Ranchlands: Crossroads (Episode 1) | History

branching to me is everything I come from a long line of ranchers and very proud of that and preserving our culture and our heritage is vastly important but we have to survive at the same time so how do you balance those two things we going to learn and evolve with the times and with the changes that are coming nice job guys my name is Duke Phillips I managed ranchlands a ranch management company that manages to large scale properties in Colorado one of which is the Chico Basin ranch outside of Colorado Springs which is primarily a cattle operation and the Mendes Potter ranch outside of Alamosa Colorado owned by the Nature Conservancy we just home to one of the largest bison conservation hers the United States our mission with the Chico basin and the men Espada ranch is running a branch that's ecologically and economically sustainable I have an incredible team working on both ranches my eldest daughter tests and her brother Duke we're now working in the business my name is Duke Phillips fourth named after my great-grandfather and with ranch lands I oversee kind of everything on the ground operations in the agriculture the public my name is Tess I am Dukes oldest daughter I run the lodge it's pata and do business development for ranch lands working in a family business has been a great experience and I think that's so because we are all very different and also because the business is flexible enough that we can all kind of have our own niche we all really trust each other in that way and we feel very lucky to have that yeah our business is completely manipulated by the seasons each one of those seasons has a very particular thing that we do those seasonally we start with our calving where the calves are born that starts about 1st of April once those calves are old enough we move on to our branding season the time of year when we're bringing the calves in and physically branding them with a permanent mark to show ownership Randy cattle has always been something that ranchers do collaboratively it's an annual thing and your neighbors come over and you're doing something and your ancestors has done for decades fall is a time when we bring an entire Buffalo herd and to harvest the animals that we're going to sell for cash flow and try and conservative stocking race so they don't grow beyond what the land can support we have is we sell animals so you have to have a large enough body to select enough out of that to provide the income that we need in order to survive for another year we manage the menos spotter ranch and a one-of-a-kind partnership with the Nature Conservancy the world's largest conservation organization to try to create a model for managing large-scale ranches in American West that balances ecology economics and ranching traditions my name is brett off i'm the ranch manager here that no zapata i've been here two months now i was pretty nervous at first you know i came from a 2,000 acre ranch in kansas as just a hired hand basically to the manager of a hundred and three thousand acre buffalo ranch I turned down a lot of stuff just because I knew there was a better way to do things and I think I found a good balance here working for the Phillips and Rachel Innes ranch hands began when we moved on to the Chico Basin ranch in 1999 with our young family when we moved to Chico Basin we had lived on a neighboring ranch and we used to drive to the back of the property and Duke would point to a little mulberry tree and he said that ranch with the tree is 87,000 acres and someday we're going to live in a place like that and I have to say that I didn't really believe him but within a couple years we were not just on a big ranch we were on that ranch I had worked on ranches many states and different countries and had worked for other people and all of a sudden to have my own place that was same size as the ranch I was raised on was like the dream that I had fantasized about had become true I grew up in a family that did nothing but ranching my grandfather owned ranches and those ranches captured my father's interest and imagination and made him decide that he was going to spend his entire life as a rancher so he moved us to Mexico to a ranch it was five hours from theirs town where we live we had community of people at babies that were born on the ranch people that died on the ranch so it was a very self-sufficient part of the world that doesn't exist anymore Duke's passion comes from being born into what he does now he grew up in a community of ranching people that cared deeply about the land and the animals and being able to provide for themselves the passion just comes from it being so close to his heart a big part of United States that is occupied by Ranchers they managed land is difficult to manage if you're not living on it I think ranching as a way of life and as a livelihood has been at a crossroads we have to try to maintain some of the heritage and traditions that made us who we are yet at the same time balance that with new ideas new relationships with non-traditional partners some of the new ideas are radically different than the way things have been done and I think that we need to be open to those kinds of things in order to move ahead and do a better job at managing the land you have to be open to change in the world is ever changing and this industry is not like what it was 20 years ago even it's really a dying industry literally in the sense that the families that have been in it forever are either being out priced and kicked out of the business or you know just can't sustain it any longer and it's really depending on 10 of the new generation to continue everybody talks about passing the family ranch on the next generation and ranching is at a crossroads and if we as a ranching community don't learn to think long term we're not going to survive as ranchers we're going to have to figure out how to fit into tomorrow's world this is the only thing that we know and that's what drives us this makes us get up in morning I see myself as a rancher part of the land the last Berlin

Channel: HISTORY

Views: 601,918

Rating: 4.9072504 out of 5

Keywords: full episodes, episodes, clips, original series, sneak peeks, history, history channel, history shows, history channel shows, ranchlands, watch ranchlands, ranching, herding, cattle, branding, bison, duke phillips, san luis valley, colorado, new series, digital series, cows, oxen, ranch life, ranch, cowboys, rodeo, bulls, horns, herds, ranch lands, ranchland, wrangling, new life, lifetstyle, west, western, culture

Id: uXcV6H9DM_g

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Fri May 13 2016