Slinkies of 2024

I felt like a Slinky a few times this past year.

My coils stretched and stretched until they might never spring back.

Sometimes they became a mass of tangles.

I spent a lot of time untangling so I could stretch again.

I watched my ranching industry and our world stretch and tangle, too.

I even started my Slinky down a couple of different stairsteps.

My daughter, Abby, left me an empty-nester when she moved to Houston for college.

I’m fine, but the house feels lonely now.

I’m considering strategies for filling the house with smiles again – get a roommate, move to my smaller house and rent out the bigger house or just let the antics of my psycho cat keep the house on edge.

I need to be able to leave the ranch for a few days at a time so I’m considering options for help.

Finding a person who fits well in my world stretches my Slinky coils into my panic zone.

This year found many of us who raise livestock still untangling our coils after prolonged drought.

While people who don’t walk the land every day might have forgotten the dust clouds and grasshoppers of the past four years, many ranchers are still either paying off their debt from buying $300-a-ton hay or rebuilding their herds after decimating them.

It’s hard to stretch toward new strategies that might help us build capacity and reduce the impacts of drought when we are still untangling the kinks in our coils.

Economists who sit in an office chair point to the helpful high cattle prices, but I don’t hear them mention the skyrocketing costs of pickups, repairs, mineral supplements, taxes and utilities.

High cattle prices alone won’t keep us in business. Only a positive difference between income and expenses will.

My neighbor, a solid rancher who has raised cattle his entire life, said he won’t make it through another dry year.

He’s not the only one.

So far, we have no snow on the ground or in the mountains.

In 2024, I found myself compressing my Slinky coils, avoiding aspects of society and markets that I can’t control.

I focused on a few narrow dilemmas and researching solutions that will work for me.

Now, I stretch toward those solutions, knowing I just can’t carry the whole world’s wars, natural disasters and pain in my individual Slinky.

Also, I don’t have the clout to win within market systems that set me up for failure.

Commodity markets provide a profit margin for every middleman but neglect the cow-calf producer and the consumer.

Producers are told they can win at this no-win game if they become more efficient.

Bigger is better.

Only it isn’t.

Consumers suffer, too, with only the choice between cheap, processed food of unknown origins that make us sick or nutrient-dense, expensive food.

I’m too much of a control-freak to participate in a market that insists I conform to strategies that clearly don’t work for me.

I’ve been selling my beef and lamb directly to people who put it in their freezers for a long time.

My strategy won’t feed the entire world just as any single one-size-fits-all approach never works.

Our food industry needs many Slinkies and those Slinkies need to stretch toward solutions that work for each of us.

I’m developing new products and a production facility for my beef and lamb for 2025. I’ll have extra capacity so other ranchers will have the opportunity to develop their products, too.

Consumers will have more choices and producers will set their own margins.

Instead of recoiling against a system set up for our failure, we all can stretch our Slinkies toward rewards we create.

Cheers to the Slinkies of 2025.