Outskirts Press, INC.

Living The Dream
Leaving The Dream

Life On A Montana Cattle Ranch, Living The Dream, Leaving The Dream. This book is our family story and our dream to live off the land in this modern age, my wife and I and our two children. We built a 125-animal unit cattle ranch in the Clark’s Fork of the Yellowstone Valley with a backdrop of wild and untamed Montana landscape. The book takes the reader through our adventures from getting ownership of the land to the challenges of building and maintaining a ranch in a difficult environment where extreme weather and dealing with predators is all in a day’s work. We built a ranch that does not use pesticides or chemical fertilizers while turning farmland into healthy pastures. Our cattle herd is only one part of our holistic approach to ranching. Find out how we used honeybees, free-range chickens, milk cows, grass-finished beef, and even orchards and large vegetable gardens in our quest to live off the land. The reader might be surprised at the ways cattle and healthy grasslands can lead to better biodiversity and carbon sequestration. It’s a story not just about us, but also about the lives of the animals, both wild and domestic, that share the land with us. The final part of the book addresses Country Of Origin Labeling (COOL) and how the removal of this law gave all the leverage in the beef market to the big four meat-packing companies.