This Life Ain't Simple
By Jennifer Hill
Every rancher has heard it at one time or another. From friends or random acquaintances, from store clerks who notice our boots or the banker discussing our op loan. Some iteration of, “boy I sure envy your life. I wish I could just get back to the simple things,” is thrown at ranchers and cowhands with regularity. While I’m sure they mean it in a friendly, and even complimentary way, it feels like a slap in the face every time.
Other than our love for the land, cattle and food production process, nothing about this life is simple. Ranching is early mornings and late nights. It’s four-hour shifts making sure the heifers don’t have calving trouble and performing middle of the night emergency procedures to try and save a birthing cow and calf. It’s heartbreak when you aren’t successful.
It’s managing the never-ending physical labor along with the books, figuring out how to stay afloat in a climate that wants you to do anything but that. It’s knowing that while you have your job down to science, producing top quality animals through ever improving genetic choices, it’ll all come down to a market you can’t control and frankly sometimes can barely understand.
Ranching is spending the moments that you aren’t in the saddle or working the corral on the phone with your congressman fighting for your way of life, trying to explain what the death tax will mean for your family. It’s listening to the “ag-vocates” tell you over and over that you must, “tell your story” if you want to survive another generation without them ever clearly telling you how to do it. All while getting called a murder and raper of the land on social media. It’s watching bureaucrats bow to the pressures of environmentalists and welfare activists that have almost no understanding of the land or animal production, sacrificing the range and your business in the process.
Owning a ranch means being constantly asked for access by people in town who refuse to understand that selling that access is part of how you are keeping the lights on. It’s finding a poacher or trespasser that you know personally and having to make the hard call on turning them in. It’s wondering if the person who cut their way through your fence to hunt is someone you see regularly in town.
And it’s doing all this with the inherent pressures of family business. Worrying about how you can take over more of the responsibilities of operation in order to pursue your goals without making your parents feel pushed out. It’s walking the line between employer and brother relationships and encouraging your kids to work the ranch, praying that they’ll love it like you do instead of burning out on it. It’s worrying endlessly about how the business can thrive enough to feed the ever-growing number of mouths involved while the media screams at you that you will soon be replaced by lab meat. It’s anything but simple.
While they likely don’t intend it, calling what we do simple is demeaning and completely out of touch with reality. This life, this profession, is complicated. If we want to stay in this business we cannot be simple. We must be a jack-of-all-trades and constantly preparing to fight the next battle. We do it because we truly love it. If we didn’t we’d never put up with all of the craziness. And while we continue to fight for survival in the messiness and beauty that is ranching, it’s definitely not simple, so stop telling us it is.