Ranchers know that a top-down, single-answer approach doesn’t work in the real world.
Seven-inch stubble height won’t save the sage-grouse. One breed won’t guarantee meat quality improvement. A particular marketing strategy won’t safeguard profitability. A variety of solutions is needed to adapt to the ever-changing needs of ranching.
That need for variety extends to who gets a seat at the table. This was a constant refrain from women leaders in the ranching world, speakers at the Women in AgriBusiness Summit, and members of the Women in Ranching group.
Lesli Allison, executive director of Western Landowners Association, the host organization for the Women in Ranching program, spoke at length to WLJ about the need for a variety of voices. This included both voices from outside generational ag—Allison herself is a transplant into production agriculture—and women in particular.
“I think that women bring a different set of perspectives,” she said.
“Our priorities might be a little different on the ranch. That may come down to anything from safety to humane treatment of animals to the importance of having locally-available education for our kids.”
Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, brought up another kind of different voice agriculture needs; people with autism and people who think differently, often called “neuro-atypical.”
“There are visual thinkers like me who think in pictures,” she told the audience during her keynote speech at the recent Women in AgriBusiness Summit.
“There’s the mathematical pattern thinkers, and there’s the word thinkers, and then a lot of people are combinations of two kinds of thinkers. We need the different kind of minds.”
Grandin—herself autistic and focused on improving autistic as well as livestock handling—described the contributions of autistic people she has seen throughout agriculture. This is especially the case with large engineering efforts like packing plants of the major companies.
“I’ve worked on construction projects with most of these companies. Visual thinkers like me lay the whole plan out… Then you’ve got the quirky, weird guys in the shop who invent really clever equipment, like new hide-pulling equipment. And then the more mathematical engineers work on boilers, refrigeration, soil compaction, roof trusses, electrical power requirements, water systems.”
“You need to have the whole team,” she concluded.
Enough of us vs. them
“The different segments of ag better stop throwing rocks at each other,” Grandin said sternly during her speech. “You’ve got your niche markets and you’ve got your big boys. They need to stop throwing rocks at each other because they both have a place in the marketplace.”
Grandin suggested that an industry model needs to be created to provide for both large commodity meat production and niche specialty production. She proposed something like the beer industry in Fort Collins, CO, which is known for its explosion of craft breweries.
“We’ve got the great big gigantic Budweiser plant, and then right in the shadow we’ve got all these little tiny niche breweries. Little tiny companies. They might end up being 15, 18 percent of the beer industry. But they’re coexisting. I can see that happening with other industries.”
Allison had much the same to say regarding agriculture and environmentalism.
“I’ve talked with lots of ranchers who won’t have anything to do with an environmentalist. … And then we have environmentalists on the other hand saying anything a rancher might say about conservation is just greenwashing and we don’t buy it. Those kinds of close-minded perspectives are really, really hurting us.”
She pointed out that the goals of both groups overlap and necessitate the other. To keep landscapes wild and undeveloped, those uses that keep them open—like ranching—must remain economically viable. But economic viability and the endurance of a ranch depends on good land stewardship.
Allison noted that her group, the Western Landowners Alliance, has a foot in both camps more so than other industry or conservation groups.
“We have a strong root in the environmental side and we have a strong root in the agricultural side. We are being successful in helping different stakeholders really understand the concerns and the challenges from both sides. Really, only when you do that can you actually hope to find solutions that really work and endure.”
Cultivating different voices
Each in their own way, both women argued that it is not enough to have the variety of voices, but that they need to be cultivated.
“One of the things that bothers me is that girls and boys are still treated differently as they grow up. Boys may have more opportunities to develop skills that might later become relevant to agriculture or ranching jobs, where as girls have fewer of those opportunities.”
This puts women who want to be involved with ranching at a disadvantage, she continued.
“Whether they’ve grown up in agriculture or outside of it, by the time someone is 22 years old, it’s very likely that—if it’s a boy—that person has shot a rifle, run a chainsaw, or operated a tractor or an ATV, where as it may be less likely that the young woman has had similar types of skill development in her life.”
Grandin also stressed that exposure to agriculture and ag-relevant skills and possibilities is a necessity.
“Your good person who’s going to invent the next center pivot technology or whatever is playing video games in the basement and not getting exposed to interesting things they could do. I got interested in the cattle industry because I was exposed to it at 15. It’s that simple.”
Education and training in hands-on skills for young people was something both women saw as key.
“Most kids these days don’t have shop class,” Allison observed. “That is a big problem, and it’s going to be an even bigger problem ahead as we see this huge generational shift.”
Both women had a similar theme: Equipping more people with more relevant, hands-on skills can serve to provide more people who may want to participate in agriculture.
“I think when we diversify the people who are out there on the landscape we get new ideas and new synergies and new energy, and I think that’s very, very positive,” Allison concluded. — Kerry Halladay, WLJ editor
