The idea of vocation attaches to work a cluster of other ideas, including devotion, skill, pride, pleasure, the good stewardship of means and materials. Here we have returned to intangibles of economic value. When they are subtracted, what remains is ‘a job,’ always implying that work is something good only to escape.
Wendell Berry.
Look, I largely agree with the assertion that American laborers are getting paid to little.
But this is historically wackadoodle.
Americans born in the early 1940s were born in an era in which German, Italian, French, British, and Japanese industry had been bombed into oblivion.
Of course, American industry did well. It was the only thing left.
For some weird reason, Americans just can't grasp that the super North American economy of the 50s and 60s was due to World War Two.
Accept the things to which fate binds you, and love the people with whom fate brings you together,but do so with all your heart.
I just inherited 1200 acres of ranch land. WTF do I do?
My father in law wants to pass on his ranch to me before he passes. He’s in bad health and for some reason decided that I would be the best of everyone to take on his property. I don’t know a god damn thing about cows or hay, having lived in a big city my whole life; but I’m a pretty good mechanic and would fix all of his equipment whenever I visited him, so I guess he likes me and he thinks I’m the best to take things over. The ranch, located in southern Wyoming, hasn’t done anything productive in the past 5 years due to FIL declining health and I have no idea what to do with it. Like the title says, it’s 1200 acres of mostly hilly sagebrush with grassy bottom land surrounded by forest land. I promised him I wouldn’t break up the land or develop it; but how does a city slicker move out to the middle of Wyoming and generate a living income off of the land without knowing a thing about ranching? Can I lease the grazing property out; lease the grass land out? Just looking for any advice or recommendations. Any advice is appreciated.
Let's answer the question first, that being, "how does a city slicker move out to the middle of Wyoming and generate a living income off of the land without knowing a thing about ranching?"
The answer is simple. You don't.
Here's the reason why:
level 1With only two sections, in Wyoming, I’m assuming that he wasn't a full time rancher, or that he leased a lot of land to get by. Most working Wyoming ranches are large for a reason.
So, as a starting point, what did he do with it? 1,200 acres sounds like a lot unless you've actually ranched in Wyoming, in which case, it really isn't.
19level 2And to be fair, two sections in Carbon or Sweetwater Counties is different than the same area in Laramie or Albany Counties. Your mention of sagebrush suggests that you are somewhere west of Laramie. That also suggests that there are some state or federal leases that are connected to the privately owned land. How many adult cattle does (or did) he run on his place?
The truth of the matter is that, in today's operations, your mechanical abilities are among the most important skills to make a farm or ranch work.
15level 3True. If you are east of Cheyenne, which is really more farm country, it's one thing. Once you start heading west of Cheyenne and into Albany County, it's another. The sagebrush country of Carbon County, something else entirely. Wyoming has quite a bit of varied terrain and conditions.
None of it will support really dense stocking, however, like some other regions of the country will allow. I'd have to assume, like you, that if he was really ranching, he must have had Federal and perhaps state leases, or maybe some private leases.
As a total aside, the line "Somewhere west of Laramie" is part of one of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time, which some credit with starting modern advertising. The 1923 ad for the Jordan Playboy car, which starts off with “Somewhere west of Laramie there's a broncho busting, steer roping girl who knows what I'm talking about".
Replies, from me, and some other guy.
Now, the same thread is full of advice on how this person can just move out and, yee haw, be a rancher.
Bull.
All agriculture is local. All of it. A grain farmer in Kansas can't walk right into a bandanna plantation in Africa and expect to make a go of it instantly. Gardeners all over the country, if they suddenly inherited a wheat farm, would go broke.
And with animal agriculture, this is particularly true. Ranching in Wyoming may be like ranching in Montana, but it's not like cattle farming in Arkansas. Frankly, a Northern Plains rancher used to low grass and cold winters would have a lot better chance of being successful in Arkansas, than an Arkansas cattle farmer would of being a rancher here.
And somebody from a city, stepping into land on advice from people who don't realize that 1,200 acres doesn't cut it here as a ranch, and who have never endured our winters.
Forget it.
This property will be leased to a neighbor, or sold.
And let us discuss the injustice of things.
From when I was small, I've always wanted to ranch. It's hard to explain these things, but I always wanted to. It's probably one of the two "I want to be when I grow up" things in my personality. The other one was being a soldier, which I've done. Regarding that, by the time I was approaching graduating from high school (I graduated when I was 17 years old, not all that uncommon at the time) that was waning, but that desire was expressed by six years I spent in the National Guard.
And I have been a stockman as an adult, but I was never able to make it my full time occupation.
I came pretty close twice, once before being married, and once after, but events transpired and. . . off to the office I go.
There's a difference between being in the Regular Army (which I was for training) and being in the reserves. And there's a difference between being a part-time stockman and a full time one. Moreover, as I'm in one of the professions, I've entered that weird part of my life, which seems to be the case for at least people in my profession, when the kids have grown up and have their own lives, and your spouse has her own job, and most of the people you meet on a daily basis are in your profession, where your private aspirations just die as other people murder them.
You don't need a stock working horse. . . you can borrow one. Wouldn't you like to sell that old one ton stick shift and buy a nice 1/2 ton sport auto, or maybe a Jeep pickup? You don't need to work cattle this weekend, you can get that big project done at work.
Which is why, I think, that I see so many old members of my profession carrying on into their 70s and 80s. Their actual personality died thirty years ago. Just the shell is left.
And in the weird way of the world, here we are. Some urban dude who has little interest in ranching inherits a small (and it is) parcel, but one that has entertaining possibilities, and isn't really that interested, whereas some rural dude spends his whole life, more or less, in suit and tie.
M'eh.
My wife always says things work the way they do for a reason. We're placed in one place, under one set of circumstances, because God wants us there for some reason. We should accordingly accept it, and be happy with it and that we can do what we do, even if we don't realize whatever the good is that we're supposed to be doing by our placement. I try to accept that, but I'll confess, stuff like this frustrates me.
This land is your land This land is my landWoodie Guthrie's misunderstood protest song, This land Is Your Land.
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.
The popular concept of the war is that it represented an armed expression of unadulterated greed. While greed cannot be dismissed as an element, the larger question remains. What was it all about?
The cattle industry, as we know it, didn't really come about until the conclusion of the Civil War. Prior to that, the most significant meat livestock in the US was pork. Swine production produced the basic farm meat for most Americans, which is not to say that they didn't eat cattle, they did, but cattle production was fairly small scale in the East, and much of it was focused on dairy and mixed production. Meat cattle were more common in the South, and while it's popular to note that American ranching was a development of Mexican ranching, it was also very much a development of Southern ranching practices. This, in fact, partially gave rise to the Johnson County War, as will be seen.
At any rate, the American Beef Cattle industry was born when the railroads penetrated into Kansas after the Civil War, and returning Texas cattlemen found that the herds in their state had gone wild, and greatly increased. Cattle in Texas, up until that time, had followed the Mexican practice of being raised principally for their hides, not for meat, but the introduction of rail into Kansas meant that cattle could now be driven, albeit a long ways, to a railhead and then shipped to market. An explosion in urban centers in the East provided a natural market, and soon the cattle industry in Texas had switched over to being focused on shipping cattle for beef.The Texas industry spread north as well and by the 1870s it was making inroads into Wyoming, although really only southern Wyoming for the most part. At the same time, and often forgotten, a dramatic increase in herds in Oregon, the byproduct of early farm herds and pioneer oxen herds, produced a surplus there that caused herds to be driven back east into Wyoming at the very moment that northern Wyoming opened up for ranching.But what was ranching like here, at the time?It was dominated by the fact of the Homestead Act, a bill passed during the Civil War in order to encourage western emigration into the vast public domain. But the bill had been written by men familiar only with Eastern farming, and it used the Eastern agricultural unit, 40 acres, as a model. That amount of acreage was perfectly adequate for a yeoman farmer, and indeed after the Civil War "40 acres and a mule" was the dream of the liberated slave, which they hoped to obtain from the Federal government. But 40 acres wasn't anywhere near adequate for any sort of livestock unit in the West, and most of the West wasn't suitable for farming. In the West, additionally, the Federal homesteading provisions oddly dovetailed with State and Territorial water law.
Water law was the domain of states or territories exclusively, and evolved in the mining districts of California, which accepted that claiming water in one place and moving it to another was a necessary right. This type of water law, much different from that existing in the well watered East, spread to the West, and a "first in time, first in right" concept of water law evolved. This was to be a significant factor in Western homesteading. Additionally, the Federal government allowed open use of unappropriated public lands for grazing. States and Territories, accepting this system, sought to organize the public grazing by district, and soon an entire legal system evolved which accepted the homesteading of a small acreage, usually for the control of water, and the use of vast surrounding public areas, perhaps collectively, but under the administration of some grazing body, some of which, particularly in Wyoming, were legally recognized. In the case of Wyoming, the Wyoming Stock Growers Association controlled the public grazing, and had quasi legal status in that livestock detectives, who policed the system, were recognized at law as stock detectives.
This was the system that the large ranching interests accepted, developed and became use to in the 1870s and 1880s. Large foreign corporations bought into Western ranching accepting that this was, in fact the system. It had apparent legal status.
But nothing made additional small homesteading illegal. And the penalty for failing to cooperate in the grazing districts mostly amounted to being shunned, or having no entry into annual roundups. This continued to encourage some to file small homesteads. Homesteading was actually extremely expensive, and it was difficult for many to do much more than that. Ironically, small homesteading was aided by the large ranchers practice of paying good hands partially in livestock, giving them the ability to start up where they otherwise would not have been. It was the dream of many a top hand, even if it had not been when they first took up employment as a cowboy, to get a large enough, albeit small, herd together and start out on their own. Indeed, if they hoped to marry, and most men did, they had little other choice, the only other option being to get out of ranch work entirely, as the pay for a cowhand was simply not great enough to allow for very many married men to engage in it.
By the 1880s this was beginning to cause a conflict between the well established ranchers, who tended to be large, and the newer ones, who tended to be small. The large stockmen were distressed by the carving up of what they regarded as their range, with some justification, and sought to combat it by legal means. One such method was the exclusion of smaller stockmen from the large regional roundups, which were done collectively at that time, and which were fairly controlled events. Exclusion for a roundup could be very problematic for a small stockman grazing on the public domain, as they all were, and this forced them into smaller unofficial roundups. Soon this created the idea that they were engaging in theft. To make matters even more problematic, Wyoming and other areas attempted to combat this through "Maverick" laws, which allowed any unbranded, cow attended, calf to be branded with the brand of its discoverer. This law, it was thought, would allow large stockmen to claim the strays found on their ranges, which they assumed, because of their larger herds, to be most likely to be theirs (a not unreasonable assumption), but in fact the law actually encouraged theft, as it allowed anybody with a brand to brand a calf, unattended or not, as long as nobody was watching. Soon a situation developed in which large stockmen were convinced that smaller stockmen were acting illegally or semi illegally, and that certain areas of the state were controlled by thieves or near thieves, while the small stockmen rightly regarded their livelihoods as being under siege. Soon, they'd be under defacto siege.
That's true of the Federal lands, for everyone. Ranching helps keep it that way. And there's something to be said for that in addition, we'd note.As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
