Originally printed in the July/August 2026 issue of Down Country Roads Magazine

Summer is here. On the ranch, summer sort of slips into existence, as if it is the quiet end result of getting the spring work finished. Summer comes specifically because the spring work is done. As the spring work wraps up, the last of the calves born and the brandings and getting bulls put out and the cows out to pasture, suddenly it is summer.

Some years, summer comes as a reprieve. Busy, but with an easygoing kind of bustle: fixing some fence, putting up some hay, checking cows, watering and tending the garden, doctoring an animal or two when the need arises, watering the fruit trees, things of that nature. Plenty to do, but without the urgency of the springtime months, and with long days, long enough to accommodate the to-do lists.

But this year, a somber haze hangs drearily over the horizon, not unlike the somber haze in everyone’s thinking right now. What do you do when there is no grass? What do you do when the rain doesn’t come? The moisture-bringing storms of early June were hopeful, but it didn’t take long for the ground to crack again, and the brilliant green of the spring pastures has faded to a greyish tint in the days and days of hot, dry wind. The pines are taking on a sickly, yellowish hue, losing their emerald depth, and the fragrance of flowing sap has long since dried up. The sky looks flat and white and dingy, and the dust devils in the hayfield and the water lots are disconcerting. Dust devils, this early? One becomes very conscious of ignition sources, and fire risk.

On a good or even just a normal year, the hills and prairies would be covered over with wildflowers right now, a flower-hunter’s paradise, but this is just a different sort of year. Even the hardy perennials, like yarrow and coneflower, even noxious thistle, are struggling to do more than a couple of inches of growth, and many of those friendly little flowers like columbine and dame’s rocket and shooting star haven’t shown their faces at all.

Pastureland holds up much better than cultivated ground, in a year like this. The roots of the perennial flowers and grasses are what hold moisture and prevent erosion and give structure. Topsoil, dry and hard, is held together by those wonderful perennial root systems delving deep underground, sometimes yards down, able to tap into hints of moisture the fast-growing, fast-fading annuals can’t access, but also able to sit in dormancy. Without them, the ground would turn to sand, and easily, too. Each windy day would carry away precious topsoil. The life is in their roots. And their roots go deep.

It is years like this one that highlight both the fragility of our way of life and the resilience needed in order to survive. We can’t control the skies. We can’t make it rain. But we can steward what we have. The drought will break. Eventually, it will rain again. We pray that it would be sooner rather than later. We pray for renewal and refreshing and a good, long rain. An then we trust in a God-given design that we witness daily, but perhaps take for granted, the resilience of an ecosystem that is stewarded and then allowed to adapt as needed.

Because years like this also highlight the fragility of the world around us, not just our fragility, and how dependent it is on weather patterns and precipitation and temperature, yet is so incredibly resilient. The drought will break, and good years will come again. We’ll see the grass grow tall, sweeping our boots as we ride horseback to move cows. We’ll see the hillsides studded with wildflowers like jewels. We’ll see the tangle of wild roses along every trail and the chaos of spiderworts, all shades of purple and pink and everything in between. The coneflowers and yellow sweetclover will bloom again.

The roots are deep. The drought will break.

Originally printed in the Custer County Chronicle on June 17, 2026

At this point, I’m guessing everyone has heard enough about the lack of rain, but pretty much none of us can stop talking about it, so here I am, talking about it some more. You’re welcome in advance. In case you need your monthly update, all your friendly neighborhood ranchers are selling cows and buying hay and making it obvious why seminars titled “Ranching for Profit” exist. That’s a real seminar, by the way. You’d think it would be a given, but it isn’t.

Turns out there’s a whole Ranching for Profit school. The curriculum includes discussing “the five grazing principles that work in any environment” and “developing a business structure that works with nature’s cycles.” Nature’s cycles…as in, we average something like 4 inches of rain each year and periodically go three-quarters of a year without measurable precipitation? And I challenge anyone to come up with a failproof grazing strategy that works when at any moment you can be obliterated with tennis ball sized hail, grasshoppers the size of small rodents, raging wildfires, or the occasional “isolated tornado,” as I’ve seen forecasted a few times lately. Thank goodness it was just an isolated tornado and not a whole flock of them. Not to mention, the random hurricane-force, straight-line winds vicious enough to drive your cows all the way to Nebraska, where they aren’t faring any better and this year are actually faring considerably worse.  

I have to say, I’ve definitely wondered who first had the bright idea to ranch out here anyway. It must have been one heck of a good year to convince him.

Anyway, we have a neighbor – I’ll call him “Denys” – who could have been teaching his own Ranching for Profit classes on diversification of income if he hadn’t turned down the opportunity of a lifetime in recent years. Cows are needy animals, after all, and one of the unfortunate realities of drought is having to haul water when your dams dry up.

Well, as near as I can remember, “Denys” was offered this camel – yes, a camel – by some landowners he leased from. They were going to give it to him. Give. As in, all he had to do was transport it wheresoever he desired. Now, I’m sure if “Denys” had asked his wife, she could have figured out some way to transport said camel. Ranch wives are good at figuring out how to move odd, homeless animals closer to home, and I’m sure she would have delivered. But apparently “Denys” just turned this camel down cold. Ranchers say things like, “What would I do with a camel?” Their wives say, “Poor thing,” and home it comes.

Come to find out camels really are a novelty, and some other enterprising individual hauled the camel to the nearest sale barn and brought home somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 dollars.

I’d like to just sit with that for a minute.

We’re in the middle of this drought, possibly the worst drought since the Dirty Thirties, we’re hauling water and feeding hay like our lives depend on it, because they kind of do, and while everyone else is tightening their belts and shipping cows away and spending a fortune on hay, or selling down their herd, “Denys” could be sitting pretty with a herd of animals that can go 2 weeks without drinking water and giving camel rides to tourists, and selling the occasional critter at the sale barn. I mean, shucks, an adorable little bottle baby camel went for $21,000 at a sale barn in Nebraska last year. Talk about diversifying one’s streams of income.

Agriculture is an interesting way of life. Even in parts of the country where the land isn’t trying to die every two to four years, even in places where the environment is more temperate, or wetter, or the growing season is longer, agriculture as a way of life relies on factors that are entirely outside of one’s control. It is humbling. We don’t drive prices and we can’t control the cost of feed, and we for certain can’t control the weather. There are some means of predicting and planning for slips in prices or increased cost of feeding, but there is no way to accurately predict the weather, much less to control it.

It puts those of us who live and work in ag in a unique position of facing head-on the truth of Whom it is that we actually rely on. Now, it is really easy to squander the opportunity, with a woe-is-me attitude, anger or bitterness, or just general pessimism. But the American mindset of self-determination and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps starts to fall apart on years like this, when all that is left to do is pray. Which, if you believe in Someone eternal who has revealed Himself to us in His Word, is more than enough. Prayer doesn’t always bring about the material result requested, but it is a means of bringing our hearts into greater agreement with God. He is not primarily concerned with our physical, temporal destiny but with our spiritual, eternal destiny, and saints aren’t made in a trouble-free life.

Ranching may not always be profitable, in a numbers and dollar signs kind of a way. And sometimes the least profitable ranching years just might be the ones with the greatest potential for a different kind of profit, the kind of profit that Jesus talked about when He taught His followers to store up treasures in Heaven, where moth and rust (and drought and fire) can’t destroy. So, this year might be one of those where income and expenses are uncomfortably close together. But it just might be that this year the ranch will turn a different kind of profit. The kind of profit that last a lot longer.