How did you get interested in agriculture? And what are you hoping to gain from your apprenticeship?May 2026
I arrived in the midst of a March storm on the Coulter Family Ranch, a special place where prairie meets Missouri River breaks and badlands. Driving through present‑day Garfield County, Montana, discloses the many stories of its past: dinosaur bones, fading volcano‑top buttes, relic cottonwoods in dry creek lines, stone homestead structures, dynamic grasslands where sheep, cows, pronghorn, and elk weave paths. Any kind stranger with worked hands also holds cracking wide smiles and stories. The ebbs of wind and daylight’s expansion have already revealed the beauties and challenges of caring for our yearling cattle. Some have lost their lives in the jagged temperature fluctuations and strikes of sickness, while others have only lost their shaggy winter coats. Many have been steadily growing and surprise us with their fullness, similar to the verdant pasture emerging as a miracle from the recent hail and gumbo‑mud mess. The little things have so much to offer and welcome us to pause, listen. I love this feeling and start my days this way.
My kettle gently roils by the time color arrives on the dawn horizon. Dog nails clink against wood until they wait at the back door, where we’ll depart for a slow, quiet walk. We pause often, making space for the first calls of the robins and meadowlark. I watch the steer herd move with the wind or lie chewing against a warm pink sky, whichever is available on a given spring morning. Cherishing the little things and noticing helps ground me in my rhythms and sense of place in the face of new daily challenges of work in northeastern Montana spring. Observing what arises from such a wide‑open environment, and the emotions it draws upon, was a draw to dive into this deeply rural context. A month in, the transition feels exciting, mostly embodied, with moments of edginess and fluster like learning a new dance. In retrospect, it is a contrast to the way change used to feel like drowning.
Change was once an overwhelming and threatening element, taking everything I knew away from me. Grappling with this intense polarity – starts meaning there also had to be endings, that new life could only come at the expense of death – shook my nervous system. As a child, I’d go seek comfort outside, where I’d let my body melt into grass and animal fur as a salve. Until the death of my guardian dog one afternoon while we lay together in the sun, I thought I was safe from the realities of the inside worlds: the dreaded high‑pressure classrooms, conflict‑ridden households, fear of losing friends in our aging. But circumstances began to pile on that confronted my narrative of change as an agent of discord, and instead showed me its role in sustaining everything I’ve loved. Yes, everything! Music, rivers, and people alike. This has been one of life’s most expansive lessons yet. It complicated things in a delicious, albeit sometimes frustrating, way.
While studying conservation biology, I questioned how we could so cleanly define the land as intact vs. degraded, plants as noxious and invasive as if malicious, and climate change and modern agriculture as our inherent doom without discussion of alternatives. Confused on some days and in emotional upheaval on others, my studies seemed to demand a calculated attention to life’s inevitable trend toward an unfathomable doom. I escaped lectures of conditioning for planetary collapse by spending every moment in her living, breathing body, building a different belief system for future building. It’s where I began to distinguish the feeling of moving toward rather than away from, seeing balance and healing as expansions of capacity to move with regeneration rather than anxiously praying some holding pattern never collapses.
A dear friend painted a simple sign to decorate our home some years back: Feed The Good. I’ve scribed this phrase into notebook margins, text messages, even professional purpose statements since. It spoke so loudly to the value of treating my life as an altar. I want my life’s abundance to spill over into service of something greater, by being grounded in acts of devotion instead of the commands of commitment. It makes room for possibilities over prescriptions, trusting my future to be curated by actions grounded in present personal values. I can feel the thread holding together my decisions, passions, and lessons. It made room for me to move beyond a job and life that felt hinged together by calculations for potential stability and impact. By leaning into land stewardship work and life as devotion, I was led back to prioritizing the act of digging into my home landscape in service of the ecosystems that sustain me. My life made sense as a throughline rather than an endless journey toward some honorable finale. I was still tethered to that child in the garden, who would go on to pack in tools and mule strings into the backcountry in the name of conservation, to sleep in mountain‑lion‑haunted sheep camps on my weekends. Learning about tenets of holistic land and life management toward what you want rather than trying to eradicate or run away felt so resonant for this reason. I reckoned this perspective of abundance rather than scarcity could provide integral professional and personal guidance.
This opportunity, trust, and generosity to nourish good together is such an affirmation from my newfound family in Quivira and the Coulters. I hope this apprenticeship can deepen my capacity to nourish and be nourished across my web: within my own working body and mind, and with the human and otherwise stewards alongside me. How can I fill plates by filling the soil, the watersheds, and the big ruminant bellies in my lifetime of devotion? I face fears of potentials like eons untangling polywire reels with the possibilities available in curiosity, mentorship, and wide‑open spaces.