Ranchers and partners gather to envision the future for family ranches and rangelands on the Northern Great Plains

In 2023, Megan Torgerson from Reframing Rural, a podcast with a mission to share stories of people and places in rural America in an effort to celebrate culture, preserve history and cultivate curiosity and conversation across geographic, class and cultural divides, had the opportunity to attend WWF’s inaugural Sustainable Ranching Initiative gathering. What follows is Megan’s account of her experience at the event, and what participants can expect at this year’s gathering, which will take place on Sept 10-11, 2024 in Spearfish, South Dakota.

It’s not often you walk into an air-conditioned conference room to see a large gathering of ranchers in ivory cowboy hats, cotton dresses, and pressed work shirts. In August they’re usually outside, on the ranch, close to the many beating hearts of their herd and the rangelands and water they rely upon. But this summer on Montana Avenue in Billings, ranchers from across the Northern Great Plains carved out time to come together for World Wildlife Fund’s first-ever Sustainable Ranching Initiative Gathering. The day before the convening, ranchers toured operations near Winnett, Montana to see grassland conservation in action and the on-the-ground impacts of rancher-led nonprofit Winnett ACES.

The Sustainable Ranching Initiative (SRI) was developed in 2011 to support ranchers in their efforts to protect the health of their soil and rangelands so they can sustain resilient herds and the financial viability of family businesses. The latest project of the initiative, the Ranch Systems Viability Planning program (RSVP), further supports participating ranchers through educational scholarships, cost-share dollars, technical assistance and in-depth rangeland and ecological monitoring. By putting sustainable grazing principles into practice, RSVP ranchers are fostering watershed, soil and grassland health that support livestock and wildlife habitat and the ecosystem services like carbon sequestration that they provide. The reciprocal relationship between healthy pastures, healthy herds and a healthy prairie ecosystem, all contribute to the success of family ranches and the rural economies that depend on them.

“Our relationships are the most important thing we have,” acknowledged Alexis Bonogofsky, director of WWF’s Sustainable Ranching Initiative, at the gathering’s opening. She was not only referring to human relationships, but a sense of kinship with the land.

A rancher’s multilayered relationship to land

Amber Smith, a first-generation rancher from Cohagen, Montana and the executive director of Women in Ranching, facilitated a morning keynote that invited the audience of multi- and first- generation ranchers to reflect in six words on their relationship to land. One rancher shared the words “home, history, recreation, business, life, death.” Another offered “wild, bountiful, esoteric, sublime, companion, teacher.”

Smith also welcomed her contemporaries Carlyle Stewart and Jaimie Stoltzfus to the stage to share their stories of connection with the land.

Stewart’s story began in Detroit, Michigan, the urban setting of his childhood that still inspired in him endless curiosity about land and the natural world. When he was 27, Stewart became a New Agrarian apprentice at the Milton Ranch, a family-run ranch located in Central Montana that’s enrolled in WWF’s RSVP program. That was the first time he stepped foot on privately-owned lands larger than five acres. In New York City, that’s the equivalent of one city block (New York Times).

Before moving West, Stewart served as a youth minister and community organizer in Massachusetts, work that led him to understand that his “idea of the sacred was much more expansive.” He said this realization drew him to the “wild and sacred landscapes” of the West.

Stewart encouraged the audience to broaden their understanding of the lands’ sacredness to not only include modern values of conservation, but also the ethic of reciprocity and the deep human history of the Indigenous peoples of the land. “What is your relationship to the land,” he asked. “Is it a thing, an asset to be possessed? Bought and sold? A source of wealth? Is it just a number of stock days that exist only to make sure your cattle get fed? Or is it a living, breathing relationship? One where we invest our time, our energy and resources towards ensuring that our management practices are guided by an ethic of healing and restoration.”

Jaimie’s origin story shared similarities with Stewart. She grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona and like her peers, she said, she was disconnected from the food sold in the grocery store. But from a young age she was in love with horses – her gateway into agriculture. Stoltzfus has owned horses since a young age and when she packed her bags for college at Colorado State University, she loaded her horse into a trailer and brought her to Fort Collins. Stoltzfus earned a degree in ag business and equine science and spent summers working on guest ranches. This solidified her desire to one day become a rancher. At CSU she met her now husband Austin Stoltzfus, a cowboy raised on his family’s ranch in Colorado. After college they headed north to Montana to work a “true cowboy job” for low wages at a big ranch. Ten years later, the Stoltzfuses manage the P Bar Ranch in the Absaroka Mountains along with their two capable children. Putting her ag business degree to work, in 2015 Jaimie developed her own direct-to-consumer meat business, Cowgirl Meat Co., that provides high-quality protein to her young family, friends from the city, and conscious consumers across the US.

This post is the first in a four-part series to be published over the next month.