The Ranch Kid

Ranchers are having a really hard time these days. They’ve got more drought, more conflict, expensive land, high rates of suicide, just to name a few. But this fall the University of Wyoming launched a new agricultural leadership degree. The goal is to re-envision the rancher of the future. This summer, a Wyoming kid named Ethan Mills became the first registered student in the program. We tag along as he attends a ranch camp.

In the rolling green hills north of Sheridan, Wyoming – a stone’s throw from the Montana border – University of Wyoming instructors Brian Sebade and Barton Stam lead a herd of ranching students to the bottom of a steep grassy slope. Then they introduce them to an activity. Yesterday they had the students imagine themselves as plants.

“Now you're going to be imagining yourself as the cow,” says Brian.

About a dozen students in baseball caps and cowboy boots chuckle at the idea as they stand around the tailgate of a truck. It’s a beautiful early summer day, the hills verdant in every shade of green, bugs and birds everywhere. Luckily, these students are game to try anything – even pretending to be cows. But there is a point to this activity. It’s to teach students how to graze cattle by awarding them points for finding different kinds of forage. Brian points up at the hillside covered in colorful flags.

“This hillside here is your pasture,” says Brian. “And those flags up there are the plants you're going to be eating.  Blue represents grasses, red represents forbs, and yellow represents shrubs.”

They get 15 points for every blue flag they grab, 10 for red flags and five for yellow. I notice there’s lots more blue flags – that’s the grass – down lower on the hill where they’ll be easy to snag. But there’s one more hitch to this game.

“What is your other requirement daily that you need? 

“Water,” one student says.

“Okay. This truck represents water. So you have to come here every day,” Brian says.

This ranch camp is what the university’s new ranch degree hopes to achieve, lots of hands-on learning and experimentation and team teaching. And the university has good reason to get experimental. Ranchers and farmers are having a really hard time these days. They’ve got more drought, more conflict, expensive land. In fact, the younger generation is just opting out; the average age of a rancher these days is 58. Not to mention that the rates of suicide by male ranchers are more than three times as high as for the average American. So yeah, it’s not easy being a rancher right now. This program helps to address some of those issues by attracting a younger generation to try new things.

UW Junior Ethan Mills is one of those students who always raises his hand and answers all the questions. This kind of learning really works for him. Before this summer, Ethan was trying to piece together a double major.

“But they didn’t have what I was particularly looking for,” says Ethan. “I had started out as a livestock business manager with a rangeland minor. I was trying to build my own ranch degree is what kind of, I had been told. And when they built that, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it's what I'm wanting.’”  

So Ethan signed up as the first student in the new Ranch Leadership program. Sure, a lot of these courses were already offered in a bunch of different departments: business, ecology, ag. But now, they’ll all be accessible in one degree program for students like Ethan who wants to not just ranch – but steer the direction the ranch industry is headed to be more experimental. Now, the instructors tell the students to pair up. So Ethan grabs a partner, Tanner Page. He’ll be the calf, he says. Tanner will be his mom. 

“​​A good cow cannot leave her calf behind, okay?” says Brian. “So Tanner's a good cow,  okay? So he's gonna stay bound to his calf. They're gonna travel together.”

Ethan and Tanner each hold on to one end of a clothes hanger to stay connected. But some students opt to be yearlings and are free agents to travel faster and farther than the cow/calf pairs. Before they start the contest, Brian calls all the calves over for a little huddle.

“Really quick, set your hangers down and if you're a calf, come talk to me and Barton real quick. Okay, cows stay where you are. Only baby calves!” Brian says. Once he’s got the calves gathered together he stage whispers, “So y'all need to be a calf. Because these cows can go charging up the hill, calves are kind of dragging behind. Does that make sense? Do you get what I'm putting down here? So don't pull them down, but like slow them down.  Okay? That's the point. And don't tell them you're doing it on purpose. Yeah, don't tell them. So don't make it so obvious. At some point you can say, ‘I don’t wanna.’”

The calves all snigger and nod and rejoin the group. Then the game is on.

“You guys ready? All right. Go grazing!”

The students all lumber off cow-style. They trudge up the steep hill pulling their calves along with the clothes hanger. Even the yearlings hunch over, climbing that steep slope. 

Right off the bat, Ethan and Tanner set out to win. 

“Wow, we are the laziest cows there ever was!” Ethan admits.

Lazy because they make a beeline for the blue flags – the grasses down low– and ignore the forbs and shrubs up higher. Just like cows might do. 

“The whole point of this is we have two types of herds here,” says Ethan. “We got a cow/calf herd, you have yearling herds. And yearlings, they're a little bit more mobile. You can go forage a little differently than these cows. They have calves and I'm the calf and they're dragging them along. So we kind of chose, I guess, for our team's strategy to be more lazy. We're also not being able to get out and forage as much as some of these other pairs are.”

Ethan and Tanner’s stack of blue flags piles up as they go back and forth from the truck to the hillside. Ethan drags his feet, saying how tired he is, and Tanner pulls him along. The truck is the watering hole and so they pretend to go home every night to drink. Each day is about five minutes long so these cows have to hustle to get up and down that big hill. It’s gotta be a quarter mile to the top, straight up. Not even the yearlings aspire to go that far. 

But then, Ethan and Tanner almost lose entirely when a grizzly bear attacks them from above!

Brian comes charging down the hill, growling and yelling, “I’m going to eat you, Ethan Mills!”

They run as fast as they can down the hill to escape, reaching the truck just in time. That escape uses up a lot of calories, though, a big deduction from the pair’s overall score. But at least they don’t get any red flags with the letter T on them. That would mean they’d eaten a toxic forb like larkspur or locoweed that made them sick. 

For the university, resisting old dogmas has become urgent, like that ranchers are reluctant to collaborate with public land agencies, or that ranchers can’t change the way they graze. Back in 2018, the Department of Agriculture held a summit with all the stakeholders who had a vested interest in the school. The feedback was a hard pill to swallow.

“They relayed the message that some of our students were not necessarily meeting the needs of the industry,” says Dr. Randall Violett, the director of RMAL. And he’s the guy who built this program from the ground up. 

“One of the glaring things that we kept hearing from our stakeholders is, we need the emotional intelligence kinds of things. We need conflict resolution, communication. Just dealing with people.”

But a good communicator might not be what you think of when you imagine a cowboy. They choose that life because it is so solitary, right? But Ethan agrees it’s time cowboys better represent themselves when they sit down to talk with public land agencies or lawmakers or even each other.

“You're either your biggest advocate or enemy and that's when you're dealing with your consumers or the public. Are you going to be able to show that what you're doing is for the good of the animal and the good for the population which you're feeding?” Ethan says.

In this new degree program, a key component to getting students communicating will be through internships. They’ll be required to do three of them. For the first one?

“We hope that they get on a ranch, a working ranch, to experience what it's like to be really on the ground, boots on the ground kind of thing, and experiencing what they can through that internship at various times of the year,” says Randall.

The second internship they’ll do with one of the many agencies that ranchers have to interact with.

“We're also placing a lot of emphasis on the public lands and public land management because Wyoming is 50% 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,” Randall says. “We're really excited about that because the agencies are telling us that ‘hey, we would love your graduates as well.’ Because they'll be able to relate to the permit 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.”

The third internship will be putting all that together. Through all four seasons, they’ll help manage a ranch themselves. Right now, Ethan is plugging away at his first internship on his family ranch near the Black Hills on the South Dakota border. 

“We’re located in Upton which is the best town on earth, according to our sign,” he says with a chuckle. 

All spring he’s been boots on the ground, helping with calving and branding. That’s when the calves are captured and a hot iron is pressed to their skin, searing the ranch’s insignia on them as a raised scar. Then if they get lost, it’s obvious who they belong to. It’s a tradition going all the way back to the earliest American ranchers. 

This summer, Ethan participated in his family’s branding as part of his internship. Here, he’s got a calf tied up in a steel loop and brings it to the branding stove.

“Got the calf in the nord forks,” we can hear him say over the sound of the calves crying. “Just putting a brand on. Got both vaccines, ear tags and good to go.”

Ethan is RMAL’s ideal student. His family’s ranching style is to always be trying new things. His dad even hosts a podcast about the nuts and bolts of of making a living at ranching called the Working Ranch Radio Show.

“They're very progressive in their ways and what we're trying because we want to be the most efficient, most productive we can be and that comes with trying new things and learning. Because science has gone so far and there's more that we can learn every day,” says Ethan.

If the Ranch Leadership program can partner with lots of ranches with these attitudes, they can train the next generation of ranchers to embrace a changing world.

“Everyone tally up your points!” Brian tells all the students (aka cows). The grazing contest has come to a close. Even though there’s still lots of flags up on the hill, the instructors say the pretend Forest Service is telling them to get off their permit.

“Well, we got some bear issues, spreader issues. Some resource concerns on range condition. So we're having to go home early. So you're lucky. We're going to only cap it at eight days,” Brian says.

Ethan and Tanner have one of the highest scores. But their instructors want to know what would have lured them to the top where there was lots more grass? 

“What if I'd had a bunch of Snickers bars up there?” Brian asks.

“Ice cream!” one student calls out.

“Ice cream would have gotten you up there?”

Ethan has another idea. “Or like some supplements or salt?”

It begs the question: what will it take to get these young ranchers to hike a little farther to try new agricultural strategies as well? Especially when it comes to environmental stewardship, ranchers often stick to the tried and true. Trying new things can be expensive or require a bunch of extra training. But these students aren’t so set in their ways yet. 

Walking back to the ranch’s lodge, I chat up student Mikayla Johnson.

“There's  just tons of information and I feel just kind of like a sponge, just soaking it all in,” says Mikayla, another student that this program is geared toward. She’s next in line to take over a family ranch in Utah and wants to educate herself about what she might do differently so it’s a more sustainable business.

“My husband and I, we work our full time jobs during the week and then we drive over and we farm with his parents. So we're just hoping that someday we'll get back over there and just be there full time. Do farming full time.”

“I'm a PhD student in Switzerland in combination with the University Wacheningen,” says Janine Braun. She isn’t what you’d think of as this ranch program’s target student. But she kind of is. She’s a Swiss student who came to the U.S. with some hard questions to ask about the viability of raising cattle on the land at all. Getting ranch students to grapple with difficult conversations like this one is a key element to training leaders in the industry. Janine’s argument is that maybe the world just needs fewer cows.

“We have there the discussion if we need dairy or if we need cattle, because we can produce more with crop plants  and not feed unnecessary animals with the food that we have for humans,” says Janine. 

This is exactly the kind of existential discussion the ranch leadership program wants to mediate. Janine tells me that yesterday, she attended the camp branding. She says back home in Switzerland, such a branding would be illegal. 

“It's not allowed to castrate them when bleeding,” she says. “We have to give painkillers. It's not allowed to brand. And I also checked the time. It was, from the catching of the calf to castration and letting them go, we needed one minute, five seconds. Yeah, it was stressful and painful, but it was one minute, five seconds. And then they are free, like a wild animal. So they get to go off and heal.”

When she arrived in Wyoming, Janine was skeptical of the treatment of American cattle. But because she attended a hands-on workshop, she’s now seen that calves only experience a minute and five seconds of pain. And that the lives of cattle on the range are like wild animals, free roaming and idyllic. Attending the camp helped her viewpoint change. This is how the degree program can work as an ambassador for the ranching industry writ large, by encouraging students to have the hard conversation about animal welfare or  climate change or overgrazing, and then step up as leaders to find practical solutions.

After lunch, we all tromp back out into the hills for another workshop. This one is about: dirt. 

“We have to protect the biology side, right?” says Brian Sebade, the University of Wyoming Soil Professor. “Everything that's living in there. Earthworms, fungi, bacteria. We have nematodes, right? We have arthropods. We have all sorts of things that are going on in there. It's this whole living thing that's happening, okay? So we gotta protect that.”

He says the ground under our feet is full of life. Maybe you’re wondering why ranchers need to worry about their dirt. But here’s the thing. Good dirt grows good grass, and good grass grows good cows. 

“So somebody wants to volunteer and start digging?” he asks. “We're going to go kind of right below Mr. Ketto's feet here, kind of on this little hill slope right here. Let's go right here. This is gonna be an excellent spot. This should hopefully line up correctly. Yeah, let's start digging this out. What's your name?”

“Tanner.”

“Tanner! You the man. Alright, so everybody come get a chunk where Tanner's digging. 

ME: The students all scoop up handfuls of clumpy, dusty dirt. But what kind of dirt? That’s the question. To find out, they need to add water.”

“Alright, so everybody come get some water. Take some water, pass it along.”

The students all gather around to get some water dribbled in their hands.

“How much water?” a student asks.

“Till you're saturated,” Brian says.

Then…they start squishing it in their hands. 

“Alright, how's everybody doing?” Brian asks.

“This is real hard,” a student admits.

“This is real sticky stuff,” Ethan says.

“It's super sticky, right?” Brian says. “So does it form a ribbon? So if you push it together like this, between your thumb and your forefinger, does it make what's called a ribbon? That'd be a ribbon. Some people pride themselves in how nice and evenly spaced their ribbons are.” 

It’s like working in a pottery class, but in the great outdoors. And that’s the point. If you can get a nice long strip formed, and it feels smooth and not gritty under your fingers. Then you know the soil you’re dealing with is clay. And that has real world ramifications if your ranch is full of clay. 

“So last year when we came up for ranch camp, they got like four or five inches of rain in a thunderstorm in I don't know, like a four or five hour period.So since it was a clay soil, what do you think happened to this landscape?” Brian asks.

“It flooded,” a chorus of students says.

“So the bridge that you came down by Riley's house was completely wiped out. The road that you came in on, there were these huge divots cut out because the soil in this area just could not absorb too much of what was going on.”

For Ethan, a workshop that teaches him how to identify clay is what he’s all about. Not only does good dirt grow good cows, it also stores more carbon. Ethan says that means ranchers can be part of the solution in stopping the climate crisis using strategies they’ll learn in this program. Like keeping cattle from trampling the soils around water, releasing the carbon stored there, and moving herds more often so they don’t overgraze. He says these techniques are especially useful for Wyoming ranchers who are stewards of land at the headwaters of the Colorado River.

“Ranchers upstream have impact on downstream things that happen,” says Ethan. “So understanding that ranchers have that and then in carbon, I mean, that's a whole new subject that we're experiencing. They affect how carbon can be sequestered in their soils and through plant growth and grazing. So yeah, just knowing that they have these roles and they don't even sometimes know it yet.”

UW Range Professor Derek Scasta agrees that these students have the potential to be big players in the world of tomorrow. But they can only do that if they have the leadership skills to advocate for this way of life. Because right now, ranching’s got a pretty bad rap.

“Ag industries are criticized,” Derek says. “There's a broad brush painting of, ‘ag is bad and it's not sustainable.’ Well, ranching is probably the most sustainable form of agriculture because these landscapes, they're not suitable to grow corn or soybeans. Probably not going to have a dairy up here, you know? So really an important use for society is producing livestock. But in doing that, they sustain water quality, air quality, habitat for wildlife, I mean, so many other services. And even just like scrutiny over meat in your diet, ranch managers and folks in the industry have to be able to take all that and talk about it and be good stewards of the land and do what's best for the consumer and the planet.

Derek says if these students can become true leaders, the sky’s the limit. Right now, he says, they have big opportunities with all sorts of new markets… selling carbon offsets or free range meat or hosting solar farms. His worry is, for a lot of these students, they just want to be that cowboy riding off into the sunset.

“Because they're like, ‘I want to ride a horse and gather cows in the morning.’ But there's the big picture of, ‘I want to take care of the land, feed society, and leave this place better than I found it.’ That's like a higher, more noble motive. And I think these students have that, but you got to help them kind of realize it,” Derek says.

They need help because a lot of these students grew up admiring the deeply ingrained approach to ranching passed down through the generations. They’ll need to be empowered to adapt those old traditions.

Ethan has formed a beautiful ribbon of clay in his hands. But when the activity is over, he wads it up into a ball the perfect size and shape of a baseball. He asks Dr. Sebade if he thinks he can throw it and hit that pond way down at the bottom of the draw.

“I bet you can’t. Five bucks,” Brian says. 

“Five bucks?”

“Five bucks, you short it.”

 “I short it?” 

Ethan gets into his baseball throwing stance and hucks the ball of clay. We all stand and watch to see if the clay ball hits the pond. Then we see a tiny splash in the pond’s surface. 

“Woah! Dang it! Woah!” the students all roar.

“Aren't you glad I believed in you?” Brian says with a laugh.

It was a really, really long shot but Ethan hits his target. And that’s how it goes for all these aspiring ranchers. Will they take the risk? Question old dogmas? Listen to the science? Reinvent how livestock are raised on the arid lands of the American West? That still remains to be seen.