Caretaking a Ranch

We often receive email and letters from our subscribers who are currently working as ranch caretakers. We also hear from many prospective subscribers who are considering caretaking a ranch property. Many of these people are motivated by the desire to live a life outside of suburbia and the corporate world. There is also an interest in learning how to live and survive on a ranch. Prospective ranch caretakers are eager to experience life on a ranch and acquire the skills needed to keep a ranch alive. While absentee ranch owners typically seek caretakers with some ranch experience, there are many ranch owners who are willing to work with and train prospective caretakers. In some cases, caretakers are needed to assist elderly owners to keep the ranch viable and save the land from development. Our subscribers who have successfully found positions as ranch caretakers tell us that they would not trade their new lifestyle for anything. I was thinking about ranch caretaking this week when I heard Neil Young's "Old Man" on the radio. Neil Young has said that, at the age of 24, he wrote "Old Man" about the caretaker who lived and worked on the ranch he purchased in Northern California: "This is a new song I wrote about a ranch. I live on a ranch in California. I just bought it a while ago from these two lawyers. And there was an old man living on it, I don't know if you have things like that here - foremen, on ranches. It's like an old caretaker, takes care of all the old cows, fences...so I wrote this song for him." Read a profile of one of our ranch caretaker subscribers at:
https://www.caretaker.org//main.php?smPID=DBS::PROFILE_HORTON