Ryan Lankford hasn’t just seen failure. He’s lived it.
“My father definitely tried to discourage me from farming, because it wasn’t good,” he says. “I mean, we went broke.”
“We grew up relatively poor,” he says. “We leased all of our land.”
The Lankford family had an allotment on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, the 1,014 square mile land shared by the A’aninin and Nakoda Tribes in north-central Montana.
Lankford compares the arrangement to the Homestead Act. But, it was designed for failure.
“The hard part for us as Indians is that the title was held in trust by the federal government, meaning that we really couldn’t borrow off of that title,” he says. “We had no leverage for capital, no leverage to expand and so it really limited us on resources and what we could do with our land.”
But as an Army veteran, Lankford knows how to launch an offensive. When he came back to the farm to make it his life, he did so with a mission – use every tool at his disposal to protect his farm, his Tribe and his family’s future.
Fighting for Land Ownership
As a member of the Tribe’s Agricultural Expert Committee, Ryan has helped to chip away at the generational curse of Tribal land ownership.
“Now, our Tribe owns the land, and our ground goes out to bid first to the primary members of the tribe,” he says. “As a member I live here on my allotment, and I have the first right to go bid and negotiate with my Tribe without competition from the outside.”
Under the new arrangement, Lankford and his father have brokered nearly 10,000 acres.
“I was the first generation in my family to buy land,” he says. “That’s something I’m really proud of.”
He’s also tackling another land issue – how to manage absentee land ownership.
“There’s a lot of farm ground that’s being abandoned on our reservation, because it’s too hard financially to farm here,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of the same tools you do on the other side.”
His goal is to recover some of that abandoned and neglected land and seed it in native pasture ground in an effort to restore prairie lands to the region.
Fighting for Land Stewardship
He’s already managing diversified production on 10,000 acres, where he has a Red Angus herd of cattle and grows year-round wheat, canola, peas, lentils, chickpeas, flax and barley. He’s transitioned some of his acreage to Certified Organic to capitalize on the premium market.
His relationship with conservation on the land is intensely pragmatic. Lankford views it as another tool in his arsenal – one that helps him de-risk innovation and protect his bottom line.
“On the conservation side, what we try to do is make sure that we’re doing the best economically we can, because if we run out of money, we don’t get to play the game,” he says. “We can’t do a lot of the big experiences and trials, so we try practices out one at a time, like we might take a half section and do it and see what it works out.”
“And I think that’s our conservation journey -- seeing what works and what we can utilize on our farm.”
One lever that he’s used to accomplish that pragmatism is funding and technical assistance from USDA-NRCS.
In states like Montana, USDA-NRCS deploys Tribal Conservationists to tackle the unique land and management issues that tribes face.
Michael Kinsey, one of those tribal conservationists for Lankford’s area, uses his expertise to match a producer’s unique conservation goals to both funding and technical assistance opportunities within the federal agency.
“Like any big goal, there are several small steps that need to be taken to reach planned conservation outcomes,” said Kinsey. “We can help interested producers get started with smaller projects to test technology, different management strategies, incorporate traditional ecological knowledge and new conservation practices while building on what they already do.”
For Lankford, that looked like using the popular Conservation Stewardship Program to gain access to both guidance and funding to innovate use of existing technology. It wasn’t a silver bullet, but it was incentive enough for him to take the leap.
“We did variable rate fertilizer through the CSP, and it didn’t cover my cost of buying the tractor and buying the drill that did variable rate, but it gave me the motivation to expand our existing technology,” he says. “We did that on probably about 15% of our acres, and they helped me write a prescription.”
Fighting for Security
Lankford has seen what happens when there is no safety net for farmers. In 2024, he took national steps to start breaking down the barrier that agriculture’s intense amount of risk poses. His four-year term on the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation (FCIC) Board of Directors puts him at the center of the conversation around federal crop insurance administered by USDA.
“Our margins are so tight, and the risk is so great that we’re putting our whole lives into it,” he says. “I think that’s something other industries don’t understand—that there’s no safety net for us year to year.”
“We need that crop insurance to take as a marketability tool to our bankers and borrow money.”
Lankford has some very specific goals with his work in that space, which include protections for his fellow farmers against shallow losses as much as the catastrophic ones.
“Catastrophic insurance is a one-year fix to get your machinery lined up for the auction,” he says. “That’s not the fix. I think the fix for me is, how do we insure those shallow losses?”
“Because as a producer, I would rather pay a premium every year and not have any help, because that means I’m doing things right.”
Fighting for Family
Lankford is now in his forties, with six children who are into the normal things, such as basketball.
In your 40s, sometimes you take a hard look at your priorities. So, he went looking for a tool to help him tip the work-life scales more in his favor.
Now, when he leaves the farm in the hands of family and employees, oversight is readily available in the palm of his hands, courtesy of tractors with Starlink gauges.
“When I’m coaching junior high girls’ basketball, I can look at my phone and see if they are in the right field, applying the right things and if it’s timely and on-point,” he says.
He’s not the only one that is leveraging tools like precision ag technology to capture efficiency and work-life balance.
“Precision agricultural technologies afford farmers the opportunity to be more efficient through increased insights into their operation that assist and speed up the decision- making process while also bringing that precision into the field through the more precise placement of seeds, fertilizers and pesticides,” says Austin Gellings, senior director of agricultural services at Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM), an organization that regularly publishes insights into equipment integration and adoption.
“This leads to less passes, less stops and, overall, more time.”
For Lankford, that extra time in his day is time that he can spend with his family.
“That gives me the ability to live a life off the farm too.”
In his thirties, Lankford says he missed a lot of life. When he was off-farm, he was constantly worried about production. Now, though, he’s able to not only leave the farm for his family, but he can prioritize responsibilities that maximize his skills.
“And that’s one of the things that I see technology doing for me is giving me a way to say I don’t have to be married to the machine.”
Icing on that cake, for Lankford, is the ROI that his technology is unlocking.
“I need to make sure I am maximizing the capabilities of my equipment all the time and I think the technology is doing that,” he says. “It’s taking the operator error out of it so I can more closely pencil and get a better baseline of ROI.”
Gellings believes that the benefits of technology can reach all the way to the bottom line.
“In total, the increased efficiencies that an operation can realize through the use of precision ag technologies can often lead to less overall inputs with increased productivity, helping to both reduce cost and increase overall profits.”
Fighting for Legacy
In his tractor is when Lankford really starts to add up his ammunition and consider if it really is enough for him to leave the farm and the industry better for the next generation.
Is he doing enough?
He has a son and daughters coming up behind him, quicker than he’d like, and the work that he is doing today has stakes higher than they ever have before.
“There are times where I’m running this machine and we’re cutting 200-bushel and I think, ‘Man, it don’t get any better than this,’” he says. “But I’ve also ran this machine and cut seven bushel and thought, ‘Oh man, are my kids going to have what they need?’”
The stress is real. And Lankford knows that he’s not the only one who feels the tightness in the chest sometimes. He works with the Veterans Farmer Coalition to help ensure that his peers have the support they need.
But, that starts at home, so he’s working on taking care of his own mental health. He’s getting out of the sprayer more. He built a heated shop with an office that, critically, has a door. When things get tough, he shuts the door, leaves the building, leans on his kids, his wife or his church.
Because his kids need him to create an operation that they can take over someday. But, they also need a dad.
“It’s no better reward than working with your dad, I’ll tell you that right now,” he says. “There’s, not a person in your life that wants you to succeed more than your father.”
“I have that same feeling for my son -- that I want him to succeed.”
“If he wants to come back, he can come back,” he says. “But I want him to have the ability to say ‘I’m marketable--I can do anything I want to do, and if it happens to be farming, I’m going to be excellent.’”
America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at americasconservationagmovement.com.
