Coming to Terms with Being Part-Time

Photo by Kaleiah Schiller

About a decade ago, I was focused on becoming a full-time rancher. We had more sheep than we'd ever had before (and more than we've had since). We were getting paid to graze within the city limits of Rocklin and Lincoln, as well as at Sierra College's campuses in Grass Valley and Rocklin. We were selling grassfed lamb and beef at farmers markets in Auburn, Roseville, Tahoe City, and Truckee. I was working more than full time, but was only paying myself a part-time wage. Ten years later, we run our sheep business as a part-time partnership. I work full time for the University of California; the sheep are a sideline. And I think I've finally embraced the idea of being a part-time rancher.

Ranching - raising grazing livestock on rangeland and pasture - has always been a difficult business. The amount of land necessary for an economically viable operation has always been enormous - even in relatively productive regions like the Sierra foothills. Over the years, I've realized that I would need to have at least 600 ewes to generate enough income to pay myself a reasonable full-time salary. This many ovine mouths would require somewhere around 1000 acres of rangeland and 120 acres of irrigated pasture to be feasible. While I might be able to earn similar income with fewer sheep if I were getting paid to graze, there would be tradeoffs in terms of headaches and time away from home. When I first began to realize the barriers to achieving my full-time goal, I cursed the modern-day challenges of urbanization (and conversion of land to other uses), of ranch fragmentation, of my own standard-of-living expectations. These external challenges were compounded by my own under-capitalization (partly due to my reluctance to take on debt) and, if I'm honest, my own naivete.

The transition away from my goal of ranching full-time wasn't always easy, nor was it a straight line. In 2012, I went to work part time for our local cooperative extension office as a community education specialist. The wages weren't great, but the health benefits were! In 2013 (just as our 1000-year drought was intensifying) I went to work half-time for McCormack Sheep and Grain in Rio Vista (where I was able to graze our sheep, as well). When the drought forced the operation to downsize in early 2014, I picked up more hours for cooperative extension. Later that year, I went to work as the beef herdsman at the UC Sierra Foothill Research and Extension Center, simultaneously starting an online master's degree program at Colorado State University. A year later, I joined the UC Rangelands Lab as an assistant specialist, focusing on water quality and drought issues. Finally, in 2017, I finished my master's degree and was hired as the livestock and natural resources advisor for UC Cooperative Extension in the community where I lived and raised sheep.

This personal history came back to me one evening last week as I was checking the lambing ewes well after dark (sheepherding is often solitary work, so my mind usually wanders!). Rangeland livestock production, at least at the family scale, has often been part time. Most of the ranchers I've known since I was a kid in Tuolumne County had a side hustle (before any of us even knew the term) - ranchers were often loggers, or worked at the sawmill. Somebody in the family usually had a town job - mostly for the benefits and stability of a regular income. Some ranchers were (and are) teachers, lawyers, contractors, or other professionals - maybe ranching is the side hustle!

Part of my struggle with being part-time, I think, has been the self-imposed idea that anything less than full-time is just a hobby. Several weeks ago, my friend Joe Fischer, who runs a purebred Angus operation here in the foothills, offered this observation:

"There are part-time ranches who take their operations seriously as a business. These are the ranchers who understand that their livestock often set the schedule - that even a part-time business can sometimes require full-time attention."

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from my favorite author, Ivan Doig:

"To be successful with sheep, even when you're not thinking about them, you need to think about them a little."

As I was walking through the ewes that evening last week, looking for a set of newborn lambs in the midst of a rainstorm, I thought about both of these quotes. I realized that a job or a business are simply a piece of making a "living" - that a "livelihood" is more than just the income I receive. Raising sheep, for me, is both a part-time business and a full-time avocation.