Conservation isn’t abstract and ranching doesn’t reward those who disconnect themselves from nature. I learned these truths from Duke Phillips, or Big Duke, to his friends. For Big Duke and his family, ranching is a way of life.

Standing at a slim 6 foot, he carries the presence of a patriarch who has lived his dream, and still is. Crows-feet and weathered hands tell the story, one that began in the grasslands of Mexico as a young boy where Big Duke learned the ropes from his father and grandfather. You can read some of the story written across his hat, one built of beaver felt, tanned by a life in the sun, adorned by a silver pin of a sandhill crane. His silver belt buckle, dirt caked jeans and homemade leather belt befit the stockman and steward he has become.

His fingerprints are everywhere out here. They’re a testament to his commitment to the land, to his family and America’s ranching legacy. He’s a reminder that to be a successful rancher you have to be a grass farmer first. Without grass, water runs off the land, evaporates under a high sun, and slowly the land turns to dust. Without grass to protect the topsoil, slow and spread water into a great bank account below ground, the heartbeat of this place is gone – the very heartbeat that sustains livestock, ranching families and wildlife alike.

Today, Duke and his family shape the ecological balance of nearly 300,000 acres of managed lands that span the American West. The family business is Ranchlands. The name says it all. Stewarding working landscapes is their expertise, and using livestock as a tool to accomplish conservation goals is just one of the ways they restore America’s grasslands. In their eyes, it’s not just about producing grass fed, holistically managed cattle, it’s about creating a business model that leans on eco-tourism, art, science, conservation, education, fishing and hunting, community and family to support a model that improves the ecosystem.
Most Autumns, I make the pilgrimage to the crown jewel of their operation, the Medano Zapata Ranch, a cottonwood peppered prairie oasis that flanks the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of Southwest Colorado. Here something special happens: Bisonworks.

When you arrive on day one of Bisonworks, a few things are certain to catch your eye. First, you’ll see the curved horns and thick coats of bison pouring across the land. You’ll then hear the sound of hooves pounding warm soil, the grunts and calls, the swinging of gates, and rumble of engines. You’ll also notice the faces, young and old. Help comes from across the West. Conservationists and biologists from The Nature Conservancy work alongside vets and ranch hands, all dedicated to ensuring these lands have a bright future, one, ideally, with a free-range herd of bison roaming across the land as they always have.
Look closely, and you’ll learn that the scene in front of you is a unique one. Big Duke and Ranchlands have created an opportunity for huge tracts of land to be stewarded their way, which has earned them countless awards and global recognition as leaders in grassland conservation. Just as they have partnered with The Nature Conservancy to manage the 103,000 acres Medano-Zapata Ranch, a framework exists for landowners to partner with Ranchlands to ensure their lands and livestock, grass and water, wildlife and community benefit from a management plan that honors the natural way of things, the synergy that creates and sustains thriving ecosystems.

Bisonworks is a case study of their commitment and successes. One week a year, these bison come into contact with humans, a jeep, plane, horses and motorbikes. The other 364 days, they’re free to roam a 50,000-acre pasture flanked by Great Sand Dunes National Park. Their way of life is not dissimilar to their ancient experience before they were nearly forced to extinction towards the end of the 19^thcentury.
The Ranchlands way of doing business exists in part to ensure that these webs of life continue to exist into the future. Big Duke’s grandson, Woods, will someday take the reins. When of age, he will begin writing a new chapter for the family, one rooted to 6^thgenerations of history, defined by Ranchlands signature on the lands they steward. As Woods grows so will his family’s impact on the land. New ranches are under management in New Mexico that are allowing Big Duke and his family to continue their tradition of restoring working landscapes.

Ranchland’s gift to the land is best viewed over time and space: the greater of both, the better. With a future increasingly shaped by their hands, we can be sure grass will grow tall, soil will run deep, water will flow cool and clear and working lands will continue to thrive among wild corners of the American West.

Photos & words by: Charles Post

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Farriers spend years mastering the ancient craft of horseshoeing. It requires many hours of standing next to a hot forge, swinging a hammer, bending in uncomfortable positions, all within striking distance of a horse’s kick. “Ferrarius” is Latin for “of iron” or “blacksmith,” and farriering, in addition to skilled manipulation of hot metal, requires a deep knowledge of these powerful animals.

The North Bay Farriers are comprised of RT Goodrich, Brelen Parker, and Lila Scott. Just outside of Point Reyes Station, in the rolling hills of Northern California, they demonstrate what a day in the stables is like, and how they became farriers.

Operating out of a small but perfectly adapted van, the team works seamlessly around each other. One carries red hot shoes fresh from the mini forge, another swings their hammer on the anvil, while a third works through clouds of smoke produced from a hot shoe being applied to the hoof.

The first part of the process is removing the old shoe – a crescent-shaped piece of metal that protects the hoof from the ground. He or she then trims and cleans the keratin-rich hoof, as you would a fingernail. Once prepped, the new shoe is heated and pressed against the hoof, which causes a painless burning that simultaneously cleans the hoof, while also allowing the farrier to seat the shoe precisely. Once aligned, the shoe is secured on the hoof via driven nails and then finished off with a quick file.

The rewarding nature of working with horses seems to outweigh the physical demands of the trade. Often farriers feel that the craft is something that seems to choose them; usually growing up around horses or falling in love with the farriering process after witnessing the work firsthand.

For Scott, it was in her blood:

“My father was a blacksmith specializing in shipsmithing, so I grew up with a coal forge and blacksmith shop as part of our home and daily life. I was very involved in endurance horse racing and noticed the tremendous difference shoeing made to the performance of the horses. I started shoeing horses when I was fourteen and had several other jobs over the years until taking up farriery full time, five years ago.”

While watching them work, the horses remained calm and often predicted how to move next, based upon the posture of the farrier or the slight movement of a well-placed hand. These animals knew them well, but in farriery a slight mistake or misjudgment by a handler can lead to critical injury. If a farrier causes discomfort, the horse will remember and act accordingly. It is a relationship of trust.

“Although the job is me working on their feet, I like to believe that it is a partnership and the horse and I are working together,” Parker explained. “[Horses] have highly sensitive energies.  They teach me about my own internal energies. They have taught me to be introspective, consistent, and patient. Horseman, Tom Dorrence, once said ‘first you go with the horse, then the horse goes with you, then you go together.’”

Photos & Words: Will Kutscher

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When Neil Fromm was twenty-five years old he drove his Volkswagen van from the Florida Keys up to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Known to Vermonters simply as “The Kingdom,” this mountainous, sparsely populated area is situated between the Connecticut River and the Green Mountains. Fromm, now fifty, is tall and solidly built, still looking the college basketball player he was three decades ago. “I moved to Marsfield and quickly met a guy twice my age named Dave Rooney. He took me under his wing and let me live in his brother’s house, who had recently been killed in a logging accident.” Rooney had draft horses and he and Fromm used them to sugar—the process of collecting sap from Maple trees to boil it down to maple syrup. The horses pulled a dray—a contraption with bobsled runners upfront pulling a travois dragging in the snow—from tree to tree collecting sap. That’s when Fromm got into horses. Later, when he made the move to East Albany, Fromm met a guy with two big Belgians, Bob and Duke. “I ended up buying them,” he remembers. “Paid half cash and worked off the rest. They were seventeen and so mellow you couldn’t do anything wrong. They basically trained me.”

Eventually, Fromm had two young sons and quit his side jobs. He started to log with Bob and Duke full-time. “I’d take my boys with me all the time, skidding logs. They’d just ride on their backs.” When his second son was born Fromm had realized he just wanted to live a simple life—have a good garden and be around for his sons. “When I’d work for the old farmers around here I was so amazed by their lifestyle,” he says. “Their lives revolved around their farms and family. When you meet someone who is content—it really rubs off on you. They were like kings of their own little kingdoms.”

Coming up the long drive to the simple cabin that Fromm built is like time travel. There are tapes stacked around a portable stereo and a composting toilet. The walls and floors are uneven—they give when you walk over them in a way that almost seems organic. Chickens meet you at your car and gigantic pigs talk at you from their sties in a way that seem only a percentage point away from human language. And then there are the horses. Six of them. Your brain struggles to make sense of the distance, either they’re closer than they seem or just much bigger than usual.

When it comes down to it, Fromm just prefers animals to machines. “It just feels better. I’ve helped guys with skidders—and I’m not saying it’s the right or wrong way to do it—but you’re just tearing the shit out of everything. It’s just really nice with the horses, in the end you only have this little trail.” He continues with a laugh, “Sometimes I’ll be mowing hay with the horses and people ask, ‘Why are you doing that?’ And I’ll ask them, ‘Why do you have a 4-wheeler?’ I like it. It’s what I do for pleasure, I guess. What’s the big deal?” Call it entertainment in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom.

Fromm logs mostly for lumber. Occasionally, people will hire him to remove the broken and dying material from their land. “I do it the way I do for a reason. I take the tipped over and broken trees, but I don’t ever want to sound like an environmental warrior. It’s true that there is an underlying philosophy, but I just do it because I like it.”

Fromm and his partner Tryna produce raw milk from seven cows, which they sell at farmers markets. They also tap five hundred maple trees, and last year produced sixty gallons of maple syrup. Additionally, they sell ground beef and pork. They have a big garden and equally productive chickens. “My biggest hope is that we can just be self-sustaining, right here.” Tryna tells me. “We have all the ingredients—just need time to pull it off.”

Two of Vermont’s finest folks, trying to farm and work their land in the right way, in a world that makes it nearly impossible.

Photography and writing by Joel Caldwell
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Working with the earth is a chemistry equation of timing, weather and soil science. I’ve botched that equation many times. That’s part of the learning curve of working with living things. My hope is that each year, I can better read the natural signs and become a stronger farmer.

Weather and changing seasons are a challenge on the farm. This year, an early snow took me by surprise and I raced out to the garden with a headlamp to pick the last of the vegetables and fruit. The learning curve continues.

During harvest, the garden demands my full attention and the clearing of my schedule. The pieces that are harvested and kept are coveted. Sprigs of lavender get divided into gifts and are folded into pastries and teas in the wintertime.

The fingertips of my gloves ripped open this year. When I see those gloves in their basket, I think about the hours that they spent outside and how the leather now is curled inwards; permanently in position to pull more weeds. At the end of the season, my wrists and forearms ache with overuse from the pulling of weeds and the manual labor that has filled days and months on end. But the ache and pain of work fade as soon as I walk in the processing kitchen and see the harvest: heads of garlic, lavender bouquets, jars of dried apples and herbs.

In our garden processing room is where things dehydrate and cure. In the month of October, there are gallon jars of dried plums and calendula. There are three rounds of beeswax and twenty jars of honey. The fruit of the labor from the final pushes of harvest long outlasts the effort and I appreciate knowing that these things came from outside our front door. The things we spent all year growing will now feed us through the winter.

We work hard to waste nothing. The stocks and roots get trimmed and the garlic bulbs are hung to dry. We then take all the trimmings to the compost which is distributed on the vegetable beds the following season.

Watching the snow come in always makes me miss the summertime, despite the long days. However, the winter is for studying techniques and learning more about the soil. It’s also for ordering seeds and fixing tools. If we missed the window of harvest on some things, we take comfort in the fact that it may have fed the birds, or it is bettering the soil for next year when we begin the cycle again.

Photography by Becca Skinner
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An average summer day at Ploughgate Creamery goes something like this: You’re up at quarter to six to start the churn. An hour later you’ve got golden butter and buttermilk (the latter you feed to the pigs). Next, you divide the butter into three thirty pound batches. The slow churn is what takes some time, and the butter falls in on itself to expel the moisture. Lastly, you hand slap the butter to remove every last bit of moisture, mix with salt, make butter balls, weigh and wrap each individually by hand. That’s 220 lbs of butter a day. 440 pieces. The whole process takes between ten and fourteen hours.

Another day of butter on the books. But wait, don’t forget the outside chores: caring for the animals—rotational grazing requires the cows are moved every few days—the pigs, the one hundred pheasants that recently arrived. You’d also need to tend the big, productive garden and, of course, building maintenance. And as the day winds to a close, don’t forget bookkeeping, sales, filling orders and coordinating with distributors.

It’s not the easiest way to make a living. But easy never really figured into the equation for Marisa Mauro. “I need hard work. It makes me feel confident and accomplished,” she says. “I started farming at fourteen and never looked back.” Hailing from a hardworking family in southern Vermont, Mauro had a circuitous path to farming, an industry that’s near-completely dominated by family businesses handed down from one generation to the next. “My dad was a contractor. He worked hard his whole life, always taking big risks. I’ve gotten my optimism from him. That’s crucial if you want to make a living off the land.”

As a girl, Mauro had dreams of being a vet, so she started working at a sheep dairy. It was at Woodcock Farm that she fell in love with farming—all of it: running tractors, haying, milking, you name it. “I wasn’t good at school and there was a lot of stuff going on with my family. So at sixteen I left home.” In a fortuitous turn of fate, she was able to convince her headmaster to allow her to do her senior semester at Shelburne Farms outside Burlington. She rented an apartment in town and made cheese for six months, writing reports and documenting the process in order to meet her math and science requirements. She graduated.

The next few years she spent out west, working for a cattle rancher on the Crow reservation in southeastern Montana—a “hard experience” that taught her a lot—followed by school in California for herbal medicine. Next she spent over two years years with a Peruvian American goat farmer, getting his business in order and learning about food. This experience ultimately sent her back to Vermont, enrolling as a freshman at Sterling College.

She was twenty-two and moving into the dorms in Vermont’s remote Northeast Kingdom. Young, but having seen a lot of the real world, she knew she needed to have an education  to run a business properly. “I had seen all the challenges these ma and pa operations faced. There is a right way to farm. I didn’t want to struggle.” Balancing school while bartending nights and milking sheep on the weekends proved challenging—not your typical freshman college experience.

But after a year she decided she was wasting too much money and figured she learned best on the job anyway. She left school to work for Neil Urie at Bonnieview sheep farm full-time. She made blue cheese and milked the cows. “I loved Neil and his family, but I was making something like six dollars an hour.” One day Neil mentioned an abandoned cheese facility down the road. “It was the end of a work day and Neil brings me a beer, which typically meant that I’d messed something up.” Neil tells her that he’s made an appointment with the owner of the facility. “I walk out of that meeting with a $300 per month lease and the place was ready to go—just needed equipment.”

So she started a creamery. Took a class. Spent a year writing a business plan. She milked jerseys in the winter and sheep in the summer, got $40k from a bank and asked local farmers what she should make. “I’m big on mentors. If you’re respectful, the older generation wants to share what they’ve learned.” Ultimately, the boys at Jasper Hill Farm—largely responsible for the artisanal cheese movement in America—suggested she make something for them. She’d produce and they would buy her green cheese and age it underground. “Farming is all about connection—connection to the land, the animals, and creating a family around what you do. I was one of Jasper Hill’s first producers.”

After four years working six days a week plus selling at the farmer’s market on Sunday—the unspeakable happened. A mechanical fire erupted in the rented facility. Mauro lost everything. Neither she nor the owner had the right insurance. “It was a really tough lesson. I’d worked so hard there, all by myself. Then I got lost for a few years.”

“I’ve found that the biggest shit-storms often bring me to the best places,” says Mauro thoughtfully. In 2012, a friend told her about the Vermont Land Trust—a non-profit environmental group working to conserve productive lands within the state. The Trust has something called a Farm Land Access Program. Mauro rewrote her business plan, submit it, and was selected to buy ag land at a fraction of the market value cost. Enter Bragg Farm.

Bragg Farm, Mauro’s home since 2013, sits high atop a hill in Vermont’s scenic Mad River Valley and looks out over Mount Ellen and Lincoln Peak. There’s a massive, sprawling barn built in1909—Vermont’s most photographed and loved by the community. It’s here that she makes her cultured butter, by introducing beneficial, live bacteria to cream—in the European style. The pasteurized cream is procured from a 4th generation local farm, Monument Valley. “I feel very attached to each piece of butter I make. A lot of time goes into it. It’s artistic, scientific—it means a lot to me.”

Still, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. “Humbling and character building—that’s farming” says Mauro. “I’m doing it right this time and I’m hoping I can pay for it” she says with a smile. “The verdict is still out, but I’m going for it.” With six distributors across the country and relationships with high end restaurants like New York City’s Momofuku, things are looking up. May fortune favor the bold!

Photography and writing by Joel Caldwell
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