Sigrid Pugrud: it's not just about sustainability, it's about survivability. I can't pass it on if I can't hold onto it, I mean, I'm working on ground that has been in the family for 110 years. I'm sure each generation has done a few things that some neighbors thought, well, that's not gonna work.

 

Torgerson (narrating): To inherit a ranch is to inherit a dream from ancestors. To keep it together, oftentimes the next generation must reinvent that dream. 

On a high bench overlooking her family's cemetery, the ringlet-tight bends of Flatwillow Creek and the expansive Musselshell Plains, rancher Sig Pugrud is changing things up to keep her family's ranch and the grassland ecosystem she stewards intact.

 

Pugrud: The best I thought I could do for the land was to put it back to grass. It's a lot harder for a tenant to screw up a grass pasture than a farm field. But maybe that's just my long-term view is being a steward of the land is what's the right thing for the land.

 

***

 

Torgerson (narrating): Welcome to Reframing Rural, I'm Megan Torgerson. Today, the story of Winnett, Montana rancher, Sig Pugrud. Sig’s succession story connects back to a lineage of resolute and innovative ranchers. 

 

Her grandparents kept the ranch alive by finding work outside of agriculture. Then her parents kept it going by being early adopters of artificial insemination and cross-breeding cattle they hauled to buyers as far east as Ohio and Kentucky. Sig cut her own path as a woman in the male-dominated industry. She didn’t just inherit the ranch, she’s the boss. Her mark on the place has been transforming the family’s farm ground back into grass.

 

Sig lives in one of the least-populated counties in the nation, where the only industry is agriculture. Managing the transition between generations here is crucial to keeping that industry alive and well.

 

Sig’s life debunks the myth that ranchers are rugged individualists. Today, she is a champion for her agricultural community. She does that as a county commissioner and as a board member for Winnett ACES. You’ve heard about Winnett ACES this season. It’s a nonprofit that supports farmers and ranchers in Petroleum County, Montana, population 500. ACES is also our collaborator on this season of Reframing Rural.

 

Winnett ACES is a beacon of inspiration for rural and agricultural communities across the West. It’s a group that provides support for ag producers to implement conservation practices so they can restore native prairie and support wildlife. ACES also fosters opportunities for new and young ranchers to secure the land they need to graze their cattle. And they're creating a desirable place for people to live, by renovating previously shuttered buildings on Winnett's main street. Sig is involved in these efforts. 

 

I wanted to hear what other people thought about her work stewarding her community and her grasslands, so I asked around at ACES. 

 

Kendall Morgan: My name is Kendall Morgan and I'm the Land Health Specialist with the Winnett ACEs.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Kendall tells me about the first time she met Sig. While Sig’s in her 60s now, she has the tenacity of a rancher half her age. 

 

Morgan: My very first day on the job I got thrown into a side by side with Sig and she was moving cattle across her property and I remember meeting this force of a woman and being, um, you know, I think her second or third question to me was like, all right, so what are you gonna do in this position? How are you gonna transform this community and the education program at Winnett ACES like. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I only know four or five people from Winnet. You know? So I think I kind of stumbled through an answer and was like, you know, I really need to get to know the needs of the community and understand who I'm serving before I know, like, or have a plan. But I think that speaks to the wide lens that Sig looks at problems through or looks at opportunity more so than problems.

 

You know, she really views it and sees things far out on the horizon, and she's ready to take on whatever's gonna happen and she's not afraid to take big steps to get there. So that's something I love about Sig.

 

Torgerson (narrating): One forward-looking step Sig’s taken for Winnett is spearheading the renovation of the Petroleum County courthouse which will soon house office spaces and apartments for rent. It’ll be a huge win for her small town.

Sig’s life has been shaped by her rural identity from the beginning. Before Sig was helping to rekindle the resilience of her rural community, she was a student in a one-room country schoolhouse.

 

Pugrud: And so the Flatwillow School was still operating when I was a kid. Both my brothers and I all went to that school. I was a seventh grader when I came into the Winnett school system, and I think the school closed about a year later, we actually ended up buying the building and it moved it up into our backyard. So, so we now have the Flatwillow School in our backyard and have had for 50 years.

 

Torgerson (narrating): After the school closed, Sig's dad put in a pool table and used to host poker games there for his neighbors.

 

Pugrud: They didn't play high stakes poker. Um, they just had a, had a good comradery gathering at least once a month.

 

Torgerson (narrating): The old school is now used for group gatherings and irrigation district meetings. Keeping up old buildings is common in Winnett. The Winnett ACES recently fixed up the former Odd Fellows Hall, a historic false front building in town that now goes by 55 Main. A few years ago you could see through gaps in its walls. Today it's a coffee and ice cream shop!

 

Sig's family has seen Winnett evolve through the years, surviving the homestead era through the dust bowl, the loss of ranches in the ‘80s to the rural revival of today. Her homesteading roots here run deep. And she has the family stories to prove it.

 

A lot of people I interviewed this season detailed their genealogies for me. But Sig’s retelling stood out as it proved how much creativity and grit it takes to keep a farm and ranch alive, and pass it down through the generations. Learning more about Sig’s family history also illustrated just how monumental it was for Sig to reseed her land back to grass – as the Pugrud place actually started out as a farm. 

 

Pugrud: My grandfather Harry Tripp, had land that looked farmable, so he primarily went to farming. Didn't have cattle originally, had horse teams.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig lives on the place that was homesteaded in 1910 by her maternal grandfather Harry Tripp.  The Tripp Family cemetery is the one just down the hill from where she lives.

 

Her grandmother Hallie Tripp was the first teacher at the Flatwillow school that’s up at her house today.

 

Pugrud: She was a teacher and a music teacher. And so she came in and the story told was that when she got off the train, she was like, okay, I'll stay long enough in this godforsaken country to make the claim, but then I'm gone.

 

Um, well of course then she met my grandfather and that storyline changed.

 

Torgerson (narrating): I've heard similar homesteading stories from where I grew up in far Northeast Montana. The matriarch of the family who homesteaded just north of my childhood home once wrote: “I looked out west and saw all that rough country and I wished I’d never come.” 

 

But of course she stayed. These were the stories I heard about women in agriculture growing up. Their lives were spent doing the work of washing and cooking and cleaning. As Dr. Randi Tanglen shared in Season Two:

 

Tanglen: A lot of times, the work that is traditionally female, the domestic work, and the domestic labor that that women perform, it's done to be undone. So you make a meal so it's eaten. You wash the dishes, so they can be dirtied again. And so that's why again, the contributions of women kind of fly under the radar and, again, are seen as less than.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig’s story rewrites the myth that that’s all women can contribute to agriculture.

 

For Sig’s grandparents to survive on the hardscrabble plains of Petroleum County, they relied on Sig’s grandmother’s wages as a music teacher, as well as stints that Sig’s grandfather found working off the ranch: at a shipyard in Seattle and as a superintendent in Denton.

 

Pugrud: You know, trying to scratch together enough of a living to, come back and survive on the ranch. I mean, we still got the homestead house, and it's a tiny little one bedroom house, and they put a porch on it. So my, grandparents slept out on the porch and it had these big roll down tarps. It had to be brutally cold out there.

 

And in the summers, they would just spread out and go to the barns and sleep in the hay lofts. But my mom, she ran horse teams as a kid. They didn't have cattle. She loved horses.

 

But she had the task, her older brother wasn't necessarily the most ambitious of children, and so her job was to follow his team. So he would take off with his team first, and he'd get to the end of the field and he'd jump off and he'd try and catch a quick nap. He was to follow him so that when she got to the end of the field, she would wake him up, get him moving again.

 

That really ingrained in my mother that you didn't sit still. I mean, she had no tolerance for us following that path. It's funny to look back when she told that story and I was like, oh, Lord, did that impact how you treat us?

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig’s other grandparents immigrated to Winnett from Norway and had a herd of sheep that washed away during a sudden hailstorm. After that, they picked up and headed south for the oil fields of Wyoming. 

 

Sig's dad followed in their footsteps working as a rough neck on oil rigs. He came back to his family's old stomping ground of Winnett to work at the nearby Cat Creek Oil Company. It was at a country dance where he met Sig's mom.

 

Pugrud: Completely strange, a small world situation that they would come, end up getting together.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig's mom was home on break from the University of Montana when they met.

 

Pugrud: They just fell madly in love and were married within the next year.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Her parents, Tom and Lu married on Valentine's Day in 1948. Work took them all over the West. They were in Miles City when they got the news that Lu's father Harry Tripp had suffered a heart attack and needed someone to help run the place. At that point, the Tripps had gotten into cattle. Sig's parents stepped in to help. 

 

Pugrud: So then they moved back onto the place and they continued with the livestock and some farming. My dad wasn't born and raised on a ranch, so he was learning from my grandfather and my mom about how things ran. Uh, he came into it with incredible mechanical skills, and so they were farming, they were raising cattle.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Her parents then got into artificial insemination, the original AI. Artificial insemination was a cutting edge technology back then, and Sig's parents saw how it could transform their ranch, and the cattle industry. This was during the 1960s when the technology was taking off. Artificial insemination enabled ranchers to cross-breed and improve the genetics of their cattle, achieving what’s called hybrid vigor, or the increased biological quality of hybrid offspring. This can be done in plants and animals. The Pugruds started cross-breeding European cattle and were among the first to raise the Swiss breed Simmental.

 

Pugrud: Their timing was just perfect for being in at the beginning of that breed. So as it grew and the market exploded around the country, that was a pretty incredible windfall.

 

Torgerson (narrating): The Pugrud's breeding program was so successful they were selling calves all around the country: to Colorado, Texas, Kentucky, and Ohio.

 

Pugrud: Some guys came out from Ohio, antelope hunting. They wandered into our place. So it turns out when their kids started getting 4-H age, they would be looking at our calves and they're like, wow, we'd really like these calves back in a while.

 

Well, the markets were so bad out here that basically four neighbors around here each threw 20 steer calves on a truck, hauled them back, ran a sale. It was really incredibly successful. So for about 10 years, we would haul 80 calves into central Ohio and host a steer sale.

 

And it was really good money because these people are fanatics about their 4-H steers and trying to win the Ohio State Fair. It was just amazing.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Ohio was different from Winnett, in all kinds of ways. 

 

Pugrud: We sold a bull into Ohio once, and the guy called us and was making fun of the fact that our bull didn't wanna cross live water. And we're sitting there going, he's never seen live water.

 

This is Winnett, you know, he is, his whole life was water tanks. And so they had played this whole circus game of take the heifers to the bull. When the heifers crossed the water, the bull will cross the water. He wouldn't, you know, so we got to live that one down for a while, but he finally figured it out.

 

Torgerson (narrating): They sold cattle into Ohio for a decade. Then hit the extremely dry year of 1985. They were forced to load up all but fifty head to truck to a sale in Mexico. Still they hung on. Sig says their years selling 4-H steers in the Heartland saved the Pugrud ranch from the auction block during the 1980s farm crisis.

 

Pugrud: If I look back I can't honestly believe they held the place together. They were innovative. They were open to opportunities. You know, they were like, okay, why not try this idea? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. But it worked for 10 good years.

 

It was an interesting hit, but you know, you can't just be dependent on thinking that one way of running a place is going to get you through everything, you know, the market changed, the weather changes, you have to be adaptable.

 

You can't be crazy. You gotta have a long-term vision. But if there's an opportunity out there, you better see if there's some chance that that's something you need to do. Even if it's a short term idea. It's not that you, not that you envision, let's say, growing goats for the next 50 years, but, but then again, if that's a market that could work for you now. Maybe I'll look at it.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig's parents taught her it wasn't just okay to explore new ideas, it was what kept you in business. Participating in her parents experiments with artificial insemination are among her favorite times from childhood. 

 

Pugrud: We basically as kids just ran the rim rocks all day long. Uh, we had our hideouts, all that stuff. Probably my fondest memory would be when we were AIing cattle and we would bring in the cattle ready to inseminate in the morning and at night.

 

So we'd use our horses and back at that time we were still using horses. It was just fun. It was fun to work with mom 'cause we both loved our horses and it was that six weeks outta the year that that was the thing we were doing every morning, every evening. It was, it was fun.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Playing on the rimrocks and working with horses, paints a picture of a rural childhood people leave cities behind for. Growing up in a rural community also gave Sig an ethic of service and accountability she's carried throughout her life.

 

Pugrud: You know, it's funny 'cause I think when you're raised in it and you're surrounded by everybody else that's also in it, you don't necessarily recognize initially how that might be unique until you get out in the rest of the world and it's, and you, you know, people can be so anonymous in a city. I know I could be, when I was living in towns and in a small community, you can't be, I.

 

You know, everybody knows you or they know your parents or you're related to 'em. And so you're kind of accountable from a very early age. And, you don't get to be anonymous. You don't get to be, just an unknown. You know, at an early age, it starts to change how you approach things and, and how you interact with the world.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig lived in Denver after college before moving back to Montana.

 

When I first left Montana for Portland, Oregon at 24, I remember feeling like I couldn't wait to be anonymous. I wanted to walk down the street without having to be known. I wanted to see something different, be untethered. A few years in, I was planning my return. I realized I liked when passersby smiled or said hello. And I found I wanted to be part of a web of people working toward a common goal. For me that was producing stories from rural and agricultural communities that don't always get the spotlight.

 

Sig recognizes the camaraderie of these cast-iron agricultural communities, as another thing that sets them apart.

 

Pugrud: I think agriculture is different in that you have a community that we're all in the business, but we're not directly in competition with each other. And so we're more cooperative and helpful. Um, you know, it's not like I'm across the street from my competitive bar or restaurant or attorney and, and so when I see them getting all the customers and I'm not, and I'm going under, you know.

 

Well, we're all just trying to survive. And my neighbor's cattle contract didn't affect my cattle contract. You're able to have more of a community of people with the same goal, but they're not directly competitive, so they're more cooperative.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig views being cooperative as a responsibility. Since 2018 she's been a county commissioner, a position her father held years earlier.

 

Pugrud: Sometimes I refer to commissioner in this county as being kind of a tour of duty. You just give your time to, and your expertise as that is, towards trying to do what's best for the community as a whole or for the county. And, you know, all the people that serve on the conservation district board or the school board or the fire department, the EMTs, that all is just giving time.

 

And if, if we're not doing it, who's going to do it? There's nobody else. So if you're gonna have a strong community, people have gotta give their time to it and their effort and it's good for 'em. You learn a lot from it.

 

Torgerson (narrating): This feeling of obligation toward her community is incredibly important to keep a place as remote as Petroleum County going. The county has fewer residents than any other county in Montana, and is the seventh-least populated county in the entire nation.

 

Pugrud: We're not just rural, they call us frontier. You know, we have no hospital, we have no nursing home. We have no fairgrounds. We do have a rodeo grounds. So our extension service, we co-op with Fergus County.

 

I don't have any great plans for things I hope we achieve as a commissioner. You just wanna continue to keep the county strong and hope to do what you can to make it more sustainable.

 

This isn't a county that at this point is growing. We don't have pipelines. We don't have windmills. There's no new sources of money and no real new industry. The industry of this county is agriculture.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Having a single-industry economy makes Petroleum County vulnerable to economic recessions and commodity market fluctuations. Most people who live in Petroleum County work in agriculture, more specifically, in the cattle business. 85% of Petroleum County is rangeland, pasture land or grazable forest, and only 14% is cropland.

Kendall, from Winnett ACES, spends her days thinking about how the land can support agriculture. She says in the Winnett area, the soil is really more suitable for ranching.

 

Morgan: So the soils tend to be a lot heavier. They're clay, they're silt, and there's a lot of salinity in them as well. So the soils really are, they're pretty deep and there are a lot of minerals in them, but as far as farming goes, they're pretty borderline. Like they're not super suitable for being tilled. You know, and as the dust bowl came around, this area was hit really hard by that because the soil just was not holding together and there's lots of wind in the area.

 

Whether you're farming or ranching, just as it was when Sig's family settled in the area, agriculture continues to be a tough industry to make a living in.

 

Torgerson (narrating): That's why Sig's parents wanted her to get an education and seek opportunities outside of the area.

 

Pugrud: Well of course having survived everything they did they could see it was a rough way to make a living. And even basically back to my grandparents, you know, it was always somebody's free choice to go, get an education and decide what you want to do.

 

I can't through any part of this family branches see that the parents had expectations that you will be back here and I'm doing this so you can have it thing. It was, this is a choice, but we're gonna tell you, you know, we're gonna be honest. It's, it's gonna be rough.

 

It was very realistic and, sobering, so to speak. And, and so we were all free to, you know, go explore whatever we wanted.

 

Torgerson (narrating): So Sig went to Bozeman to attend Montana State University's College of Agriculture.

 

Pugrud: As much as I loved livestock, genetics and all of that, I actually studied ag business because another tendency in our family, and again, this goes to extended family and cousins, is we were taught to, you know, address your weakness. Well, we probably all felt financial success was our weakness.

 

Torgerson (narrating): After she earned a degree in agricultural business, Sig worked various jobs, including a job for a beef industry research and analysis company and a job as a hired hand on her family’s operation. Then she married into a Montana family with a large-scale farming operation scattered across several counties.

 

Pugrud: It was really a business first more than a culture, it was so much more of, you know, absolute enterprise driven, and things were accounted for. And I mean, you had accountants who set up systems for monitoring out, what tractor, what person, what machine was in which field. So you had a very, detailed insight into how much money you were spending to get a crop, field by field.

 

Torgerson (narrating): While Sig was working on that large-scale farm, she always had a foot on her family's ranch in Winnett, travelling the 95 miles to help out when she could. When she was married, they lived in Billings and commuted outside the city to their farm ground. Sig longed to live, work and belong to the same community. And after her divorce, she moved back to Winnett to commit herself fully to her family's ranch.

 

Pugrud: If I look back on that, I, I would give us credit for working hard. You know, we took some big risks. We were under a lot of pressure. Um, all that takes a toll and. There were mistakes made, there were some incredible successes. Um, but it definitely, it's just a different side of agriculture that isn't necessarily what's typical in Winnet now.

 

Torgerson (narrating): While she was away, Sig missed Winnett’s culture of cooperation. 

 

More about her return home to Winnett after this short break.

 

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This season of Reframing Rural is produced in collaboration with Winnett ACES which stands for Agricultural Community Enhancement and Sustainability. The mission of the Winnett ACES is to strengthen their community by enhancing the health of their land, economy, and traditions for future generations.

Season Four: Succession Stories is supported by the Plank Stewardship Initiative, World Wildlife Fund, Headwaters Foundation, and American Farmland Trust.

 

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Torgerson (narrating): Welcome back to Reframing Rural, I'm Megan Torgerson. We were just hearing about Sig's years farming before she came back to Winnett. After her divorce, Sig was eager to return fully to the tight-knit community of her youth and the cattle herd her parents kept together through the years.

 

Pugrud: I just decided that was where I wanted to come back to regain my footing. And so I came back in. My parents would've been in their sixties, maybe even seventies. I took over the cattle thing, not completely. Dad was still in it a lot.

I expanded it. I had some other property in this area so I had a tenant farmer, but I also had some additional grasslands and so I was able to expand the herd and that started to change how. Even the home place was running.

 

Torgerson (narrating): The timing of Sig's homecoming worked out well. When she came back, her parents were slowing down and needed more help.  So she took over management of the operation. 

I ask Sig if this is when their succession process started, but she says conversations began years earlier, when she was in her 20s.

 

Pugrud: There weren't any real formal meeting conversations about this. Maybe the folks were having conversations with my brothers through the years that I was never even aware of.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig has two older brothers. While her parents were partners in their ranching business and moved back to Winnett to take over her mom's family place, they grew up in the 1930s. And per the cultural norm, they were born with the belief that if you have sons, they're the ones to take over a farm and ranch.

 

This practice goes back to Sig’s motherland, Norway where law dictated until 1974 that firstborn sons had first right to family farms. 

 

While no such law exists in America, gender bias is a part of the culture of succession. The fact that Sig took over her family’s ranch, without a husband in tow, is a big deal. It signals that things are changing and becoming more flexible in agriculture.

 

Good thing, because today, women are entering agriculture at higher rates than men. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture Census, women producers have been on the rise since 2002 while the number of male producers have steadily decreased since 2007. 

 

Sig’s brothers are representative of this. They went on to have careers outside of agriculture and the Winnett community.

 

Pugrud: My oldest brother worked like crazy as a kid that I would hate to guess how many bales that guy stacked back in the world of small bales. He always knew he wanted to be somewhere else in the big world. And super smart guy, became a CPA, worked in banking and accounting, his whole life. My other brother had allergies to nearly everything on the place so he, he was very mechanical and he went into the Air Force and that was his career. So I was the one who. Stayed there and stayed with it, stayed in the area.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Despite her brothers’ departure from agriculture and Sig's early interest in the industry, her dad didn’t immediately consider her as his successor at the ranch. That’s for one reason: she was a girl. 

 

Even when I was born in the early ‘90s, my parents, who had three girls before me, were hoping for a boy to take over our farm and ranch. This is changing today however, especially in ranching communities, where I have seen more women returning to their family places to take over. 

 

Pugrud: While I was still in my twenties, but I'd been back at the ranch working for a few years and I had my ag degree and all of that. There was a time where my folks and I had gone to visit my oldest brother, and I was really shocked because in the midst of a conversation, my dad asked my oldest brother if he ever had any intention of trying to come back to the ranch.

 

And I was speechless. I mean, I was, I was so shocked at the question, and much to my oldest brother's credit, he just looked at dad and he said, it kind of looks to me like Sig, kind of got this idea. And it seems like it, you know, she's the one that's got the interest. I don't, and I don't think I ever will, and so I have to admit, I was pretty shocked at that even being a topic.

 

You know, I was, I was there. I was working it. And my brothers over the years, I think basically felt I earned it.

 

Torgerson: What was it like to have your brother stand up for you in that way when your dad brought that topic up?

 

Pugrud: Wonderful. Incredible. Yeah, I couldn't have been any happier. Yeah, I probably started to breathe again after that. No, I was really grateful. But it was very sobering because it was also recognizing that I thought this issue was settled and suddenly it wasn't. And, and that was pretty shocking.

 

Torgerson (narrating): As the sole sibling to pursue a life in agriculture, it is no wonder it was disappointing for Sig to hear her dad consider her brothers for the role. 

 

But back then, Sig shares that people didn't consider her capable of running her family's operation, just because she was born a girl.

 

Pugrud: I don't know that anybody ever seriously thought that I would seriously end up back on the place because there were neighbors or new people that would move in and they'd start, you know, really kind of trying to see if this wasn't gonna be a place that was gonna be in their future.

 

Um, it's like they must have discounted my, capabilities or intentions, probably because I was a girl.

​

Torgerson (narrating): After the conversation between Sig's dad and oldest brother, the family put to rest the idea for Sig’s brothers to move back to Winnett. It was practical, and considering the era you could even say progressive, of Sig's parents to leave the ranch in her hands.

 

While Sig inherited the ranch, her brothers weren't left without.

 

Pugrud: So through all of that, they, they pretty much disconnected from thinking that the ranch owed them anything. My oldest brother spent most of his life in Idaho.

 

My other brother in the military moved around, you know, they had their professional careers and their retirement plans and all of that. And luckily my folks had some windfall situations in the last few decades, and fortunately they invested it off the farm. They invested in the stock market, so by the time we came to estate settlement, the portfolio could be split between the brothers. And that probably, maybe, you know, took away from any sting against the idea that they'd stepped away from a demand on the ranch property. 

 

Torgerson (narrating): After learning how shocked Sig was to hear her dad broach the subject of her brothers stepping in to run things, I ask to learn more about her relationship with her dad.

 

Pugrud: We were good friends. Dad was just an enjoyable person. He just had a great sense of humor. He was a hard worker. Oh my gosh. He was a hard worker and, you know, and I just always wanted to make him proud, be able to do what he expected of me. But he was, he was fun to work with. He could be so mad about something and throw out a line and all you'd wanna do is laugh. And he didn't mean it to be funny.

 

He was very patient and, both of the folks were patient and good teachers. I don't feel like I really had any conflicts with my folks, either in when they were managing it or I was.

​

Torgerson (narrating): Sig didn’t just follow in her parents’ footsteps, she innovated. More on that after this short break. 

 

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This episode was supported in part by American Farmland Trust, the only national organization that takes a holistic approach to agriculture, focusing on the land itself, agricultural practices, and farmers and ranchers. Since its founding in 1980, American Farmland Trust has helped permanently protect over 8 million acres of agricultural land. It has advanced environmentally-sound farming practices on millions of acres, supported thousands of farm families, and raised public awareness through its No Farms No Food® message. Learn more and help farms and ranches thrive at farmland.org.

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Torgerson (narrating): When Sig took over her parents’ ranch, she didn’t want to do things exactly like they had.

 

Pugrud: And I think when I started to take it over, there were a few things I was trying to do, like expand the herd and start summering them off the place in a different place and things like that, that, that were new to 'em. And they were just like, okay, you figure it out. And there were times I'd actually go to him and say, okay, this is what I'm thinking.

 

What do you think? And they're like, sure, call. That's a little rough. That's a little scary. But I mean, it's also a challenge, trust, you know? I don't think I was doing it much different than they trained me to do it. Um, so I enjoyed working with my dad and my mom both.

 

Torgerson (narrating): It shows how much Sig's parents did in fact trust her to let her make her own decisions. Though I imagine it was stressful having them bow out of being a sounding board – especially in an industry like agriculture where one wrong move could cost you your operation and your family's legacy -- it shows just how much faith they had in Sig to keep it all together and do what was right by the ranch.

 

When I ask what advice she has for families going through the succession planning process, Sig shares the importance of having your own vision, patience and respect across generations. She speaks from her experience as someone to transition into the operation her parents and grandparents built, and as someone actively planning the transition to the next generation.

 

Pugrud: Everybody's gotta kind of come in and make their own mark. There's doing that in a graceful way. And there's doing that in an obnoxious way. And that's where I think the two sides have to communicate a lot, and show professional respect for each other. 

 

Because your older generation aren't there by accident. They work to have what they have and they have their opinions based on their experience. Your younger generation has energy and ideas and, they can sometimes act as though they're just the first person who ever thought of that idea.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Succession educator Dave Pratt says that "you don’t get harmony if you sing the same note." Ideally younger generations can harmonize their ideas with older generations' experience. To get there, Sig shares that families need to put aside their family roles and think of each other as colleagues in a business.

 

Pugrud: You know, especially within a family, if you've got somebody young coming in, they need to come in being mature and professional and, and the older generation has to forgive them and forget all the antics they did as children that are still in the back of their head. As you know, this child always showed this habit, they're still labeling them. In a way that may no longer be true. Younger person has to prove that, you know, I'm a new adult person here, you know, it takes a little extra effort and this isn't necessarily a culture that is used to, uh, approaching things like that.

 

I think that would vary from family to family, but I mean, you know, do you have a defined role and are you respecting each other's defined role? As in, you know, this isn't mom, this is the accountant. You know, this is my brother who's in charge of the breeding program on the cows, or, and this is the, you know, this is the person who's taking care of the soil or the water tanks, and, and so let's sit down and talk to each other as a business person.

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I mean, it's the business aspects that if you were to go put yourself in any other industry and any other business. The people have their jobs, their responsibilities, and they're representing their department and the departments have to work together for a common goal.

 

And so that all sounds well, way too crazy organized or systematic, but maybe that's what you've gotta do to start to break away from just being family members who are judged based on old, younger days.

 

Torgerson (narrating): These are the types of paradigm shifts that help families both manage a ranch, and plan for its transition. Both of these things are intertwined.

 

Pugrud: It's not just about sustainability, it's about survivability. I mean, I, I can't pass it on if I can't hold onto it, you know? And so it's like. It can't destroy your asset. You have to work to not destroy your asset. Is, is the way I should say it. I mean, I'm working on ground that has been in the family for 110 years. I'm sure each generation has done a few things that some neighbors thought, well, that's not gonna work. Um, apparently it's, it's been okay.

 

You just have to stay versatile. Don't get locked into thinking there's only one way you're gonna make it work out here.

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Torgerson (narrating): Sig's parents stayed versatile by breeding 4-H calves for kids in the Midwest. For Sig, it was making changes to the land.

 

Pugrud: The best I thought I could do for the land was to put it back to grass. It's a lot harder for a tenant to screw up a grass pasture than a farm field. So this was kind of a long-term decision.

 

Of course I'm devaluating the land per se, from being a farm ground value to being a grassland value. But maybe that's just my long-term view is being a steward of the land is what's the right thing for the land.

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Torgerson (narrating): Sig told me she doesn’t think everyone should be growing grass in Petroleum County, but it’s the arrangement that worked best for her particular situation. And while pasture land has less economic value than farm land, Sig saw the ecological value of reseeding the farm ground they had back to its original form as of greater significance.

That’s especially important because, according to Kendall at Winnet ACES, Sig’s ranch is part of a rare and important ecosystem. 

 

Morgan: Sig’s ranch sits just south of Winnett. And you know, all of Petroleum County is a part of the Northern Great Plains, which is a sweeping landscape that covers 180 million acres across five states and as well as two Canadian provinces.

 

And it is one of only four remaining relatively intact temperate grasslands. So this ecosystem is really important. Grasslands tend to be one of the least protected and most at risk biomes. 'cause I think people tend to overlook them. You know, until you're sitting on the prairie. You don't fully understand the amount of diversity and how valuable that space is, and why it's so important. So the landscape in Petroleum County is a combination of mixed grass, prairie and sage rush step.

 

If you picture the landscape here, it's generally like these gently rolling prairie hills, with sage brushed sprinkled throughout, and there's a few areas of like timbered sandstone ridges, and to the north there's the Missouri Breaks. And to the East there's the Musselshell river. So there's a lot of diversity here. You know, it's not just the plains, but it's, it really provides a lot of essential habitat and diversity for a lot of grassland birds and large grazers such as elk and mule deer, pronghorn, and pollinators.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Since 2015, landowners in Petroleum County have reseeded 20,000 acres back into grass. These grasslands are not only important for habitat and biodiversity, they are also a huge carbon sink.

 

Before Sig could turn cattle out onto her pastures to graze, the grass needed two to three years to mature. Once it was ready Sig could grow the size of her herd.

 

As Sig's grass seeds were growing, extreme rainstorms hit. Here's Kendall again.

 

Morgan: So Sig reseeded this ground around 2019, and she got really lucky. Some people have told her to buy a lottery ticket because she reseeded such a wide expanse, such a large amount of acreage. But she took a risk and she reseeded all this land at once and she got really lucky with precipitation. So it took really well. And it's still going, like every year. We're seeing that those bunch grasses are starting to expand out more and fill in the gaps, you know? 'Cause when you first seed, you can see the lines, you know, where that no-till seeder went through and put those seeds down. But you just can't tell where those lines are anymore because it's filling in and, there's been some monitoring that's gone on on this ground.

 

So we do different tests like an infiltration test, which measures how quickly an inch of water will infiltrate into the soil. So if it's infiltrating quickly, you know that if you're getting a rain event, you're gonna be capturing all of that water. You're gonna be holding onto it, you're gonna be watering your plants, your microbes are gonna be thriving because they need water to live just like plants, just like us.

 

And we've seen those infiltration rates increase over time, and we're seeing the soil structure improve. We're seeing the forage quality improve over time.

 

Torgerson (narrating): By that time, Sig had sold off most of her herd, and she was trying to figure out how cattle were going to factor into her business. She contemplated whether it would make more sense to find a rancher to lease out her pastures, than to buy back more cattle of her own.

 

Pugrud: When I sold the herd off initially knowing how much grass I was bringing back and how much the capacity was gonna increase, it was like, I don't think I'm gonna be the one doing that, for me to do it would've required one or two more people full time. And I just couldn't see that at that phase in my life. I guess I took a lesson from my folks in watching so many ranchers don't wanna give it up until they have to.

 

And I could, I, I just could see that I wasn't gonna be the person that was gonna be the owner of the cattle when it got restocked. And that was a good decision, you know, and I'm glad I made it.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Around this time, the son of Sig's cousin was returning to their place. They needed more capacity and a healthy stand of grass for their cattle. Sig needed someone to lease her pastures to. It was a perfect fit.

 

Pugrud: I had the crop coming in that hadn't been grazed. So their herd came to my ranch for nearly two years.

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Torgerson (narrating): Kendall shares how trusting it was of Sig to allow her cousin's cattle to graze her new stand of grass.

 

Morgan: I really appreciate Sigs curiosity and her trust in other people, as she's let her, her cousins who are younger and just getting, you know, kind of getting started in the ranching world, allowing them to graze on this reseeding. And, giving that reseeding a couple years to get established and get going and then stimulating it with grazing has been beautiful to see.

 

And, talking with Sig about the soil test results that we've done on her property was really fun because, I think they expected the soil health levels to be pretty low. You know, I mean, this was, farmed for so long and , there's a lot of compaction and stuff like that. But actually we found, it was really promising what we found in the ground.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Kendall gets excited when she talks about parcels of Sig's land that were bad saline seeps but were transformed after Sig reseeded grass. Saline seeps are patches where salty groundwater rises to the surface preventing any plants from growing on top.

 

Morgan: So one thing that's really cool on Sigs land is that there used to be some really serious saline seeps. And since she has reseeded that into native grassland. And there's been some really amazing grazing going on. They have seen those saline seeps shrink up and like places where they used to not be able to drive across, they can drive across now.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Sig has witnessed these transformations on her land alongside her cousins who are grazing their cattle there.

 

Right now it looks like Sig's cousins will be the ones to carry the Pugrud flag forward. While she's still finalizing her succession plans, Sig's biggest wish is for the land to stay together so that the family taking over has enough land to make it in ranching and stay in the community.

 

Pugrud: My purpose in trying to work through a succession plan is that this ranch is in a good workable size right now. I've got plenty of opportunity to piecemeal it out to existing neighbors. That same opportunity was there for my folks. It's not what they wanted, it's not what I wanted. You go through the effort of trying to put together something that's sustainable for the good of the land and the livestock and everything. I'm probably as loyal to my livestock as my land.

 

I hope it will work that the plan or contemplating works. If that doesn't, I, I'd have to say my next choice is to go find a someone else who wants to hold it together and keep it together. I just wish for them all the things that I, you know, my family has had, which is, years of having the benefits of being in a community, being in agriculture, having those opportunities for their family while being able to be good stewards of the land, and good stewards of their livestock.

 

Torgerson (narrating): While Sig's succession story is unresolved, many families are in that same stage of the ever-evolving process. Sig is in the middle of the dance. She's creating opportunities for the next generation while continuing to do her part.

 

Kendall sees Sig's role on her ranch and in the community, similar to the inner-workings of soil health, as Sig allows the grasses, livestock and neighbors surrounding her to grow and flourish.

 

Morgan: I did make a small, like allegory because I just can't be stopped. Um, but, Stig is not afraid to roll up her sleeves and do the job that's in front of her. She's just so deeply rooted in her community. She knows where she can make a difference. But she also knows where she can let her foot off the gas and let others fill a role. Just like with allowing her cousins to steward her land. She put that trust in them and the way that she conducts herself on the ACES board, I've learned so much by watching her and I just felt like, like I see so many similarities to soil microbiology. Like we all have our role, we all work together, but fungi and bacteria and protozoa, they all do really different things, but they rely on each other so deeply. You can't just have one. You know? And so I see Sig in the same way.

 

Like she's such a vital piece of mycorrhizal fungi connecting this community, but she needs the protozoa, you know, to, to help with that soil structure and she needs the bacteria to break down the carbons and all of that. So yeah, I just see her in such a beautiful role that she digs into, but also allows so much space for others and it's beautiful.

 

Torgerson (narrating): Getting to know Sig made me realize that succession isn’t about following a universal formula. It’s about being true to your own path, being headstrong, innovative and bucking tradition if you have to, to see things into the future. Sig sees herself as part of that tradition. 

 

Pugrud: It takes a lot of tenacity and grit. I can't even fathom what my grandparents went through, much less my folks. So I guess my dreams for the ranch would be that, that that can continue on and provide that for, for future generations.

 

This episode of Reframing Rural was written, reported and produced by me, Megan Torgerson and edited by Madeline Jorden. Story editing was by Mary Auld. Music and audio engineering was by Aaron Spieldenner and Sean Dwyer of Hazy Bay Music with additional music by Skyler Mehal and Chandra Johnson. This season of Reframing Rural is made in collaboration with Winnett ACES, with funding and support from the Plank Stewardship Initiative, World Wildlife Fund, Headwaters Foundation, American Farmland Trust, the Department of Public Transformation and listeners like you. If you know someone who is going through succession planning or who loves a good family agriculture story, please share today’s story with them. To find out more about season four of Reframing Rural, Succession Stories, and past seasons, visit reframingrural.org.