As ranchers, our lives are starkly different as the seasons change. It is the quiet of mid-winter. We’re sticking close to home. The cattle look for us each morning, their watches set for their daily bread from the haystack. We fed early one day before daylight and surprised them from their beds. It’s comforting in a way - their trust in us.
A stellars jay has been hanging around the house this winter. He’s found the table scraps I throw in the garden. When the sun catches his feathers, a green sheen flashes. From time to time he finds the cat food Mark sets out for Maude.
We’ve had some spectacular sunsets and sunrises this winter. Frosted trees on foggy days, and crisp blue-skied mornings when the thermometer dips below zero. On those days the snow crunches loudly under the hooves of the cattle as they crowd around the feed truck.
It’s also the season we scrape and sculpt this thing called “ranch succession.” It’s a gnarly subject. Ask any family farm or ranch. They’re either in the middle of transition, beginning the conversation or finishing one generation and starting on the next. It never ends, really, if you want the outfit to continue past the founders.
Our kitchen table has been strewn since Christmas with “this ‘n that" files borrowed from the office: Current Year, Timeline, Acreages, Property Taxes, Tax Scenarios, etc. Where’s the figures we went thru with the accountant? Cow inventories by owner? Did we keep the timeline of land purchases?
We talk about it with that first cup of coffee in the morning, move the files aside for lunch, and discuss another round after supper.
I had a vision last night. You know the schematic put out by the water supply folks showing the reservoirs in the Snake River system? Each reservoir is a bucket with a percent filled figure. Watching them fill (or not) is on everyone’s mind in the agriculture world. Full buckets mean the system is flush. Natural flows in the rivers and canals will be supplemented by storage, and fish and farmers will get their quota for a healthy season ahead.
What if we looked at our family operations the same way? What if each generation, employees as well, considered the storage in their household bucket? What would it look like to have a full bucket? How much savings? How much workload, with the corresponding time to pursue other interests? If our bucket was full, what happens in our daily lives? How does service to our community and/or industry play into the picture? Each generation has an ever unfolding list of concerns. For Mark’s parents a full bucket means different things than ours, which is different than the kids just starting their families. Figuring out how to keep those buckets full while keeping the ranch profitable is key.
Our buckets are connected of course. If one fills, it slops over to help fill the ones around us. Our ecosystem of families needs to be well hydrated to ensure this land continues on as a cattle ranch, which is important for all of us. Not for housing, not for real estate investors hovering like hawks, not even for raising potatoes or corn by the ever larger consolidation of tillage farmers - but for cattle in granddad’s tradition. With bottle calves and slow poke horses for the grandkids, winding acequias delivering water to pastures, and cows doing what herbivores have always done, harvesting grass.
