A Montana cattleman and his wife are giving away their $21.6 million ranch instead of selling it, a rare move as land prices climb and multigenerational ranches disappear across the West.
Dale and Janet Veseth, whose family has ranched in northwestern Montana’s Phillips County for generations, are donating their roughly 38,000-acre spread to the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, a rancher-founded nonprofit that works to keep land in cattle production.
The couple will continue to manage the ranch for the rest of their lives, with ownership transferring to the group later.
The organization says it is the largest recorded donation of a working ranch in Montana history.
For Dale Veseth, 63, the decision reflects the financial reality facing modern ranchers.
His family’s ties to the land run deep. His father ran cattle there. So did his grandfather.
Veseth has spent 35 years refining a rotational grazing system on the property, including using remote-controlled collars to move cattle up to 170 times a year across the ranch.
But rising land prices and outside buyers have reshaped the high northern plains, making it harder for family ranches to survive.
“For people to go out and pay $20 million to have an average job, that probably isn’t going to work,” Veseth told Cowboy State Daily.
“Land is just one aspect. You have cattle. You have equipment, you have labor,” he said. “And (everything) to make all these things go. We thought it was pretty hard to recruit the next generation of people who produced our food.”
The ranch’s footprint reflects decades of consolidation.
Veseth has said at least 76 homesteads are now incorporated into his deeded acres.
Including Bureau of Land Management grazing lands, he estimated roughly 100 families once worked the land that today supports just three.
“They all had dreams and interests,” he said.
The Ranchers Stewardship Alliance was formed in 2003 as ranchers pushed back against outside interests buying up land in northern Montana.
Angel DeVries, the group’s executive director, told Cowboy State Daily the organization formed when ranchers began speaking up to say they had long been “stewarding the land.”
RSA Communications Director Haylie Shipp described the group’s goal simply.
“What can we do for ranchers so that they never have to sell their ranches out of production agriculture?” he told the outlet.
Veseth said the donation is intended to create access for people without the means to buy land outright, as the average rancher is now about 60 and just 12 percent of full-time ranchers are under 35.
“RSA is going to have a forum,” Veseth said. “They will have an avenue for people that have spent their life on the land and want other people to have that opportunity, raise food and be the backbone of these rural local communities.”
“I’m extremely happy I’m a rancher,” he added. “I think I had one of the few opportunities that most people will never have.”
The post Montana rancher gives away $21.6M family cattle ranch rather than sell it off appeared first on New York Post.
