SPRING AT THE RANCH

by Cory Carman

Early morning is my favorite time of day, before the texts and emails start, when I'm sitting on the couch with the quiet and my coffee, the sun hitting the hills behind the house. 

This morning, a notification beeped through the silence. Collared wolves were close. My thoughts went immediately to the baby calves and their mothers that we'd turned out behind the house, less than a half mile from where the signal pinged.

It's calving season, and this one has been harder and more intense than most. First-time mothers who need help. Calves born backwards, and calves that won't nurse. And this year something I've never seen: calves born with neurological symptoms caused by EHD, a virus transmitted by midges that's been devastating the local population of whitetail deer. Cattle survive it, but if the mother cows are infected during pregnancy, their calves are born with brain damage. Our vet told me there's a small geographic area near us where producers are losing up to 30% of their calves. We've already lost three.

And then there are the wolves.

In every business, in every life, there are the risks you sign up for and the ones you don't. In eastern Oregon, wolves are moving from the second category to the first. The legislature recently passed a compensation program, and I'm grateful — it's no small thing that an interest as small as ours made the priority list in a difficult budget year. But the program is built around confirmed kills, which puts tremendous pressure on finding dead animals. Many calves are taken where the evidence is inconclusive, or too little of the carcass remains for confirmation. And if we zoom out — to the importance of predators on the landscape, their role in keeping herds moving — spending all of our resources documenting carcasses isn't the most productive use of anyone's time or ingenuity. But that's a longer conversation.

I bring up EHD and wolves not to dwell on them, but because they have me thinking about something bigger.

Ranching holds us accountable to things that are larger than we are — to the land, to other creatures, to the cycles of nature we can't manage or predict. Most days I love that. But some days, laying that reality against the basic structure of a business, where the objective is to minimize risk and measure everything annually, feels like a mismatch. The economic logic of our food system assumes we can control the variables that determine whether we'll be profitable in any given year. Ranching on a living landscape says otherwise.

I don't think this struggle is unique to ranching, but the way it plays out is particular for ranchers. It's particular to the story of the West and the culture that grew up in it, adjacent to and in relationship with native peoples who had their own established version of accountability to place.

When your cattle died in my grandmother's era, you had less money and less to eat. There were no wolf compensation programs, no livestock indemnity payments, no drought insurance. Today, survival within the economics of an industrialized food system has made those programs necessary. Livestock prices are near historic highs and many producers still barely break even. These safety nets keep families on the land for one more generation, but they aren't designed to make us more resilient. They're designed to perpetuate the status quo, with the government as a backstop when things go badly.

Overlay all of that on a landscape that moves in long cycles — of seasons, drought, disease, predators, floods — and it's easy to see how stretched we are. We live in between the construct of business and the reality of ecology.

This isn't a complaint. It's an attempt to explain why people in rural places who depend on natural resources can turn defensive. And maybe why ranching looks romantic from the outside. There's something in most of us that realizes we've always been accountable to bigger cycles than the ones we can put on a spreadsheet. Maybe we all want, in some way, to think about our lives as seasons. To know what it's like to work in spaces where we are equals to the other creatures, and no credential or sense of importance makes you immune to getting bucked off a horse, kicked by a cow, or losing a calf to wolves.