.

For starters, I was born in West Virginia and then moved to a homestead in Maine with my mom and step-dad when I was seven. My sister was born on the porch four years later. Growing up in Wellington, I learned to carry hot water for baths, check the sky for Orion on the way to the outhouse, and trim kerosene lamp wicks until we got solar panels (the house is still off the grid). We ate porcupine pot roast in the winter and fresh veggies from the garden in the summer. In our self-sufficient household, I entertained myself by making things, reading, hypnotizing my bantam chickens, and wandering around in the woods. I would search out old cellar holes and overgrown stonewalls where I found interesting plants like Ostrich Ferns and Jack-in-the Pulpits to bring home and plant in the yard much to my mother's delight. Even when I lived in the city years later, I noticed when Bard Owls were mating, Ocotillo was blooming, or quail were hatching. During the summer I would go back to West Virginia, and stay with my dad where we went mountain biking and ate a lot of buckwheat pancakes.

After high school, I went to Europe and worked for WWOOF (Willing Workers On Organic Farms) in France and Italy. I also worked on two independent organic dairies in France and Switzerland. There I learned how to milk goats and cows, make cheese, fertilize olives, and bake apple pie. When I returned to Maine, I went to Bowdoin College and majored in Environmental Studies and Visual Art and minored in Biology. I spent the 2001 fall semester in Brazil learning about Amazonian Ecology and Natural Resource Management. On the Amazon Delta, I conducted an independent research project on the pollination system of a cashew-like tree, Anacardium gigantium. My project also focused on native sting-less honeybees that pollinate flowering trees and plants and can be cultivated for honey, forest productivity improvement, and economic alternatives to slash and burn agriculture.

During the summers, I lead canoe trips in the remote Northwoods for Darrow Camp in Maine and Camp Widjiwagan in Minnesota. These trips ranged from one-week trips in the US to longer expeditions into Quebec, Labrador, and Ontario. Both camps used wooden canvas canoes and a traditional style of travel. In 2004, with my co-leader I planned and lead an exploratory canoe trip with 6 teenagers from a train drop in Quebec through the wilds of Labrador. The following year, I became the Assistant Director of Darrow Camp during the transition between Executive Directors.

A few years after college, I joined Teach For America and taught Algebra in Atlanta for a summer. TFA placed me in Charlotte, North Carolina where I taught Biology at a crowded inner city school. The following year I worked as a Special Education Paraprofessional in Leadville, Colorado at the Middle School. Before coming to the ranch this spring, I was a Read-To-Achieve teacher for Kindergarten and 1st grade in Leadville. I've enjoyed working with such a wide variety of students over the past three years, and I've learned a lot about different types of leaders who can adjust their style to fit any situation.

Some of the other things that I've done over the years include: being the artist-in-residence, snowshoe hare exterminator, and cook at the Kent Island Scientific Field Station, waiting tables in a yurt without running water, grooming Nordic ski trails, researching various ant species' relationships to Fish Hook Barrel Cactus in Tucson, working at a boat yard building wooden lobster boats (Pulsifer Hamptons), wrapping Christmas trees in the snow, and pulling tons (literally) of Alsa Craig onions for the Common Ground Fair in Maine.

Ranchers and farmers must be adaptive and observant; therefore, they thrive when they understand the specifics of their land. I believe that sustainable agriculture is the most important component of conservation, and grass-based ranching is the most efficient use of our natural resources and the healthiest, happiest system for animals and people. I want to be part of the movement forward with ranchers and farmers who are innovative, skeptical, and care deeply for their land, animals, and communities.


IN SAM'S OWN WORDS...

Where I Rode, and What I Ride For
I like complexity and quiet in cowboying. Ranching can be complicated, but the new leaders of the industry should be equipped to conserve both the land and culture of the West. I've been lucky enough to work on some big old beautiful outfits in Montana, Wyoming and Argentina. I was luckiest to find some good horses, friends and neighbors. Along the way I had a few real generous teachers. Soon I hope I'll run my own place - keeping the horseback traditions and applying the best practices of progressive management. For a guy like me this apprenticeship is a chance to go forward.

The San Juan Ranch is an honest old beautiful place. George Whitten and Julie Sullivan are the best kind of teachers. Their ground on the flats south of Saguache, Colorado and up in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains might not be one of those romantic spreads, which is a good thing. You can't disguise the humble fact this is a real ranch. Down in the chico brush these meadows raise the finest tender beef: organic, grass-fed and affordable. Here in the big open valley George and Julie offer this unique curriculum in learning on the land.

I came here to study some unusual methods of ranch management, grazing planning, beef production, grass-based finishing and marketing. Owning or managing any piece of land is a high privilege, and one to which I aspire. Wallace Stegner wrote, "Ranching is one of the few western occupations that have been renewable and produced a continuing way of life." I like the kind of progressive ranching that keeps the ancient traditions contemporary, growing livestock for the good of the land. I admire the careful old ways the best buckaroos handle their cattle a-horseback. They remain proud enough of their skills never to compromise and modest enough never to tell. You can heal the land with livestock, but not by just talking about it. It happens here at 8,000 feet above sea level in the best kind of a classroom in the San Luis Valley.

I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I studied architecture and urbanism at Yale. Directly after graduating there I moved into a tipi in southern Montana where I was designing a house for my mother. After a while I had a little black gelding. I was just riding him bareback around the county, finding odd jobs and cooking in a café when I landed on a good ranch near Roscoe. They hired me on, just as I was. Soon enough I bought a saddle and a rope to throw at a cow whenever I got the chance. I never planned on being a cowboy but before too long I had more horses, colts and cow-dogs.

A cowboy might need to just wander for a spell, and if I did roam around a little I was lucky to find myself always learning. I hitchhiked across the country. I rode an old bicycle across Italy. One winter I was in Argentina riding with some gauchos, working grass-fed cattle on the Pampas. When I came home that spring I spent a month herding 1,500 weed-eating goats restoring oilfields in Wyoming. I rode on some big roundup crews. I spent months riding alone watching cows and calves in the high country of Montana and Idaho. I managed another herd of goats for weed control on ranches across central Montana. I started colts under some top hands. Most of those jobs never felt like work. I always had the horses and a dog or two right there with me. But we've been traveling enough for now. I'm pulling the shoes off my horses this week. The dogs are glad to stretch out and sleep in the winter sun. I'm ready to settle down and study for a while.

George asked me today where was the best place I ever worked. I said, "I don't know, some places were more beautiful and some places had better people or better horses. But you could never stick around anywhere too long." I said, "I hope this place turns out to be the best one." We were just rattling down the road in his old Suzuki, dogs in the back, late in the day west across the big valley. We'd been feeding cows, planning our winter pasture rotations and roping a dummy calf in the driveway but we had to go bring that old blue flatbed truck home with some hay before the cold tomorrow morning. The cowboy romance of ranching makes a rugged old myth, but I'll take the complex reality. The best part of any place is the quiet way we get along, all of us neighbors on the land.