Home on the range
By Austin Schuver ’17 • Photographs by Amy Toensing ’93
In Montana, farmers often say things like, “We’re always in a drought, sometimes it rains.”
As a new grad student studying resource conservation at the University of Montana, I wanted to know how the state’s farmers cope with drought and extreme weather. Over 80% of farmland in Montana is dryland. Without irrigation, they grow wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops on 13 inches of unpredictable rainfall a year. How these farmers adapt to climate change could give us a window into a hotter, drier future.
It was my second week of collecting social science data for my thesis, research that consisted mostly of driving on lonely highways to talk to farmers. I turned onto a gravel road that joined the Rockies to the Great Plains. I was invited to sit in a room where every square foot of wall space held a mounted menagerie, heads of deer, elk, antelope, moose, and buffalo. The furry jurors kept quiet. On trial: climate.
Throughout my interviews I heard the gamut: the dismissal—the climate is always changing, it’s nothing new; the religious—mankind can’t change the climate; and the impressively pseudo-scientific—all the wildfires this summer released more carbon dioxide than humans have ever released since the 1800s.
Cruising back to Missoula after the interview, I spotted a pair of black terns. Pulling off and stepping outside, I emerged into a 95-degree haze courtesy of wildfires across Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia. A regional heat dome killed dozens of people just weeks earlier. As I walked to the edge of the lake, hundreds of grasshoppers flung around my footsteps. The west was experiencing the second-worst grasshopper outbreak in a half century. I lost the terns as they flew deeper into the smoky sky.
Climate change was all around me. Yet many farmers I met denied that it existed, instead practicing a kind of climate change atheism.
Along with the fisherfolk, the foragers, and the hunters, some of the first human ecologists were farmers. Across the world, they cultivated astronomy alongside agriculture. The stars showed them when to sow and when to reap. But when they gazed into the heavens, it wasn’t only to survey the seasons. It was to appease the gods. It was about explaining why, despite doing everything right, the rains didn’t fall or the crops didn’t grow.
The current state of Montana’s farmland was shaped by belief systems. Spurious but powerful notions like manifest destiny in the US and others around the world justified the genocides of Indigenous communities whose cultures—and often specifically their farming—was “uncivilized.” These labels were applied under the authoritative guise of Western science. Instead of diverse prairies where buffalo roam, our most precious resources are devoted to those apostles of capitalism: the cash crop and the beef ranch.
Today, facts and beliefs are supposed to be incommensurable. Once technological revolutions honed the hard science of producing as much as possible to feed the planet, we thought, at least in agriculture, that the two worlds separated. However, in an era of climate change, what happens after the seed goes in the ground is anyone’s guess. God’s in charge.
In 30 years, much of Montana will be nine degrees warmer and receive half as much precipitation, on average. As climate change intensifies, extreme weather events will become more common and less predictable. Despite advances in weather and climate forecasting, science can’t predict whether a farmer’s fields will receive the one rainstorm that can make a bumper crop. Uncertainty lives on and with it, so do the ancient faiths of farming.
As generations before them, Montana farmers believe they must not waver in their steadfast belief that their labor will provide. If they put in a good crop, the moisture will come. To this researcher, their blind faith is only one step removed from rain follows the plow.
In practice there’s little difference between a Montana farmer who accepts climate change and one who doesn’t. They both use some of the most efficient technologies, they both take advantage of the latest zero tillage methods, and they both plan far more diverse crop rotations than their predecessors. But they do so because the local weather and the global markets demand them. Farming is a business after all (They never hesitated to tell me that).
Even though some Montana farmers believe in climate change and others, sometimes called agnostic, might accept it as an unknowable and irrelevant possibility, climate change is the least of their immediate worries. Embedded in a system that prioritizes immediate financial outcomes, it only takes two bad seasons to put a farmer out of business. Short-term thinking and faith-based decision-making are necessities in a land of uncertainty. Farmers can only control what they can control.
As America’s farmers age out of the industry, most will attempt to pass on their operations to their children. Some families will see the growing prices of land, labor, equipment, inputs, the self-exploitation, the lack of health care, and the absence of retirement savings as reasons enough to move on from the family business. Yet some will succeed.
For these families, the future is an abyss that only confidence can cross.
Amy Toensing’s photographs first appeared in National Geographic Magazine (Feb. 2020). The original article can be found at hannahnordhaus.com.
