First-generation cattle rancher, Cassidy Johnston, Colorado, gave Australian farmers food for thought as she addressed the Farm Tender 2024 conference in Marnoo recently.
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Ms Johnston managed two divisions of a large mountain cattle ranch in southern Colorado with her husband Bert and told the more than 200 farmers present how she went from city girl to cattle pro.
Mr Johnston was also a first-generation rancher.
The couple's 1000-cow Angus and Red Angus herd roam across 28,000 hectares, on slopes as high as 2700 metres above sea level.
They run Stabiliser bulls to breed cattle for market in what she said was a "big operation" for the US.
Ms Johnston grew up in Denver, Colorado, a city with a population of three million people, and never envisaged herself working with livestock.
She said her experience enabled her to bridge that gap between farmers and urban dwellers and suggested agriculture must open its arms to involve more of those from non-farming backgrounds.
She said farmers need to "make time" to help others understand and learn about their enterprises.
"People did it for me," she said.
"The very basic things in your brain that you think people should know, I didn't know any of those.
"I was a mess and it worked out."
Ms Johnston said farmers who complain of not having enough labour should open their gates to those who want to learn, and actually invest time in educating them on how a farm works.
She said these things would be as simple as how to feed and water livestock and fix fences.
The Denver-born cattle rancher studied Environmental Science at University of Colorado Boulder.
As a young girl, she had spent some time with horses near her godmother's property in Aspen but other than that, had no major farm experience.
However, when it came to her thesis, she said she was drawn to studying the relationship between the environmentalists in her world and ranchers.
"Colorado is a very environmentalist state," she said.
Ms Johnston ended up working on a farm as part of her thesis study through contacts of her mother.
She said her mother was calling ranchers asking for them to take her, a girl that had "never been more than a mile away from a Starbucks her whole life".
"I was supposed to stay for three weeks and I ended up staying the whole summer," Ms Johnston said.
"They taught me how to drive a tractor, got me back on a horse, and then I went back to work with them after I graduated that December.
"I met my husband while all of that was going on," she said, on her first steps into the ranching world.
She said Mr Johnston already knew he wanted to be a rancher and that the couple had been doing it "ever since".
They worked on and managed a series of ranches in Montana and Colorado before they moved to their current operation in August 2020.
Ms Johnston said first-generation cattle ranchers like herself and her husband were becoming "more common" in the US.
"But in the area of ranching that we're in, we're fairly unusual," she said.
"I get so passionate about it because there's still a lot of resistance to first-generation producers and it's just incredible that we were able to get started in this business."
She said set up costs and cattle prices were barriers to people entering the US ranching sector.
"Unless you come from money or make money somehow or marry into it, which is what everyone told me I should have done, you'll have to start somewhere," she said.
The Johnstons also ran a new cattle ranching consulting business where they advise farmers on how to make efficiencies in their operations.
They juggle it all with three young boys.
"It's a company that's geared towards doing what we do now but not necessarily always on site," Ms Johnston said.
"We have a lot of absentee [ranch] owners and we have a lot of ranches being bought by people who aren't in the business.
"We have a lot of really mismanaged ranches in the US because there are ranch managers and then there's professional ranch managers."
She said anyone could keep cows alive but the couple's consultancy goals were to help ranches become good places to work.
"That's a piece that's missing, the people management part," she said.
She said financial aptitude was another skill lacking amongst many US ranchers.
Farm Tender chief executive Dwain Duxson also asked Ms Johnston about her 10,000 followers on LinkedIn.
She said the platform has allowed her to engage with a lot of people sharing a similar mindset.
"It feels to me that there is dialogue that can happen on LinkedIn," she said.
"I think the stuff that we talk about in agriculture is complicated.
"It doesn't fit into itty bitty [social media] posts."
Ms Johnston said in the US, less than one per cent of the population was involved in agriculture and most people did not know what farmers do.
"I find that explaining it and bringing it to people in a way that they can understand is helpful," she said.
"Even just on a small scale."
