Chrissy McFarren worries about the future of American ranching. She points to the challenges of the business model, where ranches often run a meager 1-2% profit margin. There’re also the headwinds of partisan politics, rising costs, new technology, drought and a changing planet.

When all of that’s combined with the average age of the American rancher pushing 60, she thinks many will be forced to sell and that in the coming years millions of acres of land will change hands. Not because they want to, necessarily, but rather because there are not too many kids interested in the yoke of that inheritance.

“The truth is that most ranchers’ children don’t want to step in to take on the ranch. Why would they?” McFarren said. “Because they’re like, ‘You work 24/7 for nothing.’”

It’s a calculus McFarren has encountered herself. She’s a first-generation rancher and owns Badger Creek Ranch bordering Park and Fremont counties in Colorado. She chose this lifestyle that she worries about, the one she loves.

But considering the challenges, she doesn’t like the uncertainty such potential land transfers spell for America’s landscapes nor its food security. “We’ve just got a huge issue on our hands.”

That story, though, is not at all doom and gloom, she said. In fact, it has “a positive spin” or a potential silver lining. McFarren knows a path forward because she has been on it for about a decade now. It’s full of people interested in becoming the next generation of ranchers.

McFarren is a mentor in the New Agrarian Program. She’s one of scores of ranchers across the West who are teaching ambitious and aspiring ranchers — who did not necessarily grow up in agriculture — how to ranch in a holistic, sustainable way. It’s one of several core offerings of the Santa Fe-based Quivira Coalition, an organization dedicated to finding common ground between conservation, ranching and agriculture so that regenerative practices are a key component of American food systems.

The New Agrarian Program, or NAP, is an apprenticeship designed for a younger generation that is both interested in ranching and worried about the state of the planet. And the vast majority of American young people are worried: only 9% of American youth said they’re not at all concerned about climate change.

For eight to 10 months, apprentices work alongside ranchers, learning how to produce food for their communities while stewarding their land for the benefit of generations well into the future. The program is creating a pipeline of people eager to bear that yoke.

“I got into agriculture for more selfish reasons: I liked being around animals, I liked being outside, I liked working hard, and I like the people,” said Jordyn Ludeman, 24, McFarren’s current apprentice — one of eight men and 14 women placed across western ranches this year — and a second year New Agrarian.

“But I also do care about the regenerative aspect because I want the life to continue. I want agriculture to continue indefinitely so that I get to enjoy the experience of being in agriculture, and then also because we need food to eat. So making sure that we can still produce food with our land is pretty stinking important.”

‘How can we do a better job?’

Julie Sullivan and her husband George Witten founded the NAP in 2008. How they met years prior, however, is the wellspring of the program.

Despite being a voracious champion for ranching today, Sullivan hails from Southern California and is “several generations out from any kind of agricultural background.”

Prior to Quivira and the NAP, she was a professor of environmental education at the since-closed Audubon Expedition Institute of Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where students travelled around and lived outside for the entire duration of the program.

One of the lessons she long sought to impart on her students is that any conflicts between environmentalism and agriculture were surface level, and that the two had common values and goals. It was an idea that Witten exemplified, so much so that a book was written about his family’s efforts called “The Last Ranch.” So, Sullivan brought her students to see what he was up to.

Witten is a third-generation rancher from the San Luis Valley of Colorado and, after meeting Allan Savory in the 1980s, became an early adopter of his “holistic management” movement.

Savory was the Zimbabwean rancher and ecologist who popularized the idea of leveraging the symbiotic relationship between grazers and grasslands to stop the desertification of landscapes. When done “holistically,” he showed how the animals can help save those ecosystems. The Savory Institute has now trained more than 35,000 people across 47 international hubs, and contributed to the transformation of 102,442,319 acres around the world.

“I had been a vegetarian for 25 years,” Sullivan said. “I thought cattle were always bad — environmentalist, you know? An uppity feminist from California and drove in off the highway, and met this rancher ... ”

Six months later, Sullivan and Witten were married and working together to practice holistic agriculture. When they hosted folks at the ranch, Sullivan recalled, Witten said that he liked sharing the questions he had about ranching, if not the answers.

“How can we do a better job of caring for working landscapes? How can we build coalition between the conservation or environmental movement, which also loves the land, and the ranching community, which also loves the land? And rather than feeling like one another are enemies, how can we actually look for ways in which we can be mutually supportive?” Sullivan said.

How the program came together

In 2008 there was a concern about feeding the world’s population, which was then close to 7 billion people. Buried within that concern, Sullivan said, was a recognition that there were ways for people who didn’t grow up in agriculture to get a farming job — work weeding carrots was pretty easy to find. But without experience, it was nearly impossible to get a ranching job. Livestock operators do not hire a lot, and when they do, they look for experienced hands.

“Where was the doorway in for this increasing number of young people who felt like the difference they wanted to make in the world was on a sort of larger landscape scale?” Sullivan said.

There were ambitious people coming to agriculture from a conservation background who recognized that ranching could be the solution to desertification, to prevent urban sprawl and the loss of agricultural land in the West, she said. But they had nowhere to go.

“Like really sort of recognizing again that this polarization between the environment and agriculture,” Sullivan said, “was not leading us to a better West. It was kind of leading us against that.”

Sullivan and Witten started the New Agrarian Program in partnership with Quivira, whose core mission includes addressing that perceived distinction between environmentalists and ranching. The NAP is a practical effort to show the next generation of ranchers that the two ideas go hand-in-hand.

The first year, 2009, they ran the program on Witten’s and Sullivan’s ranch. Today there are over 20 mentor ranches, with apprentices placed in New Mexico, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, Montana, Idaho and Colorado.

“These are mentor sites that range from really, really large cattle operations, which (have) hundreds and hundreds of heads of animals, to some with residential herds, some that are basically stocker operations — horseback all the time dealing with grizzly bears and wolves — selling into the conventional market, to people who’ve designed really robust direct marketing and are really involved in regional food systems,” Sullivan said.

“Our mentors are really diverse, but they all have to have a commitment to regenerative practices ... because the young people who come to our program want to work on regenerative operations. They don’t want to work on operations which are solely commercial.”

This year’s 22 apprentices add to the 170 “alumni” who have participated in the program. Most, Sullivan said, have stayed in production or agriculture-adjacent careers.

“I think letting the ranching community and the land-owning community know that there is an incoming generation that is looking for opportunity, desperately wants opportunity” is extremely important, Sullivan said. “They’re highly motivated and they need help finding their opportunity.”

The New Agrarians

Ludeman loves a moment that occurs when she’s moving polywire, the thin lightweight electric fence that allows ranchers to be specific about which parts of the range their cattle graze. It’s a key component of rotational grazing, a primary effort of regenerative agriculture.

“When you open the gate and (the cattle) run through and they put their heads down and they start munching and you can hear them all chewing, all at once,” she said. “You can just feel the happiness radiating off of the animals.”

Such work is now part of her day-to-day life as an apprentice. Neither Ludeman nor Maddy Pollack, 24, another of McFarren’s apprentices this year, were raised in agriculture, yet both found a way to Badger Creek to learn how to ranch.

Ludeman grew up in Petaluma, California, surrounded by the dairies, ranches and vineyards of Sonoma County, but hers was not an agriculture family. Her father’s side hails from a small town in the Russian River Valley and so she was drawn early to rural culture, finding friends who also liked country music, dirt bikes and fishing.

Despite starting college as an engineering major, she graduated with a bachelor’s in dairy science. But after an internship in Wyoming, she felt much happier in the open range of beef cattle ranching than the dairies. Through word of mouth, she heard about Quivira and then the NAP.

“When I was younger, I cared — I still care — a lot about the environment and was worried about climate change. Then I went to college and I loved agriculture and I fell in love with working with cows. And so I really liked that overlap between those two parts of myself,” Ludeman said.

But in her college experience, she found that the people who cared about conventional agriculture and those that cared about the environment were mostly separate.

“And so I really, really enjoyed that Quivira brought those two groups of people together,” she said, “and everybody cares about both of those things.”

Pollack is not an official New Agrarian Program apprentice as she was hired directly to Badger Creek. But once she became aware of the program, she went out of her way to learn from McFarren.

Her connection to agriculture is even less direct than Ludeman’s. Though she lived some of her life in rural Texas and rode horses — English-style show horses — she followed what she called a more traditional path. After graduating from a master’s program this past May, she was working an unfulfilling job in a law office.

That’s when she came across the NAP. Intimidated by how competitive it is — McFarren had 40 applicants apply for her one or two slots at the ranch this year — she reached out directly to McFarren.

“As a young person, I’m concerned about climate change and the future of our landscape and working lands. So, I was really drawn to Chrissy being a regenerative rancher. I don’t know if I would have been drawn to working for a traditional rancher,” Pollack said.

“I felt like the best use of my time was to do this kind of work that is focused on future generations, and it’s not so much focused on instant gratification. That’s really attractive to me, just as far as the values I’d want to lead my life with.”

Regenerative agriculture

McFarren, herself, found the program through Quivira’s annual REGENERATE conference. She said those several-day meetings were like “drinking at the well of regenerative agriculture.”

Some of its methods are widely adopted such as rotational grazing, where grazers are moved systemically to prevent desertification of landscapes. Others, like the use of non-monoculture crop feeds, are less so. There are those, too, like prioritizing soil health, that are recognized tenets for those familiar with organic farming.

Rather than a series of rules, per se, regenerative agriculture is better understood as a method of approach that foregrounds the shared, interactive ecology of a landscape over pure, commercial production.

“A lot of ranchers do regenerative practices, but just don’t call it that. The things we do, like rotational grazing, have been around for hundreds or thousands of years,” said Pollack.

“I don’t think there’s any ranchers that have a motivation to destroy working lands, because it’s their livelihood and their lifestyle. And I think that every person working in agriculture cares about sustainability and being able to sustain our lands for use for generations in the future.”

But making the kind of deliberate decisions McFarren does about her ranch — and sticking with them — is very different from industrial-scale factory farming, which is quite common in America. Still, most of the work that Ludeman and Pollack do every day still looks like regular old ranching.

They wake early to feed the chickens, sheep, horses and cattle, mend fences or transport water. They also move the stock and, of course, tackle whatever McFarren has on her to-do list or any other tasks that life on a ranch throws at them.

“What is involved for the mentor is that you’re having meetings and you’re teaching them everything from fencing, how to work a tractor, stockmanship, animal health,” McFarren said. “How to put up electric fencing; for us it’s now how to use virtual fencing.”

While standard tasks for most ranches, McFarren’s intentional about making sure that the way she does each will help restore or keep healthy the ecosystems for which she’s responsible.

Among those intentions, Pollack described how the day’s schedule is partially informed by the ranch’s primary power source, which is solar power; that the chicken feed does not have soy in it, a monoculture-produced crop that often degrades fields where it grows; and, of course, rotational grazing to ensure that the grasslands are supported, rather than destroyed, by grazing. McFarren even rotates the horse’s pastures.

Along the way, she earned an Audubon Certified Bird-Friendly Land designation from the National Audubon Society which requires working ranches to meet strict criteria that stabilize declining grasslands and support wildlife populations.

In addition to the practical tasks, the NAP and Quivira Coalition host a series of classes and clinics throughout the year for the apprentices. At the start of the season, there are in-person orientations. Every Thursday, all the apprentices and the cohorts of fellows from other ranches get together on Zoom for ongoing regenerative agriculture education. There’s even a midseason stockmanship clinic, and then another gathering to end the season.

“I do believe regenerative agriculture, while it’s kind of a buzzword, the essence of it is people who are working together to steward the land in a good way so that we can continue raising cattle and using them as tools for soil health,” McFarren said.

McFarren also said that ranching in the West is near a paradigm shift, with so many apprentices who are women, so many who are young and from the suburbs.

“They (are) kind of injecting some new ideas and new thoughts across the culture,” she said. “And, well, I think for most of them it is because they’re looking at their future with climate change and food insecurities and saying, ‘Where can I be of the most value?’”

Doing more than nothing

Pollack said she believes that if money were no object, most people would do agricultural work.

“You go to sleep at the end of the day tired. You’re able to work with your hands all day and actually see the physical work you’re doing in front of you. And I just don’t think there’s a better way to have a relationship with your work,” she said.

It helps that she thinks it’s gorgeous in the mountains and that they’re not caught up in the nonsense of the world, which makes it a peaceful way of life. “I think that a lot of people would benefit from experiencing that,” she said.

If only it were that simple though. McFarren chats with her neighbor who is a seventh-generation rancher with whom she and her apprentices work closely. She feels he’s someone they can learn from, so she sends them to help him, too.

Sometimes he’ll ask McFarren if, in light of the high costs, low pay and challenges, that they are setting up the apprentices for failure.

“He’s like, ‘Don’t you think maybe this is like a cruel joke for these young people?” McFarren said. “And I was like, ‘God, I gotta hope not.’”

They’ll have to figure that out on their own, she added. But she does hope that they are going to be the ones to find new ways of doing things, or who change policies so that ranching continues to survive.

“Hopefully (they) help the big picture of ranching in the West,” McFarren said. “All we can do is try, you know? I mean, if we do nothing, it will surely fail.”