What's your wild idea?
Christmas Eve 2011
Dear friends and family, We hope that this annual dispatch from the frontier finds you well, enjoying the holidays with your loved ones, and reflecting on a well-lived 2011—what a year it’s been! Matt Barnes, range monitoring,The Howell Ranch Professionally, I continued to own…
Integrating rangeland ecosystem services and ranch economics
The Colorado State University Western Center for Integrated Resource Management‘s 2011 Nick Petry Workshop Colorado State UniversityWestern Center forIntegrated Resource Management Profitable ranches integrate land stewardship and economics. Rangeland ecosystem services, and payments for them, were the focus of the annual Nick Petry Workshop,…
Connecting with fellow New Agrarians at the Quivira Coalition conference
The progressive ranching movement is part of a larger movement of new agrarianism, a forward-looking, well-connected, well-educated, migration back to the land. It is moving at the speed of the internet. It is about healthy land, sustainable agriculture, and local food, not in the linear sense…
The LeValley Ranch: rangeland management for diversity, wildlife, and livestock production
Colorado Section of the Society for Range Management tours ranch after bestowing Excellence in Rangeland Conservation Award Lars Santana (NRCS) Last Friday, about fifty ranchers, conservationists, and government employees gathered near Hotchkiss, Colorado, for a day-long field tour of the LeValley Ranch, hosted by…
Neighboring at a Spring Cattle Works on the Great Divide
Working with animals makes us more fully human, sustains the continuity of life Bringing in the herd. Photo by Jenny Stricker Duke and George.Photo by Jenny Stricker On the western range, neighboring always brings together some of the most fascinating people to do some of…
Winter Solstice, Christmas, and New Year Wishes
Greetings everyone,I hope you are all doing well and enjoying the holiday season. It has been quite an eventful year, especially professionally. In February, I co-organized a rancher-oriented session on sustainable grass-fed livestock production at the international Society for Range Management conference hosted by…
Ute Bears
Art and becoming native At the Ute Indian Museum in Colorado’s Uncompagre Valley, on Chipeta Day, an annual event hosted by the Friends of the Ute Indian Museum, I signed up for the plein air art festival. I’d never done anything like that before, and…
Nightlife in cow camp
Last night I, the sole human resident of Cox Park, woke to a noise from my outdoor kitchen. Either the heifers have gotten in there again, or it is another bear, I thought. I had awakened to a bear in the kitchen a few nights…
Myth and Reality West of Eden
As Westerners become native, the West becomes its own place I was not born here, but I call this region home. Like so many before me, I heard its call from across the continent, and came chasing a dream. A formless dream, not of…
Listening to the voice, leaving the path, living the legend
“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness and they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy, or they become legends.” –One Stab, in the screenplay of Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall “Man needs to choose, not just accept, his…