I grew up surrounded by cattle, irrigation ditches, and valley dust. The backdrop of my childhood—California’s San Joaquin Valley—didn’t feel romantic at the time. But as I got older and had kids of my own, I began to understand its quiet complexity. The people and places I knew were often misunderstood by those who only passed by cattle ranches at 70 miles an hour, windows up, air conditioning on.

This project is an attempt to go deeper. To see ranching not from afar, but from the saddle.

Almost everything I shot here was done while working cattle on horseback—doing my best to pull my weight while photographing in between. It’s part of a personal ethic: the more uncomfortable I am, the better the photos. That proximity shapes the images in this body of work. This is ranching from the inside out—sweat-level, dust-level, hoof-level.

Cattle have been part of California’s landscape for 500 years, stretching back to the Spanish missions. Some of the ranches I photographed trace their roots to the Gold Rush or even earlier. Today, most of California’s ranches are still family-run, with four or five generations working the same land. Ranchers now steward roughly 38 million acres across the state, balancing animal care with the fragile demands of the land.

These aren’t caricatures of cowboys. These are educators, conservationists, and businesspeople—people who read the land as closely as they do market forecasts. Working with legendary rancher John Lacey, I hope to tell a story not just of livestock but of legacy, labor, and land.

This work lives somewhere between memory and fieldwork. Between where I’m from and what I want my kids to understand. And yes, many of these photos were taken between the ears of a horse.