I always find it funny when I start a conversation at my day job with a sentence such as, “So this weekend we pulled a monster calf and the cow made it without a hitch but afterward she tried to kill me.” The faces of the people in my office always remind me that not everyone knows what in the hell I’m talking about. Explaining myself and showing pictures has become my way to let them in on my life and learn a little more about the food that hits their plate.
Then enter the Dutton family from Yellowstone, the show that brings you right inside the bunkhouse on a working cattle ranch every Sunday night. Now everyone that knows how to work a streaming device knows exactly what it is like to live this crazy, dramatic and dangerous life, or at least the TV version. I find it funny when people compare my life and family to the series and brushed it off, but after reading Amanda Radke’s blog in Beef Daily, “Ranching – It’s a Family Affair Worth Fighting For,” I realized that maybe we need to ride this tide and get our stories out there!
Enter the Dutton family from Yellowstone, the show that brings you right inside the bunkhouse every Sunday night.
Radke made a good point in her thoughts, we don’t know if it is good or bad but the show has put agriculture in the spotlight, specifically ranching. Albeit our lives aren’t nearly as dramatic with the gunfire and the rival betrayals but the underlying conversations that the show brings up are things every rancher worries about.
Government regulation driven by radical animal activist groups, government imposing eminent domain for population growth or other projects, the line of succession and how it will effect the legacy of the family ranch – they are all looming in the background of our minds. Quietly, while working hand in hand with mother nature to keep our businesses alive, we also fight these battles to keep ourselves in the life we love. Maybe we need to up our ante!
Quietly, while working hand in hand with mother nature, we also fight these battles but maybe it is time to up the ante.
As Radke and many other bloggers, agriculturists, cattlemen and farmers have pointed out – education of the masses is our best offense. With Social Media on all platforms being so popular it is the perfect tool for us to bring the farm to the lives of as many people as we can. Showing our daily lives to whomever we can through their screens is a perfect way to educate them on how their food gets to them. Posting baby calves, herd gatherings, explaining why we vaccinate, preg-check and doctor – we need to strike while the iron is hot.
While the world is riveted by a show that at it’s base is designed around ranching we should be sharing stories of our kids raising animals, the pride we take in taking care of our livestock and the tools we use to do these things. The more people we can educate the longer we can continue to live this life.
Start sharing – start here – tell me your favorite ranch/farm/animal story! Post pictures, share stories from pages you follow! I’d rather see the news feeds on my pages flooded with that than anymore mindless memes or celebrities!
Pacific Coast Cattle 