GRASS RANGE — Working 5,000 acres in Fergus County from sunrise to sunset gives Grass Range rancher Gilles Stockton a lot of time to think.
“Everything goes through your head,” Stockton said. “I mean, you’re out there for hours at a time just going around in smaller and smaller circles, right? You’ve got to think about something.”
Stockton mulls over the little things as he surveys the land he grew up on. “Look at all the stuff that needs to be fixed up,” he said. “That bums me out because it’s not getting done.”
But what really vexes him are the big things. Major changes to the agriculture industry that have materially altered his way of life over the years.
When he took over the family ranch in 1975, he says he took home 73¢ for every dollar that consumers spent on beef. That number has dropped to 35¢ today.
“So over that 50 year span, the take-home pay of the ranchers has been cut in half,” Stockton said.
Stockton started writing down and organizing his thoughts.
“I was seeing that these [are] the issues that I was trying to deal with were interconnected,” Stockton said. “And I work best if I can actually write it down.”
That led to a collection of essays, focusing on the major issues facing agriculture today. A friend of his convinced him to write a book.
In May, Stockton released “Feeding a Divided America” through the University of New Mexico Press.
The third-generation Montana rancher explores the causes of what he refers to as the “rural-urban divide”.
He wants readers to take away three main points.
“The first is to give the reader an understanding of the economic and cultural reality of agriculture in America today, with a brief history of how this came to be,” he said.
The second goal is to explain the divide between urban and rural America.
“What are the reasons for this anger, this political dysfunction that we have,” Stockton said. “The perversion of agricultural policy has been a bipartisan thing. All the rural counties in the United States have been voting Republican and all the urban counties are voting Democrat. What causes that?”
The third point is the effect of climate change on agriculture.
“Erratic weather is very hard on farmers and ranchers because we don’t know how to plan for the next crop,” Stockton said. “As a farmer or a rancher, you have to work for the average. But when each year we're seeing extreme droughts or extreme wet, the average is meaningless.”
It’s a combination of factors that have made it very hard for a family farm or ranch to succeed. Stockton believes every farmer he knows would love nothing more than to pass on their ranch of farm to their children. But it’s almost a form of cruelty these days to suggest it.
“We have higher rates of alcoholism. We have higher rates of suicide,” Stockton said. “So we love our work, but we’re killing ourselves. Why? It’s the economic stress.”
But there is cause for optimism. Stockton and a faction of farmers have made small but meaningful gains against the corporate entities that control much of the agriculture industry.
“Well, I think one of the best things that has been happening in agriculture is the movement for sourcing food at the local level,” he said. “There’s a demand or concern among the consumers that they want to have their food more locally sourced with shorter supply trains and better quality food. And that’s very positive.”
Stockton was recently on hand in Washington DC when the USDA released a report on competition in the beef industry, with proposed rules to enforce the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act. Stockton called it an excellent beginning of a process that ag producers have pushed for decades to get.
The work is hard, the challenges are many. But there’s no other way of life Stockton would choose.
“My God, what an incredible privilege it is to have a ranch in Montana.”
