The Rancher of the Future: A Great Individualist Bonus

We're back with a new season of Modern West. Listen to the first episode of The Great Individualist Reboot now!

 Something really exciting is taking place in the world of sustainable agriculture.  As we speak, the University of Wyoming is rolling out an innovative program to prepare ranching students to be the best stewards of the land that they can be. Sure, they're still going to learn about animal husbandry, business management, all the stuff that you get in your standard ag program. But they're also going to learn how to manage water and soil in a warming world and how to communicate more effectively, not just with other ranchers, but with policymakers and public land agencies. And they're not going to learn all this stuff theoretically in a classroom. They'll do it hands on through several internships.

So yeah, exciting stuff if you care about the ranching tradition. That's why we here at the Modern West decided it was time to reboot our fifth season, The Great Individualist, a whole series we produced a few years back on the myths and hard truths about our ranching way of life in the American West. But most importantly, how ranching is evolving to meet a changing world. 

Later this season, I'll be heading out into the field with one of the interns who signed up for the University of Wyoming's new Ranch Management and Agricultural Leadership Program, or RMAL.  We'll tag along as Ethan Mills experiences a ranching camp where he participates in a branding, learns how to graze cattle, and digs his hands into the science of soils. 

But first, we'll start by sitting down with the man making this whole program happen, Dr. Randall Violet. Here's our conversation, lightly edited for brevity.

RANDALL VIOLETT: Back in 2018, there was a summit that was held by stakeholders across the state of Wyoming and they wanted to relay the message that some of our students weren't necessarily meeting the needs of the industry. So that was kind of the beginning of the vision and they hired me to come on board to help develop the curriculum. We put together the feasibility study and presented it to the Board of Trustees, and it was approved in November of 2023. And so now, this spring, we ran a second year of our seminar series, Ranching in the West, and are now starting to promote the degree program. The really cool thing about the whole process is it's been a grassroots movement, if you will, in terms of  bringing on stakeholders, alumni, and industry who came and told us at the university that this is what they need in their employees, and this is what our graduates should try to become. I mean, there's nothing more  universal in the state of Wyoming than ranching, right? And so we can tie in a lot of the disciplines: when you say ranch, you're talking animal science, range science, ag business, soil science, all those disciplines and we're tying them together.  

MELODIE EDWARDS: I wonder if you can describe what it is that your vision for the program is. What's it going to look like? What's it going to be like for students that enroll? 

RV: That's the exciting part of the whole thing. We went into the College of Ag in the various departments and pulled together a curriculum committee and I identified courses that we felt kind of met what we wanted in the program. Those would be hands-on, applicable, practitioner kind of courses, not a lot of theoretical type of stuff. It's mostly a practical background and application. 

So we identified the courses that already exist in the college, and actually outside the college. We've gone into the school of energy and found some courses and we've looked at the business college, the Haub School [of Environment and Natural Resources. We found holes in there so we know what the courses are that we'd like that already exist. 

So now, what are we missing?  One of the glaring things that we kept hearing from our stakeholders is that we need the emotional intelligence kinds of things. We need conflict resolution, communication,  just dealing with people. The ultimate goal is to bring them across all disciplines on campus and to do collaborative teaching so that the students will have the experts in the classroom basically every time the class meets. And try to stay away from the traditional team teaching where the animal scientist shows up for three weeks and now your economist shows up and we call that team teaching. It is in essence team teaching, but it's not collaborative teaching. So we really want to drive and create a system and a protocol to bring in faculty and experts – and even bring in ranch managers from the tremendous resources we have in the state of Wyoming – into the classroom to help share their knowledge and their expertise with our students. 

ME: Why do you feel like this was the right time for a program like this? Why does it feel necessary? It sounds like you're doing a lot of outreach to the ag industry. What are you hearing in terms of what they need right now?  

RV: Our agricultural population, our producer population is aging. We're starting to see a generation going off the farm or the ranch. Ranching is extremely important to the state of Wyoming, and we want to be positioned to where we can train and prepare that next generation to go back to their family ranch or their generational ranch or to be able to go out and manage a ranch for an absentee owner or a corporation, and meet those needs. We feel that  those two examples – a generational ranch and a corporate ranch – still have a lot of the same needs. That is, as I mentioned earlier, some of the emotional intelligence, the leadership component, the ability to communicate and to manage people, is becoming extremely important, not just in the ranching community, but in agriculture in general. 

We're really positioning ourselves for the Intermountain West. Besides our leadership component that we've identified in our title, which is unique (there's no other program in the country that has that) we're also placing a lot of emphasis on the public lands and public land management. Wyoming is 50 percent public land, and if you're going to manage a ranch in a large percentage of Wyoming, you're going to need to be able to deal with public land management and the public land agencies. We're really excited about that because the agencies are telling us that, ‘Hey, we, we would love your graduates as well because they'll be able to be the permittee or the producer or the rancher on one side of the table, or they can be on the other side of the table and represent the agency and really create a collaborative management team. We have an internship that we actually are requiring our students to be exposed to the agency's side of the management. 

ME: Sounds like you're definitely focusing on getting students out of the classroom and into a hands-on learning environment. Yeah, I'd love to hear more about the internship program.  

RV: Well, we're calling our first internship or level one internship, if you will, it's going to be an agriculture experience. So we hope that they get on a working ranch to experience what it's like to be really a boots on the ground kind of thing, experiencing what they can through that internship at various times of the year, (we envision that internship probably being a summer internship). There's a lot of labor in terms of fence building and irrigating and putting up hay, but not necessarily a lot of management kind of stuff. But I think that's important for them to appreciate what the labor is and how that is seasonal and cyclical and in the production year. That's our first level one internship, if you will.  

The second one is we want them to experience an internship with either an ag business or an agency.  Those internships are typically summer internships.  The BLM and the Forest Service are always looking for interns in the summer to do a lot of monitoring and those kinds of things. 

Then our third one is the one that we're wanting to try to bring all that kind of together again and we're calling that our ranch management internship and that's where we hope to partner or have a management shadowing experience where the student will be matched with  an existing ranch manager that wants to mentor this student through pretty much an entire production year.

Now it doesn't necessarily mean it has to happen on the ranch. You know, there's a lot of decisions that are made around the kitchen table and we feel with today's technology that a lot of those decisions could be done with an intern through Zoom: budgetary decisions, hiring, human resource decisions, marketing decisions from afar. But yet maybe during spring break or various long weekends they could go to the ranch and get exposure to calving or lambing or something along those lines too. The neatest thing about internships is we are able to bring industry to the student or the student to the industry. 

ME: You had mentioned that there's a component that's really focusing on the natural resources, but it also seems like that's really an important aspect in terms of water just because the droughts that we've been experiencing for so long. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about learning how to manage ranches in a time of drought and climate change. 

RV: We're baking in a lot of those kinds of competencies. We're baking that into some of these classes, right? You're going to be in the field learning about some of this stuff. We're going to bring experts from these various topics into the classroom and then take the students out into the field as well. So they're going to learn and see that first hand: how can we prepare the students, the next generation of ranch managers for climate change? There's ranches out there that are far enough ahead to show some of the things that they've done.I think that will make a great learning opportunity for the students as well. 

ME: You had mentioned the importance of learning that communication and that there's conflict resolution kinds of elements of this program. I wonder if you can talk about why that's necessary in this day and age? I know we've seen with the Rock Springs Resource Management Plan, just floods of public comment and a lot of conflict there. It does seem like that's becoming more and more the way that ranchers are interacting with these agencies. It's getting more difficult. How are you going to help students deal with that side of things? 

RV: Probably one of the biggest messages that we've been receiving is communication skills, requiring students to do things that will hone those skills – the reading, the writing, the speaking, becoming a well rounded citizen – that's what our stakeholders have told us. We need to really emphasize those communication skills. The biggest communication skill that I would say academia has probably failed the most is listening.

And so we're gonna try to have our students practice listening, and become better listeners. That's one of those emotional intelligent things that we have identified, and hope to bake into a lot of the curriculum. 

ME: I'm guessing the same goes for getting students to learn about how to collaborate, learning how to kind of bring together a community. It seems like that's becoming more and more important in ranching communities, not to be sort of off by yourself as a family ranch, struggling on your own, especially when things are so much harder. How do you collaborate? How do you bring people together?  

RV: Yeah, that's a great example. So you think about the typical rancher in rural Wyoming, they're pretty isolated. Most family operations, they like it that way too, right? Because it's one of the reasons they do it. That's the lifestyle. We appreciate that to be sustainable. We feel that there's enough skills there and necessary collaboration, that you can't just  live out on the ranch anymore. We have to train them. We have to get them prepared to be advocates, either through podcasts or marketing their product. They have to be well informed on what's going on in terms of what's happening in DC or what's happening in Cheyenne, in terms of all these policies and all those types of things, as well as being diverse, especially again in Wyoming where we have a lot of exciting things from the energy sector, carbon sequestration, all that happens on the land. Our land owners are our ranchers, and so they need to be aware of that and they need to be able to identify those kinds of opportunities and then collaborate.  

ME: It sounds like it's a really exciting future that you're laying out for these students. It seems like there's going to be a lot of hope going forward and maybe that could help with this problem of Wyoming's kids just out migrating. Is that part of the goal?  

RV: It is. It really is, yeah. It's a great analogy as we lose probably our most precious resource and that's our kids, our youth, right? I see that changing though. I think in this whole process, one of the real common comments I get is, ‘Where was this five years ago when I was going to school?’ So we know that there's a real vested interest in it. We have some really visionary people involved in the program. It's just going to blossom and get better.

I can't wait to get a couple of graduates out there to get feedback from them and from their employers or their experience if they go back to the family ranch and they can come back and say, ‘Man, you guys are spot on,’ or ‘No, you need to tweak this or tweak that.’ That's really when it's going to be cool to see once we get some graduates out there.