The Aunt Mary, a pasture in the central Sandhills, lies along the north fork of the headwaters of the Dismal River. Mary Crouch filed the Kinkaid patent in 1915, and her relative, George Swiggart (great-great-grandfather to Mary Ann, co-author of this chapter), took it off her hands when it was proved up. Since then, this parcel has been known as the “Aunt Mary” and has been run as one of the most distant winter pastures, receiving the older calves and their mothers after close monitoring at birth near the ranch house. It’s also one of the closest summer pastures, where grass-fattened yearlings amble from the low river ground up into choppy hills searching out swales of nutritious grama grasses, avoiding the coarse bunches of little bluestem dominating the dunes. The Aunt Mary is distinctive for being used in both seasons, but for different purposes.
Blue grama, hairy grama, and side-oats grama are species of grass belonging to the genus Bouteloua. They tend to be short in stature and high in nitrogen content. Ranchers call them “hard.” Hard is something you can depend on. Mary Ann’s rancher brother, one of the first ranchers Jay interviewed in our research, calls them grandma grasses and says things like, “It’s a good year for grandma grasses.”
Since 2018, the two of us have been putting our feet on the ground in the Sandhills, often in the Aunt Mary. Mary Ann, the biologist, shifts between recalling memories of her deep family history in this place, introducing family and neighbors to our team, and leading a small army of students and colleagues into the field to fly drones, take photos, and collect and identify species. This work paints a picture about patterns and variability from dune top to meadow. Jay, the ethnographer, benefits from Mary Ann’s relationships, spending time bumping around in trucks, hanging out at the squeeze chute, and sitting at kitchen tables recording the stories, thoughts, and concerns of ranching families. Family memories of haying, blizzards, droughts, bull sales, and calf weights are analyzed to locate patterned ways people talk about life in the Sandhills.
What bolsters our friendship and research collaboration is that we are both concerned with a singular question: What is the potential long-term stability of the Sandhills in the face of increased stress on natural and social systems?
It is a complicated question that neither of us can answer alone. Ecologically, winds, water, and time have shaped the Nebraska Sandhills into grass-covered upland dune
tops and lowland valleys where surface water gathers, creating wet meadows. The central North America climate enables a unique combination of plant cover, including both cool and warm season grasses. The interaction of soil type, topography, and weather makes understanding the ecology of this place quite difficult. Culturally, the people of the Sandhills are deeply connected to the land. It would be impossible to come to terms with who they are, what concerns them, and how they understand the past, present, or future without some sense for the local ecology and agricultural practice.
Early homesteaders tried and failed to grow crops, settling instead through mistakes, luck, and triumph on ranching as the most profitable and productive use
of the land. But cattle ranching here is not like cattle ranching anywhere else. Ecological evidence suggests that most residents have learned to coexist on the land in a way that minimizes ecological diminishment. “Go back” fields, still apparent on some level areas, date from failed attempts at farming by Kinkaid settlers. Apart from those areas, the Sandhills landscape is still largely dune after dune of grass-stabilized sand, interspersed with wet meadows brimming with groundwater. The proportion of non-native species remains low. Surviving in the Sandhills involves knowledge and practices developed with deference and humility by the people who live there.
Our impulse has been to meaningfully combine personal history, expertise in grasslands, and new research on the Aunt Mary with ethnographic observation and rancher interviews to try to understand the place, the people, and the deeply intertwined relationship between the two.
Mary Ann has worked in all kinds of grasslands: shortgrass steppe, desert grassland, tallgrass prairie, and mixed-grass prairie. In each, there is something that explains where and how much vegetation grows; often, this is water—the amount and timing of rainfall or even complex soil water dynamics like “root hydraulic lift.” In the tallgrass prairie, it often involves fire or nutrients like nitrogen or phosphorus and the rate that they cycle from dead grass to soil to plants and back, sometimes passing through herbivores first.
Ranchers have their own way of thinking about and talking through these things. Their knowledge of the land—knowing when, where, and how often to graze their cattle—is critical to maintaining the productivity of the land and their livelihoods.
Mary Ann emailed this story to Jay early on in our work:
I had 45 minutes until my next class, time to call my brother and tell him we were planning to visit the ranch to do field work. It is early October, and we start talking about the Aunt Mary. He has cows further east, in the “summer range,” and is thinking aloud about when to bring them back for the winter. September has been wet.
“The Grandma grasses are greening up again, even though they are warm-season. Maybe they should248
stay on summer range for a few more weeks. I just don’t know what to do,” he muses. “I’ve never seen a September like this, so wet, you know the water is coming up in the valleys earlier than ever. Those Grandma grasses head out, and you’d think they are done, but they are still growing. Plenty of forage, especially in the heavier soils, where the Grandma grasses grow.”
I have 5 minutes before class, but I want to be patient in letting him work out this puzzle, plus I am learning. I have never worked in a grassland with so many time- and landscape-based contingencies on forage. My academic colleagues don’t meander through stories about where and when the grass grows.
The next summer, a drought has set in, and Jay is speaking to a rancher in the bunkhouse, cold beers on the table and the recorder going. The rancher offers an assessment of the grass, along with his concern and desire to act:
I don’t like the way some of them pastures look. I feel kinda bad, kind of a drought. Feel like I need to do something. Cut down on numbers or do something.
Later that summer, while enjoying a little “windshield time,” a rancher explains to Jay the value of flying over the Sandhills:
It’s what you see. You learn to look and see how much sand there is, how much white there is when you’re looking down. It will not lie to you from the air, the grass won’t.
Our goal is to make a record and analyze as many instances of ranchers talking about ranching in the Sandhills as we can. We want to understand the local logic of things, how ranchers come to know what they know, how they think things work or don’t, and how people in the Sandhills make sense of who they are and what should be done. To do so is to describe the culture through communication, what gets said, and what is significant. More technically, this work describes a system of significant terms and meanings that have the potential to reveal beliefs about action, emotion, and identity. Grass is a symbol that, from the local point of view, requires constant monitoring; the health of the grass impacts how ranchers feel day to day and season to season; “taking care of your grass” defines a rancher’s purpose.
The hard part is learning something about cultural communication and then draw connections and develop insights with what we understand about precipitation, sandy soils, topography, and biodiversity. The goal is to make a record of a place that people revere, hold close to their hearts, worry about, want to protect, take ownership in, are moved by, have become attached to, or is part of them. It has a long natural history, and a relatively stable but not unproblematic human history. Questions about the future of the Sandhills are riddled with emotions and wonder, derived from diverse fields of knowledge and understandings of identity, and include the motivation to protect, even if the nature of protection is contested and nuanced. Key questions that motivate our research loom:
How does a rural place rich in groundwater, wind, and sun fare in an increasingly connected economy, where regional urban areas face dwindling freshwater supplies and increased demand for renewable energy?
How do family ranches survive in the face of “outside” capital? What is the impact of “absentee” landowners?
How does the advent of “lab grown” meat and the shift to more plant-based diets impact a region where production of beef cattle is likely the most sustainable use of the land? Can high quality, humanely raised, “grass-fed” meat find a market?
What are the implications of a changing climate and more extreme conditions in this fragile system?
It is necessary to learn from those whose knowledge of the Sandhills is based in looking carefully every day. Ranchers notice the slightest variations by recalling experience or oral histories. They communicate those changes to one another, are mindful of daily and seasonal impacts, and have the patience and humility to adapt to ecological forces they do not control. The future of the Sandhills largely depends on those who live there, as it has for 150 years. Sandhillers will be the first to notice the most subtle changes in climate and dune stability.
The people and this place are inextricably bound. Questions about the future of the Sandhills are largely dependent upon embracing and celebrating this bond as the foundation for finding answers.