PERKINS COUNTY, S.D. — I live on a ranch. When I stand on the gravel road that runs along the section line by my house I can look in any direction across the waving grass and, other than the modest huddle of buildings and fencing that compose our ranch, see little evidence of human development. To say it is remote is like saying water is wet. We aren’t Iowa remote or Wisconsin remote. This is the American steppe, where the population density is one person per square mile.
Four hundred miles to the southeast, Smithfield, a pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, has become the fastest-growing coronavirus hot spot in the nation. Racial inequality, an unstable food supply chain and corporate greed exacerbated the spread of the virus. But though we share state borders, Smithfield is as far from our reality as the outbreak in New York City.
Smithfield is near the end of the food supply chain; we are where it begins. On our drought-prone side of the state, where ruminants outnumber humans, there are no processing plants, just grass — vast, luminous expanses of grass — with intricate root structures that grow thick and deep.
There are still custom butcher shops scattered across the hundreds of miles of open pasture, small mom-and-pop operations, remnants of a system that used to connect rural economies to the food they were producing. Now nearly all animals raised here are shipped elsewhere — to feedlots to be grain-fattened, and then to gargantuan facilities like Smithfield to be slaughtered.
I know some ranchers who are working to change this system, but many more lack the financial or political clout to innovate beyond the scope of their own operations. We are part of an industrialized system that treats animals and their caretakers as columns on spreadsheets geared toward achieving maximum profit. These columns ignore the physical realities of labor in animal husbandry, as well the dignity of the animals we husband, while saddling us with debt and draining resources from our rural communities.
It is spring now in our isolated, windswept stretch of Middle America. For those of us on the front lines of agriculture, the seasons define our labor. Spring is the busiest time of year on a ranch. Cows give birth to their calves and sheep to their lambs. Even when there isn’t fear of infection to keep us sheltered in place, most of us leave our herds and flocks only for essential trips to town — the cows and sheep need round-the-clock attention.
We are used to watching businesses die, and we are also used to making do with what remains. The one cafe, the small truck stop, the grocery store and the feed store in the nearest small town are offering curbside pickup. Maybe these businesses will survive. Maybe they won’t. Our main street has been a half-ghost town for decades. As in most of rural America, commerce here was stripped back to essential services a long time ago.
Even before the pandemic laid bare the instability of the industrialized food supply chain, ranchers knew that chain wasn’t working. At its core, our work will always be based around the rhythms of nature rather than technically derived calculations. Instead, sun and rain, dormancy and renewal determine our obligations. At the height of a pandemic that is exposing nearly every systemic flaw in society, our work on the ranch remains virtually unchanged.
Our livestock and land require a quality of care and consideration that exists independent of profit, which is why we work as hard as we ever have, even while taking on second and third jobs to keep our ranches financially viable. The marketplace has changed, but our mandate to feed communities and care for our animals has not.
Ultimately, the American consumer, who votes with his or her dollars, will decide if the disruption typified by the crisis at Smithfield will lead to healthier, more sustainable systems — or a return to the brittle, exploitive structure the pandemic has so starkly revealed.
In the meantime, the prairie grows greener. The cows shuffle slowly across it, seeking the slim blades of new grass. Spring is still the season of rebirth, a reminder that the days of darkness and deep cold are part of the wheel, not the end of the line.
Eliza Blue is the author of the forthcoming book “Accidental Rancher.”
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