My name is Duke Phillips III, founder of Ranchlands. Over the last year or so, I have been writing a letter every month which we have shared exclusively with members of the Ranchlands Collective. I wrote about the work we were doing on our ranches, like trailing cattle into the Wyoming Bighorn mountains over the summer season, or shared a poem, or provided updates on business developments within Ranchlands. Sometimes the letters were just a personal reflection, and other times, news from Ranchlands, but always connected in one way or another to ranching. 

Recently, we made the decision to share this monthly letter  – The Saddlehouse – more broadly, with all the thousands of members of our Ranchlands community, in order that you might have a deeper perspective and awareness of what is happening behind the scenes at Ranchlands. This shift mirrored a change we made to the Ranchlands Collective, which has been redesigned as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) and will now fund education and conservation programs that connect people to the land.

There is such a wide spectrum of familiarity with Ranchlands among our audience. Some of you may have visited our ranches as a guest multiple times, getting to know our family and our staff, while others may have only purchased something from our online store, or followed us on social media. So my intent in this letter is to provide a fundamental description of what we are about, with the hope that it might inspire you to join us in the Ranchlands Collective to support our mission to connect people to the land through ranching. However, because we see The Collective as an important outgrowth of Ranchlands, I think I should provide you with a brief description of Ranchlands first.

Over the last twenty-five years, Ranchlands has grown as a cattle grazing business operating ranches in five states and as a diversified business running multiple land-based businesses. We offer guest stays, workshops, host potlucks and field days, sell handcrafted leather goods, and have created programs in hunting, fishing, concerts, art shows, and education. Although stewarding the land that is our home and workplace is important to our family and critical to our wellbeing as a business, it also has vital implications to all of us who must live in harmony with the earth to survive. 

We believe that the careful stewardship of large landscapes that ranching provides is a critically important service. And the Collective is our attempt to foster an exchange of knowledge and awareness about this role by joining with the large number of people we have come to know over the last 25 years. As a member of this growing community, you are an important arm of Ranchlands, whether you’ve been a guest on one of our ranches, a customer from the Mercantile, or a reader of The Ranchlands Review. We hope that many of you will consider supporting this newest venture, the Ranchlands Collective nonprofit.

In addition to supporting our cause of education and conservation, being a member of The Collective is also an invitation for you to join us and help map the way into the future by sharing your thoughts and ideas. In many ways, we are inviting you into our home: the ranches that we manage and our work which goes beyond our border fences. For more information about The Collective, or to make a donation, please follow this link. Anything that you choose to donate is tax deductible. 

We hope that you enjoy these monthly letters from The Saddlehouse, and the additional information and stories that we will be sharing with you. We also hope to meet you in person some day on one of the ranches, if we haven’t already. Please write to us and share your thoughts and questions: what you would like to see in addition to what we are already doing, stories, information, anything you care to share. We look forward to hearing from you.