You Own the Ground You Land On
Sam Ryerson with art by Ariel Greenwood
Originally published in Resilience, Issue #45 – Searching for Home Ground
“Always take care of a place like it’s your own, and someday you’ll own your own place,” I remember Thad Harris telling me when we were heading out to fix fence one day, getting pastures ready to receive cattle early in the spring in 2006. Thad was 21, already a seasoned buckaroo, and my first mentor in my first ranch job. The ranch, south of Roscoe, Montana, leased out the grazing and provided care for 2,500 yearling heifers from June to October. I had spent the winter caretaking a place near Red Lodge and cooking in a café in town, and rode my little black horse bareback 20 miles to the ranch when I started. Right away, I felt like I belonged. Everywhere I’ve worked since then, I’ve treated the land like I belonged to it, like it was my own; I felt connected to the land, and I felt at home. For the last ten years, I’ve owned part of the cattle I’ve cared for, and I’ve always cared for them like they were all my own. And I can say for sure that I don’t need to own land to love working on it.
“If you get bucked off, you own the ground you land on,” was another reassuring saying of Thad’s — and a generally accepted fact in cowboy wisdom. I purchased some prime Montana rangeland in the early years of my career. The worst real estate transaction I made, on some bog bumps next to Big Beaver Creek, happened after a close call with a red dun horse named Pal. That decision helped lead me to find better ways of getting along with horses to strategically avoid purchasing land outright. I’ve been doing this work ever since, I haven’t bought much ground lately, and I still don’t own my place, but I’ve felt at home where I’ve been for many years now. The senses of home, belonging, community, or querencia do not require possession of title, and might sometimes be stronger for the lack of it. The partnerships are the most important part, and my partnership with my wife, Ariel, is the foundation of our work.
My cowboy education was based on good teachers, wandering, working hard, and close observation. My entry into this work might not have been typical, but it is traditional that young cowboys should work on a variety of places as informal low-paid apprentices, and they are usually generously supported in this by the elders whom they work with and learn from. (I use cowboy as a gender-neutral noun because although basic biological facts in the primitive living conditions of the early days made the work suited for young men, now there are plenty of women doing the same work just as well or better). Working for a variety of owners and livestock operators, working as a hired hand in different states and seasons, learning to ride horses and get along with the tough ones, tending cows, yearlings and even goats, studying changes on the land — all these things made my accidental cowboy education compelling. After a few years, when I got serious about trying to work as a ranch manager, I applied to be an apprentice in Quivira Coalition’s Conservation and Ranching Leadership for Youth program, which helped me take that step. Everywhere I worked, there were lessons to learn. Everywhere I worked, the leased or permitted grazing land was a critical part of the whole operation; managing that land was often the most challenging and fulfilling part of the work.
I’ve worked on ranches in every state from Montana to New Mexico, and every ranch I’ve worked on has had at least some component of leased or permitted grazing land. This included Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, state trust lands, wildlife refuges, Indian reservations, private grazing leases, and adverse possession. When you lease land, you have to consider your management from multiple perspectives — especially if you want to keep your lease. This can be challenging and frustrating when different stakeholders have conflicting priorities for the same piece of ground. But the patience and humility that the process requires can make the work more meaningful. More people can find fulfillment and connection in the same place. This is especially true on lands with wider public or community access, like federal and state lands, and reservations.
When my partners and I leased part of the Mescalero Apache Reservation in southern New Mexico, we felt honored to work in a place that is both sacred and functional for the community it belongs to. The land is productive and mysterious, holding secrets that our friends from the tribe hinted at, but we could never really know. We spent five years there, built our cattle company, rebuilt a house and corrals, left fences and pastures better than we found them — until, as we expected might happen, the tribe decided they needed more acres for their own expanding cow herd. We moved to the lease we’re on now.
“I don’t need to own my own ranch,” my friend, Jeff Gossage, said when he spoke at Quivira’s conference in 2011. He said that owning his own ranch was not his goal because he realized he could never afford to buy a place big enough to work at the scale he wanted to work at. He was glad to work for people who owned or leased the land. At the time, he was managing a ranch for an outfit that leased a couple of big ranches in Colorado on very creative terms, just south of the wildlife refuge where the outfit I was an apprentice for had cattle grazing on very creative terms.
Jeff’s boss had a long-term lease on a property owned by The Nature Conservancy to graze cattle, manage and harvest bison, and run a guest program. My boss had a deal to graze cattle on a national wildlife refuge just north of Jeff’s place to manage their grazing for habitat improvement, where the lease fee was paid in electric fence materials and our labor. Meanwhile in California, Ariel started her career with cattle when she managed a grazing lease on a private research preserve in suburban Sonoma County, living in a camper, moving temporary electric fences and portable water infrastructure every day, and taking her salary in the form of beef on the hoof, which she then had to sell to local customers. Each of us needed those opportunities to build our careers; each of our employers needed ambitious, optimistic, hard-working young people like us to make their deals work.
Creative lease terms, creative housing arrangements, willingness to compromise, optimism, ability to work with minimal infrastructure and equipment, commitment to improving land and resources without a guarantee of long-term tenure — these are required of graziers working on leased lands. And most of all, commitment to partnerships. A grazing lease is a relationship between at least two parties, and often more. The contract is only as good as the relationship between the partners. I’ve been fortunate to be involved in some great partnerships, and I wouldn’t have been able to do much without partners, or without the relationships that led to the partnerships. Partners and leases both come and go. That’s part of the deal, and it means our relationships and reputations matter more.
“You know, private property is a pretty recent phenomenon in human history,” said one of my partners a few years ago. We were driving to look at some cows we were partnered on near Clayton, New Mexico. We were talking about taxes — property taxes, inheritance taxes, and a recent effort in New Mexico to allow landowners to receive agricultural use classification for property tax purposes without practicing agriculture. This partner of mine is fairly conservative politically, so this conversation was really interesting and stuck with me over the years. I’m paraphrasing here, but he went on to say, “It’s hard to keep land in the hands of people who actually want to work on it. Maybe the inheritance tax should be higher. Stop using land as an asset to park cash in, as a hedge against inflation. Make it affordable for younger people who want to work it.”
Private ownership of grazing land, especially across the semi-arid grasslands of the world, is a relatively new development, which may be antithetical to the nature of the land and the most appropriate ways of working on it. The settled, fenced-in, permanent, capital-intensive kind of ranching now practiced in the North American West and elsewhere allows for careful management of specific parcels, but also confines people, livestock, and wildlife within arbitrary boundaries. Transhumance — the seasonal migration of herding communities with their livestock — has a long history throughout the grassland regions of the world. Seasonal migrations and nomadic life in close proximity with livestock have advantages for land, wildlife, and pastoralists whose production models require them to respond flexibly to changing climatic and forage conditions on extensive, wild rangelands full of predators. There are also plenty of advantages to people for settling down, living inside solid houses, removing predators, and building fences around their livestock and forage.
Historical pastoralist traditions existed within societies structured to support a relatively consistent way of life based on movement across landscapes comprised of common land tenure. Their cultural traditions celebrated this work while their social customs enabled families and communities to function in complement to this lifestyle. For a brief period in American history, early cowboys practiced some aspects of transhumance across landscapes under a sort of common tenure — the unappropriated, unfenced lands of the western territories after the forced removal of their native people and bison and before statehood, homestead claims, and barbed wire fences. The cattle market in those days was primarily speculative, with many investors from the East Coast and Europe seeking short-term profits by investing in relatively liquid livestock grazing on “free” land, rather than the long-term, equity investments in land, livestock, improvements, and equipment that appreciate over time (and carry tax benefits in the interim) that motivate many ranch owners now. The system that created cowboy culture was not set up to support cowboys owning their own spreads, nor to prioritize long-term ecological, economic, or social value, though some cattle owners and stock companies did build systems to support cowboys in their work. Cowboys created their own cultures, customs, and skills to sustain themselves — as they still do now.
The work was suited for single young men, not for stable family life. Chuckwagons, bedrolls, horse wranglers, remudas, rope corrals, line camps, and other innovations were practical responses to the demands of working large numbers of semi-feral cattle and moving them across wild, rough country. Living conditions were coarse and primitive, but the job required certain refined skills — many of them introduced by Spanish settlers on California’s ranchos and adapted to this continent — to manage cattle on undeveloped rangeland without the benefit of fences or corrals: working cattle from a rodear or hold-up, roping calves from a distance using long ropes made from grass or rawhide thrown with precise loops, and neighbors collaborating to gather and sort commingled cattle from shared ranges. The days of truly open range and the great trail drives are gone, but vast areas of grazing land, some of it contained within individual large ranches, still require these strategies and skills to manage cattle. Formal corporate structures like grazing associations still allow smaller producers to benefit from economies of scale, hiring migrant cowboys to manage combined herds while seasonally commingling cattle and resting their private home ranges or hay meadows. Flexible, responsive, collaborative, skillful management of livestock and forage still makes an ecologically-appropriate land use and economically-viable enterprise for semi-arid rangelands and rural communities.
Modern American society and the contemporary cattle industry are not structured to support pastoralism, transhumance, nomads, or cowboys. Our culture cultivates the myth, but not the reality. Still, thousands of people are making it work, and young people are joining in and sticking with it. The current typical model of individually-owned, marginally profitable private cow-calf ranches is not conducive to flexible, responsive, or collaborative management. It takes a great deal of creativity and hard work to make even an unmortgaged deeded ranch running a couple hundred cows support one family without an outside source of income. The contemporary cattle industry is structured to support these kinds of operations just enough to stay in business, and stay dependent on the same supply chain.
The cattle industry is very well-equipped to support grazing leases, especially seasonal leases for young, stocker cattle. These arrangements can provide ways for smaller operations to increase flexibility in stocking and marketing at larger scales, and offer opportunities for ambitious, hard-working younger operators, cowboys, and graziers to use their skills. Good grazing planning and grass management — along with traditional cowboy and stockmanship skills — are especially important for running naïve young cattle on seasonal grazing leases. Through these arrangements, the cattle industry does still support nomadic young cowboys moving across the land. We, and many people like us, have been doing that for years. Ariel and I support ourselves and pay our bills with our work tending land and cattle, while we try to realize longer-term profit and build equity through the cattle we own with our partners. Our partners, families, friends, and neighbors support us practically and culturally; so do both the commodity cattle industry and Quivira.
When we moved into a wall tent in Elk Canyon on the Mescalero Reservation, Ariel and I set up a company to structure our work together and called it Grass Nomads LLC. Sometimes we’ve moved from one ranch or state to another seasonally; sometimes we’ve stayed for years. Since our first months in the wall tent, we’ve lived in campers and switched houses with the seasons. Sometimes the cattle have moved with us; sometimes we moved from one herd and one partnership to another. The saddle horses and the dogs always go with us. After five years migrating between summers tending yearlings in Montana and winters with our cows in New Mexico, we decided to have a baby and stay in one place for a while. Now we’re living with our daughter in a solid old stone house with new windows on a beautiful and efficient ranch in northeastern New Mexico, where we and our partners just renewed and extended our grazing lease with the landowners. We realize we won’t be here forever, but we’re fortunate to be here now — trying to make the most of our opportunity and take care of the place the best we can.