Learn how to plan and make good decisions from Cody Holmes, a cattleman who had struggled for decades, to find this golden nugget. You too can feed more people than other ranchers, have grasslands that are more productive and useful than they previously were, and enjoy raising a family without spending all your time working.

How can anyone from a backyard hobbyist to a large-scale rancher go about raising and selling ethically produced meats directly to consumers, restaurants, and butcher shops? The regulations and logistics can be daunting enough to turn away most would-be livestock farmers, and finding and keeping their customers challenges the rest. Farmer, consultant, and author Rebecca Thistlethwaite and her husband and co-author, Jim Dunlop, both have extensive experience raising a variety of pastured livestock in California and now on their homestead farm in Oregon. Each species chapter discusses the unique requirements of that animal, then delves into the steps it takes to prepare and get them to market.

I was born ranch, raised ranch, and feel ranch. My closest friends are ranch, and my pride comes from that base. Something about ranching captivates me, and for nearly all of my eighty years, I've been involved with the land that enchants me. My stories in Part One of this book are all about ranching in the Big Horn Valley, Wyoming, where I was born. I take a few detours here and there, but everything you read here is, in one way or another, related to ranching. I hope I have done justice to the Native Americans who were here first. They are a vital part of the history of this beautiful country in northeastern Wyoming, and their influence is still highly significant today. Besides covering some history of the Big Horn region, my honest-to-goodness real "tales" will probably give you some good laughs along with some serious thinking in my more philosophical musings about the extraordinary landscapes I've had the privilege of being a part of. And even if my old elementary teacher would insist on my correcting that "dangling participle" in the last sentence, well, that's just how I talk. From my grandfather's time through my own years, the Fordyce family has been a constant presence in the Big Horn ranching scene. Out of the several enterprises I was involved with, Tepee Lodge was one of my high points. Tepee was a family-oriented dude ranch where people could watch the world roll by, go horseback riding, dance, visit other ranches, eat, or simply enjoy being alone in a purely wonderful place. My stories of Tepee are not to be forgotten! Later in life, after my ranching career came to an end, I found my place in the world of the camera. I learned the art of darkroom and black-and-white photography from David Scheinbaum and Janet Russek in Santa Fe. Through them, I met Eliot Porter. I worked with him for a spell printing his early eight-by-ten negatives for a book he would publish. My ranch-trained eye helped me to understand the relationship between the natural elements involved, and I got to see Eliot do his magic with the dye-transfer process. He had no equal and was to color what Ansel Adams was to black-and-white. These people greatly improved my life in many ways beyond photography. Through them I met people like Paul Caponigro, Bill Wright, Willard Van Dyke, and others. A marvelous group they were! I served on the board of a New Mexico group from which evolved the Santa Fe Workshops, and though I never reached the preeminence of these people, they all added greatly to my time in photography. I also met David Lubbers, a man I much admired while in New Mexico, and, along with him, I saw most of what we call our Southwest. Later, my present wife, Jane, and I angled toward the Southeast and lived for a spell in Aiken, South Carolina. She is not only my partner but my best friend, and she carried me through a crippling surgery that left me unable to stand in a darkroom or continue with black-and-white photography. We met a man, Forrest E. Roberts, who introduced me to digital photography and insisted I work at it. This began a trip with color with Jane, a portrait painter of note, and together we moved to Georgetown, Texas, followed by another move to Round Rock, Texas. My ventures in photography gave me great fulfillment. It is therefore my pleasure to share some of my favorite black-and-white photos with you in Part Two of this volume. Throughout my life, I followed my father's advice, "Let the good luck happen." He told me I needed to remember this saying in order to be successful. I also believe that hard, honest work goes well with luck. I hope you, too, will let the good luck happen, and that you'll enjoy these remembrances of days gone by in a part of the world never to be forgotten.

From the big picture to the smallest detail, Richard Collins fashions a rousing memoir about the modern-day lives of cowboys and ranchers. However, Cowboy is a Verb is much more than wild horse rides and cattle chases. While Collins recounts stories of quirky ranch horses, cranky cow critters, cow dogs, and the people who use and care for them, he also paints a rural West struggling to survive the onslaught of relentless suburbanization. A born storyteller with a flair for words, Collins breathes life into the geology, history, and interdependency of land, water, and native and introduced plants and animals. He conjures indelible portraits of the hardworking, dedicated people he comes to know. With both humor and humility, he recounts the day-to-day challenges of ranch life such as how to build a productive herd, distribute your cattle evenly across a rough and rocky landscape, and establish a grazing system that allows pastures enough time to recover. He also intimately recounts a battle over the endangered Gila topminnow and how he and his neighbors worked with university range scientists, forest service conservationists, and funding agencies to improve their ranches as well as the ecological health of the Redrock Canyon watershed. Ranchers who want to stay in the game don’t dominate the landscape; instead, they have to continually study the land and the animals it supports. Collins is a keen observer of both. He demonstrates that patience, resilience, and a common-sense approach to conservation and range management are what counts, combined with an enduring affection for nature, its animals, and the land. Cowboy is a Verb is not a romanticized story of cowboy life on the range, rather it is a complex story of the complicated work involved with being a rancher in the twenty-first-century West.

DIVIn this groundbreaking book Andrew Sluyter demonstrates for the first time that Africans played significant creative roles in establishing open-range cattle ranching in the Americas. In so doing, he provides a new way of looking at and studying the history of land, labor, property, and commerce in the Atlantic world./div DIVSluyter shows that Africans’ ideas and creativity helped to establish a production system so fundamental to the environmental and social relations of the American colonies that the consequences persist to the present. He examines various methods of cattle production, compares these methods to those used in Europe and the Americas, and traces the networks of actors that linked that Atlantic world. The use of archival documents, material culture items, and ecological relationships between landscape elements make this book a methodologically and substantively original contribution to Atlantic, African-American, and agricultural history./div

Spinning yarns and storytelling has been a way of life for many folks living in the American West. Here is a returning author whose stories will captivate and remain with you for many years to come. Ron Jordan knows the western life up close and personal, living it on a daily basis. His stories and point-of-view are unlike anything you've read before. Down-to-earth honesty with the diplomacy of a stampede, this author writes it like he sees it.

Recommended by The Nature Conservancy magazine. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian offers a literary and thought-provoking look at ranching and its role in the changing West. The book's lyrical and deeply felt narratives, combined with fresh information and analysis, offer a poignant and enlightening consideration of ranchers' ecological commitments to the land, their cultural commitments to American society, and the economic role ranching plays in sustainable food production and the protection of biodiversity. The book begins with writings that bring to life the culture of ranching, including the fading reality of families living and working together on their land generation after generation. The middle section offers an understanding of the ecology of ranching, from issues of overgrazing and watershed damage to the concept that grazing animals can actually help restore degraded land. The final section addresses the economics of ranching in the face of declining commodity prices and rising land values brought by the increasing suburbanization of the West. Among the contributors are Paul Starrs, Linda Hasselstrom, Bob Budd, Drummond Hadley, Mark Brunson, Wayne Elmore, Allan Savory, Luther Propst, and Bill Weeks. Livestock ranching in the West has been attacked from all sides -- by environmentalists who see cattle as a scourge upon the land, by fiscal conservatives who consider the leasing of grazing rights to be a massive federal handout program, and by developers who covet intact ranches for subdivisions and shopping centers. The authors acknowledge that, if done wrong, ranching clearly has the capacity to hurt the land. But if done right, it has the power to restore ecological integrity to Western lands that have been too-long neglected. Ranching West of the 100th Meridian makes a unique and impassioned contribution to the ongoing debate on the future of the New West.