Final Reflections
November 2024

I am struggling to reflect on my experience this season because it feels both like I just got here and like I have been here for years. Just yesterday it was March and I drove out to my new little home in the prairie through a snowstorm and was thrown straight into calving. Now this sea of grass is blanketed in snow once again and I am completing feeding chores on autopilot in the cold. I often let the monotony get to me, forgetting that the tasks that fill my days are things I did not know how to do when I arrived here in the spring. There has been so much that has been brand new and a lot of the type of learning that comes from the hundredth hour on a piece of equipment and the quiet repetition of approaching a herd of cattle day after day. Equipment, cattle, and weather can be unpredictable and I found that the most important thing that I learned everyday I went out on the ranch was to meet those challenges with presence and patience. Agriculture is all about relationships, the relationships between the grass and the grazing animal, the soil and the water, our relationship to the land we are working. And relationships require an immense amount of patience 

I am writing this from the time in the season where I find myself burnt out, a loop of thoughts in my head about how I am ever going to make this life work for myself. My relationship to this work has certainly been tested and will be tested again, but I am leaving this season with a little more hard earned patience. It is so cold and I am so tired and I remain determined to continue to carve out an agrarian life for myself in our rapidly changing culture. I do not have my next moves layed out yet but after this year I know I want to continue to improve my stockmanship and learn more about how to communicate with cattle through movement. I have found them to be incredible teachers of patience. And as I learned this year about the cattles relationship to these grasslands I knew that deepening my understanding grazing animal’s relationship to the landscapes and the soil would have to be a part of my path. 

Within the reminders of how challenging this life can be were at least as many reminders that it is an absolute privilege to work outside with animals everyday. This season, I lived in a place more rural than anything I could have fathomed a few years ago being from the east coast. I saw through the stories recalled by my mentor and his mother, the thriving community that was here in the days of homesteads. People came here imagining an abundant agrarian livelihood for themselves and their families before each person had to acquire more and more land to graze and farm to make a living. Now from an old homestead here on the ranch, where a family once looked out at forty two other homes on the landscape you can see two or three homes, one of them mine. As I often heard Fred Veseth quoted, “we aren’t at the end of the earth but you can see it from here!” The rolling prairie landscape that at first I thought was flat I have now come to know intimately the breaks and cooleys and I can tell you it is anything but flat when you are gathering young pairs and new on a four wheeler. While I am riding on the prairie, trying to remain upright, I imagine the glaciers carving out the earth, I imagine the camps where Native people processed their harvest after jumping bison from the sharp edges of cooleys, I imagine the homesteaders arriving in lush grasslands with big dreams. Learning about the ‘culture’ part of an agrarian livelihood is about as important to me as learning about the specific ag practices being employed. This year I have been able to deepen my understanding of the context in which agriculture in the west is operating. Understanding the geological, ecological and cultural context of the landscapes and lives of ranchers in this country is allowing me to form a more holistic view of the relationships that make our working lands what they are today. This experience has helped me to translate the vague imagery of farms and ranches larger than my hometown back East into a more complex understanding of the people and landscapes where so much of our food is being produced. Two dimensional stereotypes of agriculture in the West have been replaced with a view into small town politics, the pressures of a brittle arid climate, and the tension between cowboy traditions and the different ways that farmers, ranchers and conservationists feel that they need to move into the future. 

My mentor, Dale, while being a true model of patience as he taught me the ins and outs of ranch work, also constantly wove in his knowledge of the relationships between rock and glaciers, settlers and Native people, that have shaped this landscape. As I move forward with my involvement in agriculture and food systems I think it is important to continue to engage in the questions that are shaping the direction of agriculture in the west such as; who do our public lands belong to, where is money coming from, what grazing animals belong on the grasslands, how controversial it can be to make space for people and animals who were here before Europeans. Rugged individualism has surely been a force in the history of agriculture but as we move into the future I like to remember an exclamation Daniel Quinn made in his book, Ishmael, “I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.” 

I am so deeply grateful to the Veseths and the Steeles for making me feel not only like a valued member of a team but like a part of their family. I learned what I have this year because of their open mindedness and willingness to share their own life experiences with me. I don’t know that I have ever met two more patient men than Jim and Dale and they allowed me to grow in my confidence and my own patience through their willingness to take a chance on me. 

I do not know where it will take me but I feel proud to be a part of regenerative agriculture in my small way and I know it is where I belong. A year ago I wrote, “this leaves me continuing in agriculture, feeling like I know both more and less than I did before” and the sentiment rings the same now. The more I learn the more there is to learn. I am in the same position I was in a year ago, with a little more knowledge, more questions, more patience, and also a dog (a girl can only be alone on the prairie for so long). I am so grateful for the New Agrarian Program for both testing me and reassuring me that I am headed in the right direction.

What is your land ethic? The unifying theme across all NAP apprenticeships is “regenerative agriculture” and “land-based practices.” What do these ideas mean to you? What do you want your relationship with the land to be? How will these ideas inform your future, whether you continue in agriculture or pursue a different journey?
May 2024

As we ride across the range on the way back from moving cows, my mentor stops his four wheeler and climbs off to pick something up off of the ground. He calls me over and shows me where you can see how the jasper stone in his hand had been worked, where someone started making a tool a long time ago, and never finished.  We don’t get back in the saddle before he points out how to identify the grass species under our feet and as we rip back to the ranch he points out tipi rings along our path. There will always be endless work to be done on the ranch, but Dale will unfailingly make time to stop to admire and point out to his less observant shadow (me) a pair of upland sandpipers, or a burrowing owl who slowly turns his head to watch us go by.  

When I think about regenerative agriculture I think about the person who worked that stone and worked with this land in order to support their populations and I think about land managers like Dale, who is as much a part of his ranch as the horned lark (one of the only birds to winter in this harsh country).  A life in agriculture provides us with this opportunity to experience ourselves in our biotic community, not just as environment, but as intricate relationships of cause and effect in which we are inevitably engaged, but can so easily fail to notice.  

I do not know that I will ever have the sense of belonging to an ecosystem that the native people who adapted alongside the landscape over generations or that Dale who grew up here on the ranch have access to, but I continue to gravitate towards regenerative agriculture because the moments I can place myself in the systems of relationships that make up life on earth are what make me feel human; watching the plant species change on the landscape throughout the season, observing the way the cows react to my presence and learning to move my body in ways that they can understand what I try to communicate, eating food we have grown around a table with good people.  Regenerative agriculture emphasizes improving our ecological situation armed with the tools of observation and right relationship, tools I am grateful to be learning to hone from mentors like Dale.

This opportunity to work from our place in this community rather than from an attitude of dominance is a choice I think we all have in even the most mundane choices we make in our everyday lives, but one that I can see most clearly laid out in front of me in an agrarian life.  If evolution is resolved to elaborate and diversify the constituents of our biotic community as Alddo Leopold suggests, then I am resolved to aid and abet evolution with what little influence I am granted.

FINAL REFLECTION, 1st season
November 2023

I came into this experience propelled by curiosity about managing livestock to create positive change on the land.  I came from a different climate and a different type of agriculture and had the opportunity to dive into working with livestock on a new landscape.  Because I was working with dairy cows, I was able to develop close relationships with the animals and through working with Daphne and Caitlin, make daily observations of the cows’ health, mental state, heat cycles, and individual habits.  The natural cow care practices at Light Root Farm allowed me to learn about preventative and acute treatments including herbal remedies and products as well as homeopathic treatments.  When the apprentices traveled to the San Juan Ranch to learn from Curt Pate I was able to gain perspective as to how my experience with the dairy cows falls into the greater context of working cattle.  Curt wove comparisons of our dairy cows, who are more dull to pressure, to beef cattle in various management situations.  He also brought in ideas about working with draft horses to his comments on horsemanship.  Although I will not continue with dairy, I am now informed by a deeper knowledge of cows to continue to build upon in different contexts.  My experience in this apprenticeship has left me driven to continue to pursue knowledge about grazing and managing livestock to rehabilitate land. 

This was the second time I fell into working with draft horses because it came along with a job, and this experience made me fall more in love with working with horses and the effect that it has on me.  Watching and participating in the haying process fueled by horse power was an incredible experience.  In conversations about draft power, flood irrigation, and other seemingly outdated agricultural technologies I was able to gain perspective about the place they hold in today’s struggle to feed people and preserve natural resources.  Coming from a temperate rainforest in the mountains of North Carolina the struggles of water conservation farmers and ranchers face in the west were new to me.  Participating in flooding the pastures and being able to spend a whole day walking the length of a ditch that brings water down from Left Hand Canyon as we flushed out the ditch at the beginning of the season were experiences I found very valuable.  I can better see now how these systems that may seem “less efficient” are able to keep our natural resources in cycle for longer as water returns to the table and streams after soaking our pastures and horses continue to spread manure back over the fields as well as provide a deep personal relationship and new horses for future teams, things a tractor just cannot quite do.  As new technologies bring us forward into new possibilities in agriculture, I feel I have found a new groundedness in my understanding of the place that looking to the past holds and why infinite growth can cause major problems when our goal is to leave future generations with the resources they need to keep growing food and maintaining quality of life in an agrarian lifestyle.  While I do not necessarily dream of having an entirely horse powered farm, and I do not know that I will be stewarding land in arid climates long into the future, this reverence I have for agrarian skills and systems of times past makes a little more sense to me now and I have rediscovered a dedication for finding the value in what may seem inefficient until I broaden my perspective.  Professionally, that means keeping my holistic goals front and center when I feel like I am not doing enough (which I inevitably will).

Alongside many joyful moments with the animals, I struggled as well to manage my expectations with the realities of the season.  I struggled to connect to the land in this new place after I had uprooted myself from my community and a landscape I was used to. I came from positions with more responsibility in a different type of agriculture and I found it frustrating at times to be back to what at times felt like square one in order to develop new skills.  Even knowing that pursuing knowledge in this setting was the right choice for me, I find there is always a sense of helplessness that comes along with being a learner.  I knew that my effect would be so very temporary as an apprentice, there for a single season.  Part of my goal in going into this work is a lifestyle I want for myself and I grappled with the reality that to learn what I want to learn, a life grounded in a familiar community and landscape will be a long ways off.  I will have to sacrifice autonomy and constantly practice humility in order to learn from mentors and push my growth edges.

Working in close quarters at a small family farm, you inevitably gain insight into the joys and challenges the farmers face in keeping their business running and their animals happy.  After this experience I have a better idea of how a farmer needs to make the farm work for them.  There are right ways to do things, but there are as many right ways to do things as there are farmers and each will have to adapt to the exact context that they are in.  I watched the farmers begin to adapt to the next stage of their lives and their business, and while I witnessed grief as they let go of former versions of their operation, I also saw joy and comfort in their ability to adapt to their context to continue to be able to work the land.

I felt I was able to gain perspective as to improvements I need to make in myself and my skills to succeed, and what traits I have that will remain and will need to be worked around and used to my advantage.  I cannot be someone I am not to make things work.  I cannot show up with something to prove.  I have learned the importance of humility in finding my path.  I was humbled by the day to day of the dairy, by the rapidfire repetition and constant attention to detail required to maintain the high quality of the farm’s raw milk; I felt empowered in watching the farmers who had found and were constantly creating the niche that works for who they are.  The dairy is not my niche but I feel more convinced that my niche is out there and more motivated to find it after this experience.

So, this leaves me continuing in agriculture, feeling like I know both more and less than I did before.  Land management for climate change mitigation and education are still my primary drivers.  I have more practical skills and knowledge around working with cows, horses, and water, and have improved my ability to set goals, self reflect, and ask questions.  The next steps for me are to continue to learn about different operations to better understand who I work best with and what I want my contribution to be in the world of regenerative agriculture.  I want to take what I have learned this year and dig deeper into understanding how to manage the interactions of grazing animals on the land and create mutually beneficial relationships through low stress stockmanship.  For now, working directly on the land outside, using my hands is where I believe my contribution to be and am planning to continue learning from producers directly, hopefully most imminently through a second year in this apprenticeship program.

First Reflections
April 2023

There is no one thing that led me to agriculture but I have always been headed here in my roundabout way.  When I was four years old my friend and I decided that we would be getting married when we were all grown up; the only problem was that he wanted to live in New York City and I wanted to farm.  Only we did not see that as a problem, we just took the lively rural barnyard I envisioned and plopped it in the Big Apple.  Now with a few years behind us, that friend is living happily in NYC, and in pursuit of a variety of passions and interests I have found that it all leads me back to agriculture.  

I have chased my interests in food, plants, herbalism, education and traditional cultures and they have all led me to discover that a life spent working and living close to the land is what gives me the sense of meaning that I need to keep putting one foot in front of the other.  A meaningful life to me, is one dictated by seasonal ritual and routine, where my work is physical and my relationships with my environment and community are embodied in the daily tasks involved in taking care of the land and one another.  I am continuously inspired by the hope that future generations will have the opportunity to have flourishing and mutually beneficial relationships with the land where their food grows.  When I began farming and learned that with proper management, human stewardship could accelerate the regeneration of our soils and ecosystems, I knew I had to gain a deeper understanding of the practices that made this possible.  That is what has led me here, from my background farming vegetables and medicinal herbs, to learn more about crop and livestock integration at Light Root Community Farm.  The practical reciprocity embodied in regenerative agriculture aligns work, values, and a sense of purpose in my life. 

Here at Light Root I have already gotten to peer through a new window of what it means to lead a meaningful life in agriculture.  I am learning about how farmers might go about balancing their goals to create systems that are both regenerative for the land and sustainable to the people working it.  I am learning more about systems that are able to close their own loops on the farm such as compost, animal husbandry, and draft animal power.  I am expanding my network of like minded farmers and beginning to imagine how my land management goals fit into the world and my own life.  I am grateful for this opportunity to develop my skills in managing agricultural ecosystems for climate resilience; and to be out here coloring in the visions of that four year old who planned on farming no matter where she landed.

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