Savanah McCarty was not riding across the wide-open prairie when a horse accident nearly killed her.
She was in the driveway of her leased farm outside Bozeman, Montana, waiting for a student’s mother to arrive, when her horse seized and flipped over backwards, landing on top of her.
The horse, it turned out, had a neurological disorder linked to possum urine. McCarty never imagined it could cause this.
“It was an absolute freak accident,” she says. “I thought I was fine because nothing was visibly bleeding, but the EMTs called in Life Flight [emergency helicopter transport] because I was showing signs of a brain bleed.”
After her transfer to Billings, McCarty underwent emergency brain surgery and entered a coma. A week later, she woke up.
She began sharing her recovery on Instagram, writing about the pain, the strain on her business, and her mounting medical debt. (She was uninsured; a Life Flight bill alone can reach $50,000.) She was also reeling from a miscarriage that had begun a week before the accident and was still occurring throughout her emergency treatment.
These are not the traditional struggles of a textbook Marlboro cowboy. They are the challenges modern women across industries face – high costs of living, healthcare gaps, reproductive loss – only layered with an extreme wild west twist.
With her non-profit background and outspoken feminism, McCarty has built an online following around a grittier version of cowgirl life – one that makes no money, but defies the male-centered cliches of Yellowstone.
If those stereotypes still hold sway, it may not be for long. The gender ratio of ranching and agriculture in the US is changing. With more women entering the field and more men leaving it, as data from the US Department of Agriculture’s 2022 census shows, women now account for more than 36% of all producers in the US. Male producers have steadily decreased since 2007, while the number of women has increased with every survey since 2002.
With that shift in gender demographics comes a reimagined definition of what it means to be a rancher in the west – and a good one at that. Beyond the core components of responsible land stewardship and animal husbandry practices, an emphasis on mental health, economic empowerment, and mentorship is replacing the emotional suppression and rugged individualism of old western lore.
This newer version of the ranching lifestyle is just as demanding and dangerous. But many women feel it is exactly where they belong.
“This is the hardest I’ve ever lived,” McCarty says. “I stack a ton of hay a week by myself. I’m constantly fixing fences. I do all the housework. Yes, I really wish I had a partner. I still long to be soft and nurturing … but this is all worth it for me.”
‘You have to get back in the saddle’
Even nine months after the last episode aired, Yellowstone still reverberates throughout global pop culture. You could not throw a lit Marlboro Red at a Banff skijoring weekend without hitting a multimillionaire in Lucchese boots and a Pendleton coat. Everyone wants to dress, drink and party like a Dutton. If they can do so without stepping in cowpies, all the better.
Cowgirl culture has risen through more female-centric avenues, as well. From Beyonce’s custom Cowboy Carter Shiaparelli look – a tribute to the long history of Black cowboy culture – to Shania Twain’s latest tour get-ups, these women of extreme social and financial power are wielding it like a pair of pearl-handled six-shooters.
But this pop culture persona remains an incredibly far cry from the realities on the ground, something that McCarty points out in a reel that went viral shortly after her accident.
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In it, a glammed-out Instagram influencer in leather shorts, a glittering halter top, and knee-high boots primps and preens behind the caption “getting ready to go feed the cows and some horses”.
Then appears a clean-faced McCarty in a T-shirt, sweatpants and a messy bun, leaning on a shovel, looking tired. The contrast makes the point: the glamorized cowgirl fantasy is nothing like the reality.
For McCarty, reality was brutal: if she did not return to work quickly, she faced financial ruin. Just three months after surgery – nine months earlier than doctors advised – she was back-breaking colts.
“I didn’t have a year,” she says. “Should I have gone back that soon? Absolutely not. But I was pushed to the brink of ‘you have to get back in the saddle or you’re going to be homeless.’ I didn’t have any choice.”
McCarty’s social media platform grew rapidly throughout this time. The more unfiltered content she shared from her cowgirl-dream-turned-nightmare, the more followers followed, many of them offering words of support and encouragement.
Then, in the midst of her recovery, McCarty ran into trouble with her landlord and received an unlawful eviction notice. Suddenly, she had to relocate her life and business – including all her clients’ horses – in a region where agricultural leases are scarce. Gallatin county alone lost 44,600 acres (18,050 hectares) of farmland and 114 farms between 2017 and 2022, much of it to housing developments.
Now, McCarty sits on the porch of her prairie farmhouse in Broadwater county, Montana, with a half-shaved head, a new lease on a 200-acre property, a full pen of animals and a new personal brand: the Hellbitch Ranch, a play on a popular moniker for an ill-tempered mare. The name is a fierce nod to the freedom that comes with her choice of occupation.
“I want to inspire women to know that they don’t have to live in a box,” she says. “You can exist on your terms and have your dreams, rather than [fitting] society’s version of what a cowgirl or a rancher looks like, or the idea that you have to be born into ranching. I’m trying to push against all these lies that our culture tells us about who we have to be.”
‘I am a rancher, not a sidepiece’
Women are hardly a minority at the Redwing Ranch outside Gardiner, Colorado. Ranch manager Christy Wyckoff, programs coordinator Erin Sheridan, and ranch manager Fiona Jackson piled into the same camera frame to tune into a virtual meetup.
“It was never planned to be a majority-woman team, but that’s just how it worked out,” Wyckoff says. “We’re all pretty much first-generation ranchers who have come to the industry from very different paths. Because everyone is on the younger side and we don’t come with tons of history, we aren’t tied to paradigms.”
While Redwing’s ecology-informed livestock operation is at the core of their business model, their education program also provides everything from chainsaw classes for women and the LGBTQ+ community to co-ed stockmanship clinics, knife-making and silversmithing.
Sheridan and Jackson met as summer employees on a different cattle ranch. Neither come from ranching families, but they have taken to the lifestyle all the same – even if they occasionally run up against stereotypes.
Wyckoff points out how unusual it is not only for a ranch to have a female owner-operator, but for that woman to be unmarried. “People tend to assume that women on ranches are just ranch wives, and not working,” Sheridan says. “There’s also this sexualized element to women working in the field. I’ve had a lot of comments. ‘Wow, I can’t believe you’re wearing chainsaw chaps. Those look so good on you.’ No one says that to a man.”
“I am a rancher, and that is that,” Jackson chimes in. “This isn’t just a lifestyle. This is the work we do every single day. I am a rancher, not a sidepiece. This is my career.”
The trio speak highly of Redwing’s lone male employee, apprentice Gabe Chubb. Chubb spent four years in the Marines as an aircraft technician before seeking a hands-on ranching education at Redwing. Wyckoff, Jackson and Sheridan were instantly impressed by his impeccable work ethic and enthusiasm. But with their otherwise entirely female staff, Redwing remains a major outlier.
Wyckoff recalls how often eyebrows raise when she brings up Jackson. “It takes them a second to recognize that my ranch manager is a woman,” she says. “I don’t say outright that my ranch manager is a woman, because that’s not the conversation I want to have. The conversation I want to have is about how we’re running our livestock, and how we’re on our way to being a profitable operation, because of our great practices.”
By focusing heavily on landscape ecology in southern Colorado’s changing climate and learning to ranch for profit amid the economic uncertainty of the global food system, the Redwing team is working proof of how women can breathe fresh life into an industry that frequently frets over its own demise.
Few have a better grasp on the patriarchal myth of what a “real” rancher looks like than Amber Smith.
A lifelong horse girl from central Illinois, Smith now ranches 80 miles (129km) north of Miles City, Montana, with her husband and kids. She is also the executive director of Women In Ranching, a non-profit that unites female ranchers from across the country.
The topic of today’s meetup is horsemanship. One woman tunes in from her camper van, another from a busy morning of fencing repairs, others still from the Bay Area and Los Angeles.
Participants share stories about falling in love with horses both in infancy and later in life. Book recommendations on natural horsemanship and stockmanship light up the chat box. One participant remarks on the unique comfort of an all-female setting for these types of discussions. Her comment is a sign that Women In Ranching is accomplishing exactly what founders Elaine Patarini and Wendy Millet first set out to do in 2016.
“These young, first-generation ranching women were all saying, ‘I love ranching, I love agriculture, I’m deeply passionate about this industry, but if I don’t find some community, I don’t know if I can do this,’” Smith explains. “That inspired Elaine and Wendy to get some of these women together for a long weekend, just so they could meet someone to call and have a cup of coffee with when they’re struggling.”
In 2018, Smith attended her first gathering in San Mateo county. “I came home fired up,” Smith recalls. “Any educational thing I ever did was with all men. I wasn’t seeing women out on the landscape, participating in the way that I really enjoyed. I came into ranching through a love of horsemanship and the outdoors, so moving and sorting cattle and checking water was just an extension of that joy for me. I didn’t see that in anyone around me until I participated in an all-female gathering.”
But Smith was shocked to discover that even the most seasoned attendees felt out-of-place in their operations. Women admitted to being nervous about suggesting operational changes to their husbands, who seemed to have the final say in all ranch matters. They feared divorce and losing access to land. They felt imposter syndrome at every stage of their ranching careers.
Smith saw this as more than just a source of inequity for female ranchers. She also saw it as a roadblock to the industry’s continued success.
“Here we are in agriculture, bitching and moaning because nobody wants to come back to the family ranch, and all the ranches are getting sold to wealthy absentee landowners,” Smith says. “But half the population on these ranches, who want to be actively engaged, don’t see a pathway for themselves or feel isolated.”
‘We need everybody’
Ask anyone in agriculture about the industry’s greatest challenges and they will use some combination of words like “consolidation”, “buyouts”, and “the kids not coming home to take over the family farm”.
That is where Jessie Jarvis’s work comes in. A third-generation Idaho cattle rancher and entrepreneur, Jarvis launched an agricultural job board and networking platform called Of The West in January 2021. In 2023, she added Leaders Of The West, a podcast spotlighting the next generation of agricultural practitioners.
“Change is hard and scary,” Jarvis says. “I understand why people are not necessarily receptive to change. There’s a lot of volatility in it. But if we want to see agriculture into the future, and see real families at the root of those operations, we have to diversify ourselves and our operations in some ways.”
Jarvis, who has more than 50,000 Instagram followers, has used her social media platform to introduce a lot of outsiders, especially women, to “ranch life”. One of her favorite ways to draw them in is slipping style posts into her steady stream of horses, cows, crops, family and vast Idaho landscapes.
Jarvis likes to feel like she is reintroducing some of her followers to the origins of their food system, by showing ranchers doing right by their animals and landscapes. Ultimately, her goal is to create an environment of mutual respect and community across the industry. The only path forward is one with room for anyone who feels compelled to participate.
“We need everybody,” she says. “We are 2% of the population trying to feed everyone. Whether you’re conventional or organic, or you have 10 head of animals or 1000, it doesn’t matter. Everyone has a seat at the table.”