Holistic Ranching

When used to describe a lifestyle, holistic means a life where body, mind, and spirit are all considered to create a whole, harmonious, and balanced life. More and more people are seeking to embrace a holistic lifestyle for themselves.

An important part of a holistic lifestyle, to most people, is learning to live harmoniously with nature. This means different things to different people.

Urban dwellers are limited in exactly what they can do. They cannot necessarily raise their own food, gardens, chickens, and so on - but in general they look for products that are raised in a holistic manner.

For those of us who live on and love the land, it has another meaning. More and more people involved in agriculture are making the effort to find ways to share the land as well as use it wisely. They have the often difficult task of finding a balance between organic and labor intensive ways of raising food, both crops and livestock, in a way that allows them to make enough profit to live on their land. Many also do their best to share the land with the wild things, plant and animal, and to protect the areas of wilderness that are under their care.

Art Nichols' Wagonhound Ranch combines raising natural fed, organic cattle, versatile ranch horses, and loving stewardship of the 140,000 acres of Wyoming land it occupies, and the wildlife that shares it with them.

All of the feed for their cattle and horses is raised on the ranch. The cattle free range much of their life, are finished in their own feedlots on the ranch with no antibiotics or chemicals, and are selectively bred for disposition and conformation.

The horses are bred and raised on the ranch. Trained by the cowboys who will use them to work the cattle. After starting, a few professional trainers are invited to select talented individuals for the show ring. It is not unusual for a ranch horse to have started by winning in the show arena, come home to work on the ranch, serve as a pack horse, and become a member of the broodmare band. Wow. This is another pet peeve of mine - that show horses have diverged so far from actual working horses and in the process been turned into neurotic wrecks of the animals they could be.

The ranch employs a natural resource manager whose job it is to balance the ranch's many business interests with the care of the land. Art Nichols, who owns the ranch, has a vision of a ranch that makes enough to support itself - and protect the land and the wildlife it shares the land with.

True, there is hunting on the land. I am not against hunting - I am against wholesale slaughter for "sport" and the frequent attendant "accidents" caused by idiots with guns. With the outfitting business part of the ranch businesses, I feel assured that the hunters are attended by responsible people who will assure the hunter a good experience, while also guarding the safety of ranch hands, livestock, and wildlife not on the hunting list.

History is a part of the ranch - from prehistoric fossils in caves to buildings from the 1880s. All of the modern buildings have been constructed to honor those roots, and the historic sites are protected.

The existence of a ranch like the Wagonhound gives me hope and joy.

For many years the media and even the ecological or "green" movement themselves have demonized the people involved in agriculture - farmers and ranchers. They have painted them all as greedy rapers of the land who do not care what damage they do in the name of the almighty dollar.

This is not true of the majority of the people who live and work on the land. They love their home, they love their land. But they do have to find a balance between caring for nature, and making enough of a profit to continue to live on the land they love.

Many of the small, family farmers who have the desire to create a holistic ranch or farm, are being shoved out of business by large, conglomerate agribusinesses. These corporations are run by people who care about nothing but the bottom line, they don't live on the land and they don't love it.

However, we can influence these people! How? By using the language they understand - the bottom line, the almighty dollar.

When you can't purchase locally from a small farm or rancher, you can still make the effort to purchase products that are marketed as organic, environmentally friendly, or "green" in other words. If consumers purchase these products, over those created in an exploitative way, the corporations are going to move to create and sell more of what sells best.

Let's all work together to make those organic products more profitable than the alternative.