TED MCDERMOTT

Public Service Journalism Team

LEE ENTERPRISES SPECIAL REPORT

Buddy Cheff's family has been raising cattle on a spectacular piece of the Montana land-scape for five generations -- about as long as the fictional Dutton clan, who are the center of the hit show "Yellowstone."

But Cheff isn't the head of a politically powerful -- and brutally ruthless -- family with a spread the size of Rhode Island.

He's a 36-year-old father and husband who runs a small herd of about 100 cattle on his 600-acre ranch south of Ronan, Montana.

Since taking over from his father nearly a decade ago, Cheff said he has "loved every second" of running his family's ranch.

But he "worries," he said, about his future in rapidly changing western Montana.

In part, that rapid change is a result of the show "Yellowstone" itself, Cheff said.

The contentious dynamic depicted on Paramount Network's series "Yellowstone" -- between ranchers who are trying to maintain their way of life and out-ofstaters who want to develop their agricultural land into new housing -- is a real struggle. And it has been hastened by the spotlight the popular show has shined on Montana, Cheff said.

"Everybody has seen 'Yellowstone,'" he said. "They want the Montana lifestyle."

And more than 50,000 of them have come to get it since the show debuted in 2018. Their arrival has driven up the cost of housing in Montana's cities and towns.

It also has increased the cost of agricultural land -- and made it more difficult for ranchers to access the wide-open spaces their cattle require.

"I try to budget all the time and think about purchasing more ground," Cheff said.

But that's a daunting prospect, as Montana's population has grown, bringing in newcomers and driving up the cost of land.

'Not as attractive today'

The romantic view of ranching portrayed in "Yellowstone" has contributed to a reordering of Montana's ranching landscape for the state's actual ranchers.

While Cheff is committed to making it work in the Flathead, some of his fellow ranchers have set out for greener -- or at least cheaper -- pastures in eastern Montana, said Monty Lesh, a Miles City real estate broker and rancher who also serves as the Montana Stockgrowers Association's Southeast District Director.

"In the last five years, we've seen more interest from people from western Montana that are experiencing a lot of population growth," Lesh said. "And they're considering moving to this area because they can sell out up there for a lot of money and come down here and buy something else."

But that intrastate migration has started to decline, according to Lesh, in part because the cycle of new arrivals ramping up land prices has spread to more areas of the state.

"That swap used to be fairly attractive," Lesh said. "It's not as attractive today because the land values here have increased from what they were like five years ago."

Those rising land prices in eastern Montana have combined with other economic forces that have undermined ranchers' bottom lines.

"The challenge has been the cost to operate," Lesh said. "I mean, it's been twofold. We had a rapid rise in interest rates, and most of agriculture is very capital-intensive -- you know, uses a lot of capital and leverage to operate and expand. And then the other thing is just general operating expenses: fuel, insurance, labor, parts. Everything is significantly higher than it was four or five years ago."

But while the economics of agriculture have changed in eastern Montana, Lesh said one constant has remained: People are trying to make a living off the land, despite the challenges.

'Locked up the land'

Some of the forces of change being felt by Montana ranchers have been gathering since well before "Yellowstone" aired its first episode.

Gilles Stockton, 78, has seen a lot change in the half-century he's spent raising cattle and sheep near the Fergus County town of Grass Range.

He takes a long -- and expansive -- view of ranching, informed by his experience working in livestock policy development in Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world.

Stockton said the "biggest change" to U.S. ranching occurred in the 1980s as a result of deregulation during the Reagan administration that led to consolidation and that squeezed profit margins for ranchers.

But in recent years, he's seen ranches consolidate, and he's seen them change hands.

"My newest neighbor," he said, "sold out from the Flathead region and bought the land right next to me. They're fine people. They're farmers and ranchers. ... They sort of ran away from the problems there in western Montana."

But Stockton, a district director with the Montana Cattleman's Association, isn't as enthused about everyone who has moved in.

To the north of his ranch, the American Prairie Reserve has amassed 138,000 acres of land and leased another 337,000 as it seeks to create one of the nation's largest nature reserves and a home for free-ranging buffalo.

To the south, Stockton's neighbors are the Texas-based billionaires Dan and Farris Wilks, who have long drawn the ire of locals for reducing public access to their vast landholdings in the West.

Count Stockton among those who resent how the Wilks brothers have handled their massive, 200,000-acre N Bar Ranch since buying it.

"They've essentially locked up the land and manage it for elk hunting for themselves and their rich buddies," Stockton said. "Well, the overpopulation of their elk spills over into my land. But immediately after hunting season starts, all the elk retreat to the N Bar Ranch, and nobody, nobody can have access to them."

Efforts to reach a representative of Wilks Ranch for comment were unsuccessful, but the Wilks Ranch website touts its network of ranch holdings as "a top-of-the line cattle operation."

Stockton, who is "pretty much retired" himself, said he's not sure if ranching can survive the change he's seeing around Grass Range.

"Without major policy change, I think it's going to be a continual movement towards outsiders buying this country for recreational purposes," Stockton said.

'Hard to comprehend'

Jake Korell has been in the real estate industry for 56 years, but he said the demand for Montana's agricultural land from outof-staters doesn't "make much sense," even to him.

"These prices are just hard to comprehend, for me, that people will pay that kind of money for this grassland out here," Korell said. "I don't get it, but it's selling."

And the typical Montana rancher has a hard time competing in a market like that, Korell said.

In one case, he said, he had some graze land priced at $1,200 an acre. He said two neighbors made offers below the asking price, at a cost they could make back running cattle.

"And the seller said, 'I'm not selling for that price,'" Korell said. "So there you go. Yeah, they're interested, but they're priced out. ... If it costs you a million dollars to add on to run another 40, 30 cows ... Does that work? No, it doesn't work."

But it does work for ultra-wealthy, out-of-state, cash buyers who are looking to "park their money in dirt," instead of in a bank -- and who also get a piece of prime recreation land out of the deal, he said.

"Now, somebody back East that's got a $300, $400 million portfolio, that's peanuts," Korell said of ranches that are out of reach to locals.

John Fahlgren said he sees the same thing in Valley County, where he is a county commissioner and rancher and where many ranch buyers aren't relying on the property to produce any income. "They have the money to buy it outright and then rent it out, hold on to it, or maybe use it to come and hunt on it and that sort of thing," said Fahlgren, a district director with the Montana Cattleman's Association. "So (there's) a lot of pressure on the price of land because of some of that outsideof-the-area money that comes in to join the glory of the 'Yellowstone' reality, so to speak."

'Rethink the economics'

Wally Congdon's family has deep roots in Montana's ranching community -- and a lot of experience trying to adjust to the pressures that community has faced.

Three decades ago, his family gave up land along the Clark Fork River's Alberton Gorge and near Arlee, north of Missoula, and moved to Dell, in a remote area of southwestern Montana.

So he knows firsthand what it's like to try to outrun the forces of change.

"What we didn't count on when we did that was who our neighbors became," Congdon said of his family's move to Dell. "Paul Allen, Joachim Kepin, Peggy Rockefeller, Hewlett Packard, Remington Arms, British Petroleum. Want me to keep going?"

Congdon has since pulled up stakes again, moving his operation back closer to the Clark Fork and Missoula.

But he hasn't been able to escape the specter of development. One of his hay meadows, he said, was recently "graded, bulldozed and leveled."

"It is no longer a meadow," he said. "It's all houses."

Congdon, a district director with the Montana Cattleman's Association, laments all the pressure placed "on the customs, culture, history and heritage of the West, of agriculture."

For it to survive, he said, "We have to kind of rethink the economics of what that is and do it."

'Cattle numbers are way down'

More than 2.6 million cows roamed Montana in 2017. This year, the count was down by nearly a fifth, to some 2.1 million head.

Joel Schumacher, a Montana State University extension specialist, said the drought conditions in 2021 and 2022 were the cause of this drop.

With less precipitation, he said, there was "very little grass for forage and very low hay production, which meant the hay that was available was quite expensive."

"One of the main tools that farmers had was simply to sell down the size of their herd to match the amount of forage that they had available," Schumacher said. "So that's really what you saw."

With fewer cows available for sale, their price has shot up -- and those strong prices, Schumacher said, "may be limiting how quickly herds are being rebuilt."

Nick Courville, who works a day job as an animal nutrition consultant and who operates a small ranch in Charlo, Montana, is among the producers who have taken advantage of strong cattle prices.

This fall, he sold half his herd because there's a "cash incentive right now" to do so, said Courville, who chairs the Montana Farm Bureau Federation's Young Farmer and Rancher Committee.

He'd like to build his herd back up, Courville said, but that's hard, in part because of what he calls the "'Yellowstone effect.'"

While Courville says there are "far-fetched" elements to the show, he argues that it "put some light on some actual, real problems that we have."

"The battle between neighbors, I think, sometimes could be real," he said. "The battle for land and people owning that agricultural landscape. The pretty views that we have, the clean water that comes with it, the beautiful tall grass that's waving in the wind.

"I mean, they want to buy it because they like that. And then they put a house on every 40 that we used to run cows on."