Real Rancher Weighs In: Is Yellowstone's Depiction of Ranch Life Accurate or Hollywood Flash?
THERE'S A LOT on Yellowstone that’s absolutely not realistic, from murder pits to Beth’s whole general vibe, but where the actual act of ranching is concerned, the show actually seems to care if it gets things right. Co-creator/showrunner Taylor Sheridan has never been shy from including tributes to the cowboying lifestyle into the show, whether it’s panoramic shots of cattle drives at dawn or a recent look inside an old-timer’s legendary spur workshop. If the show is to be believed, cowboys like those that work on the Dutton Ranch are some of the last true heroes, spending their lives doing thankless work just to get food to our tables.
But how true does Yellowstone ring to an actual Montana cowboy? Matt Pierson, a fifth-generation rancher out of Livingston, says that while the show’s bombast can be a bit much, its commitment to family and hyper-focus on hyper-masculinity are very real in his community. Being a rancher, he says, has traditionally required the type of 'shut up and keep working' attitude you might see from Rip or Lloyd on-screen, but it can take a toll on the mental health of workers.
'There’s a part of our job that’s always going to be a little bit harder than any other job out there, and it does weigh on people,' Pierson says. 'Nobody ever talks about it, but it’s hard on people – and especially on the older generation.'
While the idea that you have to shoot a horse that breaks a leg on a trail ride or in the field might seem like a TV trope when you spot it on Yellowstone, Pierson says that’s very real, because no rancher or farmer ever wants to see an animal suffer. 'We have to do what’s right by the animal, and letting it suffer isn’t something that any cowboy worth a shit would do,' he explains.
But cowboys also can’t take bereavement days after they’re forced to put their equine best friends down, or even call off sick. (Pierson says he can count on one hand how many times he’s done that over the course of his career.) 'We still have to get up and go to work,' he says. 'Our animals and our people are relying on us to get out of bed, no matter what.'
There’s more from Pierson below, including his thoughts about why ranchers are the ultimate environmentalists, how his life compares to the Duttons, and whether he thinks America’s cowboys are really on their way out.
MEN’S HEALTH: How did you get into ranching?
MATT PIERSON: Our family came into Montana in roughly about 1892 and started ranching near Hobbes. They were up there for a whole generation, but some of the family was still back in Minnesota. That’s where my dad’s dad was, working for the Farmhand Equipment company. He actually built the first front-end loader and then sold that patent to Farmhand, so when he retired from working there in 1960, he was able to buy a ranch out here in Livingston. They brought the equipment and the cows down from the Hobbes ranch to Livingston, and we’ve been here ever since.
MH: How big is your ranch now and many cows do you actually have?
MP: Well, I’ll go ahead and tell you, but historically speaking, that’s not something agriculture people will tell you. They’re very close to the vest about what they own, what they run on, and how many cows they have. That can be quite silly at times, because for things like the Beef Checkoff program, we all pay $1 per animal that we sell so it’s not hard to find out what anyone has.
That being said, we operate on about 12,000 acres and depending on the year and a lot of other different circumstances, we run anywhere from 800 to 1,200 cows at a time.
MH: What does Yellowstone get wrong about cowboy life? Admittedly, it's a drama, so we have to allow them a little leniency because they're trying to make something we’ll all watch.
MP: Right. Nobody wants to see the grunt portion of what we do.
I think Yellowstone over glamorises the lifestyle, like the housing and the helicopters and all of that kind of stuff. You never see the stress that comes with the job. Most people in ag, farmers, ranchers… Most of the time they're dealing with huge amounts of debt. Very few, if any, producers ever operate without debt. It's just part of the business structure of what we do. So you’re dealing with your accountant, with banks, and your cash flow all the time. You never see any of that on Yellowstone, which I get. Nobody's going to want to see me going in and chatting with the banker because I’m trying to make sure we have enough money to operate.
We get paid once, maybe twice, a year, and so our accounting is much different from everybody else. We're supposed to operate everything we do on that money, and a lot of times we'll get a good six months into our fiscal year without knowing what we're going to make. We have no idea. We know what we want to make. We know what we hope we can make, and we continue to do what we need to do without really knowing what we're going to get paid. It's a very high stress career.
I always say ranchers should be in Gamblers Anonymous, though it's not like you walk up to a table and make a bet and instantly know what happens. You walk up, make a bet, and maybe six or 12 months later, you get to see how it went.
The average American sees somebody that owns a bunch of land, and they automatically assume they're a wealthy person. And yes, we have wealthy ranchers. We have people that own ranches that made their money elsewhere. But the true core of agriculture in the United States are those family operated businesses.
They do at least have that part right in Yellowstone, with all the infighting among the family. We see plenty of that, which I think comes from the job being so stressful all the time. We have to take care of these animals as if they're our own because that's how we make a living, and to do that there's such a vast knowledge base we have to know to be able to do our job, from animal health to agronomy to accounting to business to whatever else. It makes for a real challenge.
MH: And so much of it has to depend on outside sources too. You might think you can have 500 cows, but then the price of grain might go up in six months or the cost of beef might go down, and then you’re over a barrel.
MP: We have to deal with the environment more than anybody. If we have a really bad drought, what's our contingency plan? What are we going to do to maintain water for the animals or to make sure the grass can survive and come back next year?
We used to have a bumper sticker in our window at our office that said “Ranchers: The Original Environmentalists,” and it's true, because if we don't protect the land we're on, then we aren't going to have a way to make our living. People think we're just taking from the land all the time, and that couldn't be farther from the truth. If you want to leave something for your kids, for your grandkids to be able to operate on, then you have to manage it properly. You don't get to say, 'we're just going to go ahead and overgraze,' or 'we're going to under fertilise or over fertilise' or do whatever the heck we want. It doesn't work that way.
Even when we go skiing or on vacation, your mind is always back home. Did it snow? Is it really cold? How are the cows doing? How are the crops doing? Are we going to get enough rain? Did I keep enough feed for the cows for the winter? Is some celebrity going to bad mouth beef and then our industry will just go into freefall for two days? It's amazing the number of influences there are on our everyday lives that most people don't understand.
MH: The family drama piece of what you said is interesting, because it does seem like the isolation and stress would cause people to say 'Well, is my brother making the right choice?' or even 'Why is my brother in charge? Why am I not in charge?'
MP: And on top of all that, there are times of the year when we'll average well over 80 hours a week at work. I've had summers I've tracked well over 100 hours not just in one week, but week after week after week. Add that in along with just being family, and we're always harder on family than we are anyone else.
It's no wonder that, among farmers, the suicide rate is so high. It’s a tough job. We see the same kind of thing in the military, with the under-appreciation of it all, but you add in the debt, the family stress, the work hours, the unknowns of it all, and it can be a lot.
MH: How many people are working on your ranch at any given time?
MP: On average, about three people, and then our youngest son is going to the University of Wyoming and he comes home and helps out in the summer. If you go back, say 20 to 25 years ago, that number would almost double, though. Technology has absolutely changed and has helped us a lot, but our profit margins have dropped so much that it's hard to have extra people around. So we just do more with less – we don't really have a choice.
MH: They have a lot more hands on Yellowstone, it would seem.
MP: They have a ridiculous number, and that's not to say there aren’t ranches like that. I know ranches that have a cookhouse and where all the guys live together, but most of them are much more like us, where you have a few houses that are spread out with families that live in them.
MH: Yellowstone has always been fairly vocal about how, in its view, cowboys as we know them won’t be around in 30 years. Do you believe that?
MP: It’s definitely starting to die off, but part of the reason is because we have fewer and fewer people doing it. We need to do more with fewer people all the time, in part because of technology.
I'll give you a great example: We have a 25 acre field that we planted with alfalfa and we generally do three passes in the fall and then tackle it again in the spring after everything falls out. That reminds me: They definitely don’t show the winter up here enough on Yellowstone.
Anyway, historically, that would have been four or five days worth of work but this year, between myself and one other guy, we did it in 26 hours. We just ran around the clock and got it done, which we can do because we have the technology. The tractor has GPS, it has auto-steer, and it has really nice lights so we can see what we're doing.
In 2023, the United States had the fewest number of cows we've had since about 1960. On the other side, though, we produced more beef than we ever have in the history of the United States. Honestly, we're working ourselves out of a job because we're getting better at it all the time. We're very proud of being more efficient, that we're doing more with less, but it's also kind of like, 'Dang, we're so damn good at it that people don't even realise how good we are.'
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