SigMT

Aer all the beeves were moved through the shoot, Kate and Stacey hopped on their horses and moved the them out to pasture. Later, I asked Kate about her transition from her job in forestry consulting in Helena to working full-time on the Mannix ranch as an apprentice. "I always wanted to ranch but I thought that you had to be born into ranching to be able to do it, and that held me back for a long time because I didn't see any avenues to learn what I needed to learn," Kate said, "I had to get up the courage to quit my real job and then try to figure out what to do. I googled ranch internships and Quivira's program came up." Kate is referring to the Quivira Coalition, an agricultural organization based in New Mexico that works to help ranchers develop plans and management strategies for restoring and building resilience and soil health on western working landscapes. In 2009, Quivira formed the New Agrarian Program (NAP) as a way to help beginning agrarians learn the advanced skills necessary to pursue careers in agriculture. NAP pairs up apprentices with mentor ranchers who are skilled in land stewardship, improving soil health, and agricultural practices that improve water quality and quantity. "Given all of the challenges we face in agriculture these days, we need new agrarians who are as adaptable as their predecessors. We need whole-system thinkers who are able to take the best practices of the past and merge them with the new knowledge generated today," Julie Sullivan said. Julie runs the San Juan Cale Ranch in southern Colorado with her husband George. She helped found the NAP program at Quivira and also trains the new mentors that come on board with Quivira to help them develop the skills they need to become a good teacher, which is harder than it might seem at first. "It's hard. You want to make sure you are doing a good job, making sure they are learning what they need and want to learn, and helping them on their path in ranching," David Mannix told me as he watched Kate load panels into the tractor bucket. When I visit Graham Phillips, he is about to be thrown head-first into lambing season up on the Barthelmess Ranch, about an hour south of Malta, Montana. e lambing jugs were set up, the 'lamb'orghini, (a cart they use to transport lambs to the jugs) was out, and the first ewe dropped her lamb as we chaed. "Having not grown up in the city and not around agriculture, Stacey Mannix (left) and apprentice Kate Clyatt (right) return to the ranch after moving the beeves out to pasture. Kate is learning from the entire Mannix family. SiG MT 52

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