In the rolling green hills north of Sheridan, University of Wyoming instructors Brian Sebade and Barton Stam led a herd of ranching students to the bottom of a steep grassy slope. Then they introduced them to an activity.
“Now you're going to be imagining yourself as the cow,” Sebade said.
The goal is to teach students how to graze cattle by awarding them points for finding different kinds of forage. The hillside was covered in colorful flags.
“This hillside here is your pasture,” he said. “And those flags up there are the plants you're going to be eating. Blue represents grasses, red represents forbs, and yellow represents shrubs.”
They got 15 points for every blue flag they grab, ten for red flags and five for yellow. This ranch camp is what the university’s new ranch degree hopes to achieve: lots of hands-on learning, experimentation and team teaching. UW Junior Ethan Mills was trying to piece together a double major of ranch business and rangeland. This degree puts all that together for him, and he was the first to sign up.
Mills grabbed a partner, Tanner Page. He’ll be the calf, he said, Page will be his mom. And then…the game is on.
“You guys ready?” their instructors hollered. “All right. Go grazing!”
The students all lumbered off cow-style. Mills and Page were determined to win.
“Wow, we are the laziest cows there ever was!” Mills said with a chuckle.
Lazy because they made a beeline for the blue flags – the grasses – and ignored the forbs and shrubs, just like cows might do. But they almost lose entirely when a grizzly bear attacks them from above! Instructor Sebade came tearing down the hill right at Mills, roaring like a bear as he went.
“I’m going to eat you, Ethan Mills!”
The students all ran as fast as they can down the hill to escape.
This kind of out-of-the-box learning is intrinsic to the new degree program. Every student will do a series of internships, starting as a ranch hand and progressing to ranch management. Mills is doing his first internship on his parents’ ranch outside of Upton where they practice the same kind of open-minded ranching the degree program is promoting.
“I'm really lucky that our family views agriculture that way,” he said. “They're very progressive in their ways because we want to be the most efficient, most productive we can be. That comes with trying new things because science has gone so far and there's more that we can learn every day.”
In fact, his dad, Justin Mills, even hosts a podcast called the Working Ranch Radio Show. Mills said, like his family’s ranch, this new degree program has baked in an emphasis on wise natural resource management.
“What they drill when you're learning about ranching is that soil and water in your land is the most important resource that you have. And the wildlife that’s on it is extremely important,” said Mills.
For the university, resisting old dogmas has become urgent. Back in 2018, they held a summit with all the stakeholders who had a vested interest in the College of Agriculture.
“And they relayed the message that some of our students were not necessarily meeting the needs of the industry,” said Randall Violett, the director of RMAL. “One of the glaring things that we kept hearing from our stakeholders was we need the emotional intelligence kinds of things, we need conflict resolution, communication. Just dealing with people.” (Violett’s full interview on the Modern West podcast can be found here.)
A good communicator might not be what you think of when you imagine a cowboy. They choose that life because it is so solitary. But student Ethan Mills said it’s time cowboys represented themselves with public land agencies, lawmakers, and each other.
“You're either your biggest advocate or enemy, when you're dealing with your consumers or the public. Are you going to be able to show that what you're doing is for the good of the animal and the good for the population which you're feeding?”
UW Range Professor Derek Scasta said the new generation of ranchers have lots of opportunities right now with new markets to sell carbon offsets or free range meat or host solar farms.
“A lot of students might get interested because they're like, ‘I want to ride a horse and gather cows in the morning.’ But there's the big picture of, ‘I want to take care of the land, feed society, and leave this place better than I found it.’ That's like a higher, more noble motive. I think these students have that, but you’ve got to help them kind of realize it,” Scasta said.
And realizing that potential is what UW’s new ranch degree program is all about.
“Everyone tally up your points!”
The grazing contest came to a close. Mills and Page had one of the highest scores, thanks to their lazy strategy of eating only grasses. But their instructors wanted to know what would have lured them to the top where there was lots more grass?
“What if I'd had a bunch of Snickers bars up there?” Sebade asked.
“Ice cream!” one student called out.
“Ice cream would have gotten you up there?”
“Or like some supplements or salt licks?” Mills suggested, offering the equivalent of a cow Snickers bar.
It begs the question: What will it take to get these young ranchers to hike a little farther to try new agricultural strategies as well?
