Callie Surber
Published April 18, 2025
"My name is Callie Surber and I am pursuing an M.S. in Environment, Natural Resources, and Society. I'm currently writing my thesis and plan to graduate in spring 2025.
My research is about rancher perceptions and responses to social and ecological changes in Wyoming’s Wind River basin. I am looking into how ranchers perceive critical social-ecological changes and how these may drive their behaviors and decisions. For context, social changes are all things related to human dimensions, such as economics, culture and policy; ecological changes are environmental earth-based processes, including climate and water.
Ranching is significant in Wyoming: agricultural activity generated $2.5 billion in 2021, and 77% of that comes from livestock production activities. Almost 30 million acres of private land are used in ranching or farming in the state, and over 80% of consumptive water use is agricultural. Agricultural lands are critical for wildlife conservation, food security, rural economies, and cultural values.
My study region, the Upper Wind River Basin, is located within Fremont County, which is ranked third highest in the state for agricultural economic output. There's about 100,000 irrigated acres in this area, and it is mainly associated with beef production.
Climate change is projected to have some big impacts in this region. We might move from a snow-dominant to a more rain-dominant system with decreasing snowpack in the winter, earlier peak spring run-off, and potentially a greater deficit of water later in the summer season. This is all coming amid climbing temperatures and an uncertain human demand for water. A few other social and ecological changes include invasive species, more wildfire and flooding events, recreational pressure, and amenity ranch ownership.
Models tell us what types of impacts could occur in this region, but we’re not sure how ranchers perceive these changes and how they might react. My goal is to better understand this relationship and ultimately be able to leverage these findings to better inform policy and practitioner approaches for agricultural adaptation.
I led qualitative in-depth, semi structured hour-long interviews with 38 ranchers. This approach enables us to discover nuance and complexity, highlight local knowledge, and uncover unanticipated factors. We aim to understand the breadth of views and create detailed knowledge of case studies which then can inform social theory and practitioner approaches.
Ranchers had a much greater focus on social changes – economics, policy, cultural aspects – than ecological changes, mentioning them nearly three times as often. This might be related to a lower sense of agency and control with social changes versus ecological changes.
A frequent concern among ranchers stems from amenity ranching. Amenity ranchers are typically wealthier individuals who purchase agricultural property. They might keep the land in agriculture or buy just for recreational values and take it out of agriculture altogether. This is a strong trend in the study area and leads to inflated property values. Amenity ranchers have wealth from some other enterprise and can pay a large amount of money for the property, whereas livelihood ranchers are less able to do so.
A related concern is land fragmentation and development. People buying up these properties might keep them intact, or they might sell them to housing developers, which fragments the habitat and decreases the amount of agriculture in the area. Ranchers see this as a huge barrier for young operators getting into ranching, leading to a decline in agriculture in the area.
Another big economic concern is what ranchers see as unprecedented inflation of ranch inputs since the pandemic, a topic in almost every interview. Ranch inputs costing much more than they are getting for their commodity might force them out of the livelihood altogether. Ranchers try to respond by diversifying income streams, working external jobs, and increasing the efficiency of ranch inputs, for example fertilizer.
When I asked ranchers about environmental changes, over half of them brought up climate change. The majority talked about climate change as a natural cycle or said they were unsure of the cause. But mostly they didn't talk about the cause at all and concentrated on the impacts.
One would expect that people who are concerned about environmental changes are more likely to talk about current or long-term adaptation strategies, but surprisingly this was not the case. The way ranchers talked about adaptations to environmental changes rather fed into a sentiment that the changes they are seeing are “business as usual.” Ranchers generally felt a sense of agency and control in dealing with these environmental changes because they're so used to managing these changes in their operations, year to year and season to season. They often viewed possible impacts of climate change as something they've dealt with before, like a drought or a particularly cold winter.
Use the yellow arrows to click through some ranchers' quotes.
Why not adapt?
One barrier to adaptation is the difficulty of using long term climate forecasts in ranch planning. Year-to-year and season-to-season adaptation is so baked into practice that thinking long-term like this was not seen as useful. In addition, variability in climate and weather conditions might interfere with long term perceptions of trends. The “big winter” of 2022/23 with major snowfall was brought up frequently. This kind of variability might interfere with any perceptions of water availability changes trending in one direction over time.
Land management policy is another consideration for ranchers. Most of them operate on public grazing allotments, so they are restricted in their ability to make decisions on how they utilize them. Typically, government agencies make those decisions. Agencies are also restricted in their ability to respond flexibly and quickly to changing conditions due to chronic understaffing, high rates of turnover, and lengthy bureaucratic processes. Inflexible grazing policy was a big concern for ranchers, and it was seen as preventing necessary year-to-year adaptation.
This goes hand in hand with long approval timelines for changes. For one couple, it took 19 years to get approval to install a solar well. Another rancher has been trying for nearly ten years to get approval to change grazing timing, with the goal of better utilizing the forage and enhancing vegetation health in their allotment.
Perceptions of change were not tightly linked to adaptive actions. To encourage ranchers to implement effective adaptation, it may better to emphasize co-benefits that ranchers really care about, whether that is economic benefits, lifestyle, or even ecological health. Many ranchers talked about being connected to and caring about the land, and they even make financial sacrifices to care for and steward the environment. Emphasizing those types of benefits might be more effective in promoting adaptations that will increase the resilience of ranches in the face of environmental changes."