Need Honest info about Wyoming

[sunsprit]

Originally Posted by krisand

does anyone know what they pay cowboys in wyoming?

depends a lot upon your skills and what type of operation you are working for.

we've several friends that are working cattle ranch foremen, some are feedlot managers, and their pay includes single family housing (some of it nice, some not), utilities, vehicles (pick-up trucks & ATV's), beef, and approx $3,000/month salary. Most have medical/dental insurance with some sort of worker contribution split. Not a lot of money for all the responsibility and time they must spend maintaining the facilities plus working with the cattle. It's easily 80+ hour weeks, especially when they're calving or moving cattle around the place, or have a run of predator problems, or some sickness running through the livestock that they must take care of.

Definitely a 24/7/365 job ... and all the outfits I know of don't hire enough people to do the work that they expect to be done. I know of one well-heeled outfit that ran their short-handed crew a couple of 100 hour weeks and didn't even say "thank you", let alone pay any bonus for all the effort ... our friend quit and moved his family from SE Wyoming to NW Wyoming to another beautiful (and very remote) ranch with a nice large house, the usual benefits ... and, after 8 months, let him (and her, she did bookwork for the ranch) go with no notice two months ago. The family that owns the place decided to discontinue cattle operations and were either going to sell their 20,000+ acres or turn it into an "executive retreat" tourist business. Our friends are still living in the house, but haven't yet found another cattle ranch job and have been stuck without an income to relocate ... with two children still at home being uprooted in the middle of their high school year. He's a lifelong pro cattleman (and his wife grew up in a cattle ranching family) ... and he hasn't found another job with a living wage right now in the region.

Others work on "dude" ranches, where they run cattle but also entertain paying "guests" for much of the year, so they get tips from the guests, and the jobs where they have more contact with the guests (horsemanship instruction, trail riding, fishing guide, etc.) allow them to greatly supplement their income. Some of the outfits put all the tips into a common fund and the guys split the money at the end of each week.

The glamour of this work is one of it's biggest attractions ... for people who are genuinely "cattle people" ... but it's generally a lot of hard work and long hours for low pay. You really have to love doing this and the challenges to do it, even in these times of good cattle prices.

Most of the people I know who are "successful" in this business are family members of the ranch owners, and their "pay" is derived from the income of their cattle sales, backgrounding, etc. "Hired help" is a luxury for them, and they try to do as much of the ranch work as possible with only family members. It's a risky business for many, as there as so many variables as to climate/forage/feed each year, breeding stock quality, weight gains, market pricing, shipping costs, "shrinkage" at the point of sale, etc. Many cattle and ranch owners ... full time pro's ... work other jobs off the ranch to pay for their cattle habit, or simply accept the huge swings in net income from year to year from the cattle business as a fact of life.

The best listings of regional job openings seems to be in "The Fence Post", or some of the regional ranching newspapers. If you are new to this line of work, there's not a lot of entry level jobs ... and those that show up don't pay much money.

[krisand]

thanks...my husband is a florida cowboy has been doing it all his life.we were talking the other night and he said he would like to go to wyoming nd work.thanks for the info......

[sunsprit]

Originally Posted by krisand

thanks...my husband is a florida cowboy has been doing it all his life.we were talking the other night and he said he would like to go to wyoming nd work.thanks for the info......

What makes Wyoming cattle ranching so much more daunting of a proposition than FL ranching? On average, it takes 100-110 acres per cow/calf unit here for year round support.

For somebody to run enough cattle in Wyoming to be a profitable operation on it's own merits requires a lot of land, typically deeded and with inexpensive leased ground to supplement that (BLM, state school sections, etc). Unless an operation inheirited a large parcel which has been paid for many years ago, the value of land here far exceeds it's productive capacity in ranching or farming.

I looked at a couple of regional ranches, and figured out that the cattle grazing value of the land was about $100/acre at the time when the land was asked at $1,500. The land is still for sale, but now it's around $2,000/acre.

We added some adjacent land to our ranch last year at $3,000/acre. Far in excess of it's productive capacity for our sheep operation, it had been heavily overgrazed the previous 6 years with too many cattle. It will take us years to recover this ground, but it wasn't optional to buy the land when it came up for sale as it sat directly adjacent to our ranch headquarters, so we needed to buy it to prevent that from being developed right on our doorstep with roads/traffic cutting through a portion of our prime grazing land.

Another neighbor is selling two sections of cattle grazing land that's been in his family for over 100 years ... asked at $2,000 acre. It's such poor ground that they can only graze it for about 4-5 months in a typical year (with about 60 head), and then it's played out. They have no water rights on the land, just a couple of livestock windmill wells/tanks.

This all makes for a much different business for cattle than down South, where the land is much more productive per acre. There's a lot of fencing, infrastructure, and maintenance to keep the cattle fed, protected, and watered. A normal daily chore here in the colder months would be to check on all the water tanks on the property and chop out the ice, or make sure that the tank heaters are keeping the water thawed out ... if you've got the luxury of electrical power to a tank. Then, you're looking at keeping the fences up as the wind driven snow drifts can tear then down pretty quickly. Elk take down fences, too. Then there's the predator problem here ... coyotes can wreak havoc with your livestock, especially calves. Oh, and calving season is generally still cold weather for a lot of ranches ... so you're checking on the cows and assisting, bringing calves in to warm them up, and so forth. I'd expect that it's a whole different set of daily chores than what is done in a warmer climate with much higher density cattle population .... Of course, there's all the normal handling, feeding, vet'ing, transport, branding (or tagging), and so forth ....