Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1287953
27 farm406 It's learning by doing (and doing and doing). It's not glamorous. It's hard work. e days are long. And it changes the lives of both the mentors and the young agrarians. habits. Being with that herd solidified her desire to work with cale on a bigger scale. "As a woman from Washington, D.C., I thought I had no business managing land and raising cows, and I would never fit in in rural Montana," Natalie, 26, told me as she stepped in the electric fence poles. "But here I am." It seems the path from growing up in one of the most urban seings in the country to working on a ranch in one of the most rural seings in the country is not as winding as you might expect. Last summer, Farm 406 magazine profiled the first year of the New Agrarian Program (NAP) run by the Quivira Coalition in Montana. e Quivira Coalition is an organization that has one of the most unique agricultural apprenticeships programs in the country because of the focus on large scale regenerative livestock operations in the semi-arid and arid West. It's learning by doing (and doing and doing). It's not glamorous. It's hard work. e days are long. And it changes the lives of both the mentors and the young agrarians. "I knew aer about a week I was doing the right thing," Tyler Vandermark, an apprentice on the Indreland Ranch north of Big Timber told me, as we were heading out to check on bull calves this summer. Tyler came from a small farm in Indiana where his family raised livestock and vegetables for their own consumption. "My mom had a lot of Mother Earth News magazines," Tyler laughs. When the first article ran, the NAP was hosting four apprentices on three operations in Montana and recruiting new mentor operations for the 2020 season. In 2020, the Apprentice Tyler Vandermark practices moving cows into a "bud box," at the Whit Hibbard clinic on the Mannix Ranch near Helmville, Montana. A bud box allows the handler to position themselves correctly to facilitate cattle flow out of the box into an alley leading to a chute or a trailer load out.