Jim and Cindy Kittredge have a herd of Highland cows of Scottish ancestry. (From the current issue of “Montana Outdoors.” Photo by John Warner.
[Note: I wrote this piece in 2012…and it goes a long way to explaining why we decided to place our family ranch in a conservation easement. The land, like art and our cultural heritage, does more than produce a buck (pun intended). Its space feeds much more. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving…and the gratitude to my parents for what they worked so hard to preserve is boundless.]
Those of us working on the land are an important part of our nation’s sense of collective well-being and sense of happiness. In 2010, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being score for the nation was 66.8. If we were back in middle school, that would be a solid “D”!
Could there be a tie between our collective unhappiness and how we measure our nation’s progress? Perhaps there is more to measure that just economic growth. Colwood, a Canadian town, has created another index based on five types of capital assets that as a whole form real wealth:
• Human wealth.
People form human wealth. The health of our population is dependent on farmers and ranchers producing healthy food and cultivating healthy lifestyles by the preservation of open space.
• Social wealth.
Relationships form the basis of social wealth. Studies have shown that individuals tied to the land understand the systems surrounding them and the interconnectedness of their lives with their land and the lives of others.
• Natural wealth.
The nation’s environment determines its natural wealth. Ranches, like Bird Creek Ranch, that strive for a balance between the wild and working landscapes help to build natural wealth.
• Manufactured wealth.
The state of a nation’s infrastructure is a measure of its manufactured
wealth. The nation’s farms and ranches form a part of the country’s infrastructure, no less important than a healthy transportation system.
• Financial wealth.
Financial wealth equals “money.” Farm and ranch income is important because it is not secondary, recycled money, but “new” or primary money that in its creation contributes substantially to national fiscal health. Although those of us on family farms and ranches are far from wealthy, we are rich in other ways.
The bottom line is that our nation’s farms and ranches are more than a mythical, romanticized existence. Nor are they the root cause of the nation’s problems. They are the core of our nation’s well-being.
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