03/03/08 Becoming a Cowboy!

Becoming a Cowboy. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. I spent my early years watching the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers. I wanted to be a cowboy but was a city kid so horses and coyotes were only on the tube. Now I'm a grown up, at least in age and I still want to be a cowboy. That's where Rocco Wachman comes in. He's the Senior Instructor at Arizona's Cowboy College. WACHMAN: You know we started the Arizona Cowboy College, it's just about 20 years ago and myself and my buddy Lloyd Bridwell started it to have a place where we could teach people a dying tradition. What we thought was to get a bunch of youngsters who didn't have a family background in ranching, somebody who wanted an option to learn stuff  a place where they could start and after 20 years and 2000 people it's kind of changed and it's kind of become a Mecca for men between the age of 35 and 52 of Fortune 500 CEO's mostly trying to get as far away from 2008 as possible. I guess that still gives me a couple of years! Wachman says the real interesting part is that half of all the students have been women. WACHMAN: And it's becoming like the French Foreign Legion. Girls need a sabbatical or good mind cleansing  get back to nature and horses and an Ag way of life, it really has changed. I want to go back to the age thing for a minute. WACHMAN: The average age of the working ranch cowboy in the United States right now is 58 and that's one of the reasons I'm so committed to letting so many people know about what we're doing because we've got to make that younger. There's a lot of lack of interest on youngsters part to do this kind of work. There's a lot of people who have done it who don't want their children to do it So I guess it's really about the younger generation, not us older 50ish guys. WACHMAN: I'm 52 and I can bury anybody I know so you are well within the range. Well then I guess I won't hang up my spurs just yet. But Wachman says this isn't a dude ranch experience. WACHMAN: The hardest thing is that everything is hard. You're with 5 other people you've never met before; you're in a strange environment. It's a 6 day course; we spend 2 days at the headquarters in a modest and rustic bunkhouse and then when we go to the ranch we spend 4 days sleeping on the ground with no running water or bathroom. So everything is difficult. The sleeping, the getting dressed, the riding, the messing with animals that some people might not be familiar with. At least Billy Crystal brought his coffee grinder! More tomorrow with Rocco on the Arizona Cowboy College. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.