Distinctly Montana Magazine

W W W. D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A . C O M 35 about $80 each. My guess is that the cost of our damage exceeded our salaries for the entire summer. One of our jobs involved watering the pasture with the method known as "flood irrigation" that has been used as long as humans have raised crops. We would open the head gate on an irrigation ditch and, once the water flowed into it, we would block it off with a portable canvas dam. e water would surge out across the field until it was thoroughly soaked. e responsibilities of the College Cowboys also included shov- eling out the calving shed, where the accumulated manure, piled up to a depth of four feet, gave pungent meaning to the phrase shovel- ing the Augean stable. is month, 50 years later, I revisited the ranch. It looks the same, but it is no longer the same place. What I found was a lesson in technology and work patterns. e ranch in 1965 supported a community of more than a dozen adults who worked and lived there (in addition to the four College Cowboys). Today a single ranchhand does most of the work formerly shouldered by the entire group. A foreman cutting hay can sit in an air-conditioned cab and watch a movie on a DVR while a GPS system actually guides the tractor through its paces. Field hands no longer slosh around in muddy fields doing flood irrigation, either. Instead, the hay fields are watered by enormous irrigation pivots — the long, connected arrays of pipes and sprinklers that look like the bones of a prehistoric reptile. e green circles of 140 to 160 acres they leave on the landscape are familiar sights to airline passengers. Yet environmentalists often point out that the pivot irriga- tors are inefficient: they lose more water to evaporation than does flood irrigation and do not allow the groundwater table to fully replenish itself. What was my takeaway lesson from my visit a half-century later? A modern rancher would make the case that computer technology has enabled individual ranchers to survive at a time when agri-business giants dominate the West. ey can keep their payrolls low and their costs competitive. But something is lost in this process, too. A community disappears — and takes with it the opportunity to educate the College Cowboys. [is excerpt was originally printed in e Wall Street Journal.] Sandy Martin, 1965, Cedar Creek Ranch Lanny Jones on his trusty Farmall tractor

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