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Ranching Legacies
Where Goes the Ranch?
By John Brown
Mother cows need some room to roam. In the Flint Hills of Kansas, the last earthly occurrence of the tallgrass prairie, ranchers routinely assign six good acres to each cow-calf unit—enough grass to sustain the pair nicely; nothing cramped or over-grazed, no damage to the resource. At the moment, this grass sells routinely for purchase in the thousand-plus-dollars-per-acre range.
Lands sells out here for reasons far apart from its agricultural prospects. There is just so very, very much urban and corporate interest right now in the ownership of land—almost any land—that notions of familial tradition, rancherly longevity, or cultural inheritance seem quaint, silly almost. Land to be leased for hunting and fishing is simply not available in these hills. It’s taken, thank you.
In the intergenerational passage of pasture ground, the teeth-jarring comes typically with the grandkids. Removed for the most part from the history of the grass’ use, aware in no uncertain terms of the land’s immediate monetary worth, these heirs of these hills have no problem selling land that some tenant ranching families have cared for across the better part of a century. An aged and involved landowner dies, and the twenty-or thirty-something inheritors decide that a distant half-section of faceless bluestem seems just like immediate money in the bank. And only the big boys, the really big boys, have their fingers in the air at bidding’s end. The new owners arrive sometimes from out of state, their fortunes made elsewhere, their portfolios diversified, all this superb forage accumulating to their estates by the square mile, far beyond a cowboy’s ability to buy.
Consequently, fifth-generation ranchers must find these days other ways to make a living. So off they go into leatherwork, agritourism, haying, firewood delivered to a suburban rack, on into geographically distant work where ranch-based skills such as observation, persistence, welding, determination, and carpentry command a living wage.
The change has been coming a long time now, glacial in its irresistible arrival. This grass is going. And, boys those jobs—the old ways—they may not be coming back.
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