Dale Veseth is trying to adapt as best he can to all the changes and pressures impacting cattle ranchers.
That includes using remote-controlled collars to move his cattle up to 170 times a year across his 38,300-acre ranch in southern Phillips County, Montana.
At 63, he's been refining his rotational grazing system for 35 years, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather before him as a legacy Western cattle operation.
He’s also learned to adapt to the changing market for ranch land.
Competing interests now vie to buy ranches and acquire grazing acreage on Montana’s high northern plains, where this landscape was once a place families fled.
It’s now populated with a mix of conservationists and family ranches who largely work toward the same goals of preserving wildlife, open prairie and the local livestock industry.
As ranch communities in Wyoming know well, it’s harder than ever for younger generations of ranch families — and anyone else interested in running sheep and cattle — to break into the business.
"The capitalization to get in and maintain a ranching business was out of the reach of most Americans," Veseth told Cowboy State Daily, recalling how he first started looking for solutions to central problems faced by ranching communities two decades ago.
"Land is just one aspect. You have cattle. You have equipment, you have labor,” he said. "And (everything) to make all these things go. We thought it was pretty hard to recruit the next generation of people who produced our food."
In October, Veseth and his wife Janet announced what they hope will become part of the solution.
They are gifting their entire ranch valued at $21.6 million to the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance (RSA), a rancher-founded nonprofit Veseth helped establish 22 years ago.
While the couple will continue managing the ranch throughout their lives, they believe the donation ensures it will remain a working cattle operation supporting local ranchers rather than being sold off or converted to other uses.
The gift represents the largest recorded working ranch donation in Montana history, according to RSA.
It also points to fundamental questions facing ranch families across Montana, Wyoming and the Mountain West.
A Landscape Emptied Out
Veseth's ranch tells the story of rural depopulation across Montana's northern plains. The land he now oversees once supported far more families than it does today.
"If you just break down the homesteads that are in the ranch, we have at least 76," Veseth explained, referring to homestead claims now incorporated into his deeded acres. Including Bureau of Land Management lands his operation uses, he estimates about 100 families once worked the land that encompasses his ranch now.
“They all had dreams and interests,” Veseth said.
Some succeeded in unexpected ways.
He recounted how in 1926, a struggling neighbor approached his grandfather, saying "maybe if I lease my place to you that between us we can make it."
The neighbor's family eventually got into the air conditioning business in Southern California and did well, expanding into Hawaii, but never returning to work the ranch.
Today, Veseth's ranch supports just three families, he said, explaining how property costs make it hard to justify an investment in ranching. The cost of land is sky high, while a rancher’s wages remain low.
"For people to go out and pay $20 million to have an average job, that probably isn't going to work," he said.
Building An Alternative
The Ranchers Stewardship Alliance emerged in 2003 from concerns about outside interests acquiring ranch land in Phillips County and across northern Montana.
Angel DeVries, RSA's executive director, told Cowboy State Daily the organization formed when "ranchers started to stand up a little bit more to say, ‘Hey, we've been the ones stewarding the land."
"People who were not on the ground were saying what needed to be done or changed in this landscape," DeVries added. "And that's really where the RSA, the Rancher Stewardship Alliance, was born out of."
Veseth, a founding member, helped pioneer collaborative approaches like the Matador Grass Bank with The Nature Conservancy.
During a severe drought, he approached TNC about leasing portions of their Matador Ranch to struggling local ranchers who were facing liquidation of their herds. That model has now operated successfully for 20 years.
RSA Communications Director Haylie Shipp explained the organization's core mission: "What can we do for ranchers so that they never have to sell their ranches out of production agriculture?"
The nonprofit provides conservation cost-share programs, helping producers with projects that benefit both ranching operations and wildlife habitat — from wildlife-friendly fencing to reseeding native grasses on old cropland.
Since receiving its first National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant in 2017, RSA has been able to hire staff and bring conservation dollars directly to ranchers. It has also emerged as a counterweight to another conservation group in the region.
Dale and Janet Veseth of Phillips County, Montana, made history recently by donating their $21.6 million ranch to a nonprofit they helped found in the name of preserving family ranching on the great northern plains. (Ranchers Stewardship Alliance) 
With the donation of a ranch worth more than $20 million, Montana’s great northern plains remains the center of a debate about how to best conserve wild, scenic landscapes, native wildlife and local ranching communities. (American Prairie, Gib Myers) 
With the donation of a ranch worth more than $20 million, Montana’s great northern plains remains the center of a debate about how to best conserve wild, scenic landscapes, native wildlife and local ranching communities. (American Prairie, Gib Myers) 
With the donation of a ranch worth more than $20 million, Montana’s great northern plains remains the center of a debate about how to best conserve wild, scenic landscapes, native wildlife and local ranching communities. (American Prairie, Gib Myers)
Lightning Rod
RSA's formation was catalyzed, at least in part, by the American Prairie Reserve (APR), which has been assembling a massive wildlife refuge in the same region by buying ranches and converting cattle operations into bison habitat.
"American Prairie at the very, very base level, was perhaps a catalyst for why we got started," Shipp acknowledged.
Pete Geddes, spokesperson for American Prairie, confirmed his organization was actually "one of the first members of the Rancher Stewardship Alliance" before tensions escalated.
“Things got more contentious and then we just weren't welcome anymore," Geddes told Cowboy State Daily.
Sometimes, he said, critics of American Prairie become “unhinged” when debating the future of ranches on the great plains.
The two organizations offer what sound like different but overlapping visions for the region's future, and Geddes maintains their conservation goals are generally aligned.
Geddes points to American Prairie’s role in local cattle ranching.
“Since every acre's not going to be covered with bison, how can we get cattle to sort of mimic those natural ecological processes?" said Geddes, noting how cattle can be managed to graze like a herd of bison, thereby returning to the land to a condition it evolved under, with cattle hooves stimulating the return of native grasses.
The American Prairie Reserve supports 900 head of bison, said Geddes, and that’s a controversial fact for some in Montana.
American Prairie’s critics, “Perceive us as sort of the neutron bomb in that part of the world,” Geddes said.
As American Prairie buys family ranches and converts them into bison habitat, a contingent of locals in the area worry the group is driving longstanding families from ranching.
"Nothing could be further from the truth,” insisted Geddes. “We’ve done, like, 53 land deals. Only one family ever left that region.”
At the same time, American Prairie has 15 people with families and children living in Phillips County.
“They're part of that community going forward,” he said.
Free Market Approach
American Prairie pays market prices for ranches, then converts them to bison habitat with some opportunities for local cattle ranchers to lease grazing allotments.
"I come from a free market environmental background, and I was always criticizing environmentalists for using the power of the state to get what they want,” said Geddes, who joined American Prairie in 2011. “And I was like, ‘If you want it, raise the money and buy it.’”
That’s what American Prairie continues to do, attracting criticism from politicians in Montana who are otherwise outspoken supporters of free-market thinking.
In September, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte — a former software entrepreneur from New Jersey — joined Montana's entire congressional delegation in writing to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum about APR's grazing permit applications.
The letter warned that American Prairie is "dedicated to ‘re-wilded,’ free-roaming bison and converting Montana's historic farms and ranches into the largest wildlife refuge in the continental United States."
The officials argued this would "remove immense swaths of land from production agriculture with far reaching implications" and "undermine the proud heritage of these small, agriculture-focused communities."
"Once the damage is done, and these generational farms and ranches are gone, they cannot be brought back," the Montana leaders wrote.
Geddes pushed back against these characterizations, saying Montana’s high northern plains have long been the scene of agricultural downsizing.
"It's like, what, 2% of Americans, maybe less than that, work in ag,” he said, “There are cows up there now, or at least as many as when we started. Maybe slightly fewer people, but not a precipitous decline.
"We’re just a convenient scapegoat, I think"
Meanwhile, In Wyoming
While Montana grapples with this high-profile debate over the future of ranching and conservation, Wyoming hasn’t seen the establishment of groups exactly like American Prairie or the RSA.
Dave Pellatz, executive director of the Thunder Basin Grasslands Prairie Ecosystem Association in Douglas, told Cowboy State Daily he's not aware of anything comparable happening in Wyoming.
"Ranching succession has been an issue for a long time," Pellatz said. "And as land prices continue to go higher, how do you pass that on generationally becomes more and more of an issue."
He explained the fundamental challenge facing many ag operations: "You've got multiple children. So it's difficult to leave the ranch to one because that's generally the assets of the ranching family. And what do you do with the rest of the kids?"
While Wyoming ranch families are choosing conservation easements and exploring various succession strategies, Pellatz said he hasn't seen anything quite like the Veseth donation.
"Everyone's situation obviously is different. And for some folks, this might be a good solution," he said, though he noted that donation means "you're not getting money for it."
Looking Forward
For Dale Veseth, the decision to donate rather than sell reflects practical realities and deeper values about maintaining Montana's ranching heritage.
With the average age of ranchers now at 60 and full-time ranchers under 35 representing just 12% of the agricultural population, he sees his gift as creating opportunities for the next generation.
The ranch will eventually offer access programs through RSA, providing aspiring ranchers who don't have "$20 million to buy a ranch and then several more million to equip it" a chance to enter the business through education and carefully structured leasing arrangements.
As debates continue over whether organizations like American Prairie or RSA offer better models for conservation and rural sustainability, Veseth remains focused on preserving what he sees as essential: keeping the land in agricultural production and maintaining rural communities.
"RSA is going to have a forum,” Veseth said. "They will have an avenue for people that have spent their life on the land and want other people to have that opportunity, raise food, and be the backbone of these rural local communities.
"I'm extremely happy I'm a rancher. I think I had one of the few opportunities that most people will never have."
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
