Jacie Fasselin was on a mountain at dusk, looking for cows. She and Woodrow — a tall black horse — traversed the ledges looking for the wanderers.
Fasselin did not know what to expect, especially as the darkness enveloped them later that day, and she knew they had to navigate the ledges to get off the mountain.
“He is in his young mind, but we were not going to give up.”
She built a trail of sorts to help them get off the mountain. Armed with just a spotlight and an untested horse, they began to make their way down.
“I kept expecting him to make mistakes on the switchback,” she said. “I knew if he remained calm we would be all right. If he panics, we would not be all right — not at all."
It was perilous, but the moment was about faith and putting your trust in something higher than you.
Fasselin said Woodrow turned to look at her and headed off to the left.
“He was just saying: I think we need to turn left here. He was like an old pro. He made the leap like I asked him to. I love his brain. He was a saint.”
On this day in June, Fasselin is fighting another battle. The hay baler is not cooperating.
“It thinks it is going to win. It thinks I cannot figure it out. But I will.” And she did.
Learning young
Even when Fasselin was a young girl, she had to make hard decisions.
It was not about what school to go to or who to take to the dance.
Which horse will load in the trailer first? That is a hard decision. You get the best one, the rest follow.
This woman of the 21st century grew up without running water. She lived in a single-wide trailer in Nine Mile Canyon, in east-central Utah, to wrangle cattle.
“I was not aware of the sacrifices,” she said. Her father got laid off from the coal mine and her mother took three jobs. She remembers cutting trails with a machete, not playing Mario Brothers.
“My dad did this incredible thing,” she said. “And he started me really young.”
She’s tough and hardy and seems undeterred by the changes that life throws at her. One of those callings is found in Elmo, a community tucked away in Emery County off the less traveled roads. It is simple. And it is down home like Fasselin and it is here where there is little noise, no crowds, nobody watching over your shoulder.
Like a blank artist’s canvas that is big and begging to tell a story, Fasselin is filling in the white tableau with her own colors. She’s drawing outside the lines, but it feels good to her.
Perhaps, as a woman farmer, there is inspiration all around her.
On the Utah Farm Bureau’s website, “thisfarmwife” AKA Meredith Bernard, posted this on Instagram:
“Starting is the hardest part. Always. For anything that means anything. The first words to a book, or article or post. The first step to moving from one chapter of life to another,” she wrote.
“To the one reading and watching this who is struggling to start that something on your heart, my heart is begging you to go. Do your thing your way. Will it be hard? Yes. Will you make mistakes? Yes. Will trying ever not be worth it? No.”
Fasselin and Bernard don’t know each other, but their stories are similar. Being a farmer and rancher is tough. Being a farmer and rancher as a woman, well, it can be tougher in a traditionally male-dominated tradition.
Despite the challenges, women across the country are called to farm, to ranch, to carry on the tradition etched in small towns and born out of heritage.
Maya Fasselin, Jacie’s sister-in-law, said determination is the common theme with this woman who has grown to be an inspiration for her.
“She is extremely determined and when her mind is made up, there’s no going back. Jacie is the first to help others, find solutions and get the job done.”
In Elmo, where Fasselin lives, the nearest high school is about 20 miles away, but there is a post office in town and the Elmo branch of the Emery County Library is there to serve a population of about 368 people.
That suits this single mother just fine, giving her room and space to flourish. At night, she sings to her boys. They have prayer around the dinner table and in the quiet of the night, determination wraps around this woman like a blanket and she is ready for the next day.
“A really good friend told me, ‘you are going to have an emotional breakdown and then you will wake up refreshed and have a better solution.’”
A life in a place called Elmo, Utah
In Elmo, if you want to talk to someone at the city offices, you can catch them between 10 a.m. and noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays to talk municipal business in this agrarian community founded in 1908.
For Fasselin, this is the place she realized her dream of owning her own ranch and farm, but she never thought that would come to pass.
In the split with her husband, Fasselin thought she would simply end up with pretty horses. He was the rancher and she was the mother, the high school teacher. She had her eyes set on law school.
But life turns and spins, changing a person.
“I got the farm. I chose to stay. I would be in a room wishing I was here. At least the stress of the farm is genuine, the stress of raising my children is genuine. I used to stress life that was not necessary.”
Now, she is running her own cattle, breaking horses, fixing fences, teaching all the time.
“The fact that I am a natural born teacher, I will sail that ship all day. I am really passionate about agriculture literacy. You do not have to grow up in agriculture to make a difference.”
Jacie’s heritage
She’s pretty sure her ancestors are watching with approving smiles. She drives a guest to a monument to those in her bloodline who came before her, who settled in this area that is part of an eastern swath of Utah in the Upper Colorado River Basin.
The marker honors, among others, Billy Winder, who was born in 1888 and lived until he was 90, dying in 1978. It is easy to marvel at the changes he must have experienced, how life crept steadily through a host of transformational alterations in society. Others on the monument are Zina Winder, Fasselin’s great-grandmother and the daughter of Billy Winder. She died a few years ago.
You can see the admiration in Fasselin’s eyes as she talks about this woman and her hardiness.
Fasselin is simultaneously a learner and a teacher with multiple degrees. She’s learning the intricacies of farming and ranching, while at the same time she brings this love of learning to the students she teaches at Carbon High School, where she delivers lessons on agriculture. It is a passion for her, to bring her students along and help them learn about a discipline under threat in an era when land is becoming increasingly urbanized.
“I was born to be a teacher. I am so grateful and thankful I get to teach something I am so passionate about,” she said.
Mapping the dream
Emery County farms are fed by Joe’s Valley Dam and Reservoir, Huntington North Dam and Reservoir, Cottonwood Creek-Huntington Canal, Huntington North Service Canal, and North Canal — all projects engineered by the Emery County Water Conservancy District to capture and deliver water out of the mountains. Both Huntington and Cottonwood creeks are tributaries to the San Rafael River, which is in the upper Colorado River Basin.
The annual precipitation for this area is 8.5 inches a year, while statewide it is 11 inches in this semiarid climate that has been weighed down by more than two decades of what some call a megadrought.
Emery County has tried to get out in front of water issues, with county commissioners approving a tax increase in the early 1990s to pay for an extensive monitoring system to document both the quantity and quality of the water. More than 50 stations measure water quality and volume at two reservoirs. The district was part of a case study by Campbell Scientific, which developed the monitoring devices and documented their use in the county.
Fasselin knows the value of the finite resource, having tried for years to buy both the land and get water rights. She had the benefit of knowledge on her side, having worked for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is under the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Via a joint effort with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the WaterSMART initiative utilizes targeted funding from the Environmental Quality Incentives Program to conserve water and increase drought resilience.
Under the entire umbrella, it helps farmers and other producers conserve water through local irrigation districts. For fiscal year 2024, Utah was one of 16 states that received nearly $30 million in funding.
Even with the money and the help, it’s been a struggle for this young woman.
“There have been several times where I have had to face Satan,” she said. “I felt like I would be in trouble if I did it incorrectly. ... But as long as I have Ghost and my dog Nix, I’ll make it. I would not have it any other way.”
Ghost is another of Fasselin’s horses, tested, tried and true. And Nix, the border collie, is a steadfast companion that like any good dog is simply there for you.
Why not walk away and trade work boots for a classroom to learn about the law?
“I ask myself that question all the time. It is as if you have a sickness, and I love it. I love the animals. I love the land and I love the kids.”
There are programs out there to help farmers like Fasselin.
Justin Elsner, a district conservationist with the NRCS field office in North Logan, said while the infrastructure improvements help water conservancy districts and irrigation companies to save water, farmers and other producers are often left with the exorbitantly high investments of their own to adapt to the new systems in place.
“The agriculture producers, they are kind of stuck with needing to make adjustments now that maybe their open ditch, or their open canal has been put into a pipe and it’s pressurized,” he said. “Now they have to make changes to accommodate that pressurized water, and maybe their old irrigation system can no longer be (workable). With WaterSMART, we can write a proposal to secure funds for what we call the on farm improvements — separate from the Bureau of Reclamation grant.”
That means money to move from flood irrigation to a sprinkler system, a wheel line or a pivot — while improving the water efficiency.
Emily Fife, NRCS state conservationist for Utah, said since the start of this joint-coordination effort, NRCS has invested $4 million in Cache, Morgan, and Summit counties, assisting 64 producers across more than 4,700 contracted acres to reduce drought stress on crops, protect crop health and conserve water.
“Our work is about identifying science-based solutions to complex problems,” she emphasized.
Fasselin, who has a master’s degree in natural resources, set about negotiating to get some money to help in her own quest that started years ago.
“The more information you have the more powerful you can be, the more effective you can be,” she said. “There’s amazing people willing to help.”
But it was no easy task.
The men in charge knew who she was, knew about her roots, but they cast a wary eye at her because of her gender.
“I spent the first 10 minutes talking before I convinced them I was worth listening to. I was young and I was a woman.”
Fasselin’s determination worked.
She now owns Desert Lake Livestock, with 120 cultivatable acres where she grows hay to support the 50 head of beef cattle she raises. They summer in the mountain ranges, then usually return to Elmo for the winter or spend those months in the desert. Fasselin rides her horse like she was born on one, deftly guiding the cattle to the desired location. Moving the cattle consists of long days that start early and end late — a ritual she embraces wholeheartedly.
And her approach to farming is saving precious water. In 2023, her operation used 276 acre-feet of water. Last year, growing similar crops and tackling an additional 17 acres of farming small grains, she used only 82-acre feet of water. That counts in the parched Colorado River Basin.
Fulfilling a destiny
The land was homesteaded by her family from generations ago so for Fasselin, it feels like destiny was right alongside her in her fight to get the land and the water, to basically get her start.
Fasselin secured a cost share funding investment for a $450,000 system that includes technology like a pivot with solar-powered wheel line, soil sensors and even a weather station with some NRCS funding.
The project was also made possible with money that came from the state’s Agricultural Optimization program, which the state Legislature has used to invest more than $276 million in water saving improvements since its creation in 2019. More than 550 projects have been completed through that funding.
Even with that, it hasn’t been easy. Having a master’s degree does not translate into knowing your way around mechanics, but she’s been learning.
“There’s a massive learning curve,” she said. “My sister-in-law helps and my brother is mechanically inclined.”
Still, last fall, she eyed a four-wheeler sitting idle on the property and said she was going to take a go at it with her tools. Again, it seems like no challenge deters her. She is learning welding, how to assess soil moisture and the list goes on and on.
She and Maya have an inside joke about cows.
“Every time we do something hard or every time we’re covered in hay laying underneath a baler trying to decipher what is wrong with it, we just say ‘we love cows,’” Maya said. “It’s our answer to when anything on the farm gets tough or hard: We love cows.”
The intricacies of farming and water
Since she’s been around farmers her entire life, Fasselin knows the challenges and the many rules, so many of which are unspoken and instinctive.
She follows the “rule of the boot,” which means if your boot sinks more than a quarter of an inch into the ground, your seed bed needs to be firmed up.
It has been a struggle. Highs and lows like an addict who still hangs on to the thing that gets them through the day. In this case, it is land.
“I had this massive amount of change and at the same time planted $10,000 worth of seed. I literally felt like I was going to have a heart attack,” she said. “I went out onto the farm and laid on the ground and cried and I knew it was out of my control. It is easy to get caught up in the moment and then you remember the perspective. If you pray.”
Powering through
She knows, too, that much like energy, the best water used is the water that isn’t, especially given the state’s long-term relationship with drought and the arid nature of the region she lives in.
Her roots of growing up on farm land with ancestors who did it long before she came along taught her the value of being efficient with the water rights she obtained.
Flood irrigation, she said, is tough and not effective — especially when you’re talking about acres upon acres of land that need the finite resource.
“Flood irrigation is labor intensive,” she said. “Your shovel is your best friend.”
When she used flood irrigation at her ranch, the water seeped deep into the ground, bringing extremely alkaline soil to the top infused with sodium bicarbonate, or salt, unsuitable for planting.
Her system avoids that and allows her to utilize cutting edge technology to track all aspects of her farming and ranching operation when it comes to irrigation. She does that by monitoring a variety of conditions on her phone, even remotely.
The systems pay off.
According to the NRCS, pivot irrigation uses a lot less water — perhaps as much as 30% less, industry estimates say — than flood irrigation. Pivot sprinklers apply water more evenly across fields than flood irrigation. Also, less water is lost to evaporation and there is less risk of soil erosion, fertilizer and chemical runoff, and nutrient leaching — so aside from helping farmers there are environmental benefits and improvement in public health via cleaner waterways.
The hard, good life
As a single mom, farmer and rancher, Fasselin has plenty to do. Her boys, Jace, 10, and Jaxten, 7, are learning early about the culture of having land that you work. There’s crops to be planted and harvested, cattle and horses to be managed. Jaxten proudly drives the tractor, but his feet dangle from the seat. Perhaps it is a throwback to the way Jacie was raised, when her mother would put her in a basket as she drove the tractor.
The ranching life
Both boys know their way around horses, relishing the freedom of the ride, the smells and the bond that comes with an animal that outweighs them by factor of nine or 10. They’re cautious, but they have learned that the hard way with their own mishaps on the ranch.
Fasselin is breaking Boondock, a 2-year-old, for Jaxten. She has another mare, Smoky, who is young and coming up.
At the end of the day, Fasselin gathers the boys around the dinner table. They say their prayers. She never stops feeling grateful.
These experiences that come from ranching and farming embody a way of life she says she hopes will teach her boys about their roots, their history — so one day they can pass it on.
Even with all her daily challenges and learning the rough life of ranching, she never loses sight of being a mother and helping them to learn in the most patient of ways.
For anyone else, this could be frustrating and tiring. But she takes the time to sing songs and cuddle with them at night. It is, after all, the most important job she does — being a mother and role model.
Even though her days always seem to start early and end late, and she gets tired, it’s a good tired and she has no regrets.
“I chose this life 100%.”
