Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Megan Torgerson is the producer and host of Reframing Rural, an award-winning documentary podcast that shares stories of rural people and places. She lives in Missoula, Montana and has a new film that will be debuting February 22 (and available to watch online for a limited time) called Mother Range, about two first generation ranchers and mothers.
When we chatted, Megan was hesitant to call herself a journalist, but also mentioned multiple times that she didn’t have an exact citation top-of-mind for some data she referenced [Editor’s note: all the figures are correct, of course. Megan knows her stuff.] I told her that anyone that worried about citations was probably a journalist. She’s a storyteller dedicated to bringing more complexity to rural stories, like her own family history growing up in northeast Montana. Enjoy our conversation about her podcast, upcoming film, and how she got started.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Ilana Newman, The Daily Yonder: Megan, can you just start by telling me a little bit about yourself and your upbringing and what has brought you to this, this place today, with everything you do?
Megan Torgerson: I grew up on a farm and ranch in far northeast Montana. I’m the youngest of four girls. My mom’s from Montreal, Quebec, and my dad is from eastern Montana, so kind of looking back into what’s shaped me, I feel like it’s interesting that my mom is from an urban area. My dad’s from a rural area. I’ve kind of always balanced both perspectives, in a way. And then I left to go to college at the University of Montana, Missoula in 2009 and I got an English degree with a creative nonfiction writing emphasis. From there, I moved to Portland, Oregon, and then to Asheville, North Carolina, and then Seattle, Washington, and then back to Montana in 2023. Leaving Montana and meeting people who had never encountered a rural person before, some people would say, “Oh, so you grew up on a farm, so that must have meant you grew up in poverty.” And that wasn’t the case at all. Another person told me that I was like a character from a book, kind of saying my story wasn’t real, like it’s a work of fiction. I didn’t have the language for this back then, but I really realized looking back, that I was struggling with urban normativity, or this concept or view that urban is normal and real, and rural is seen as abnormal, unreal, or culturally deviant. When I was in Asheville, around the time of the 2016 election, I was seeing all of these portrayals of rural in the media that really represented them as a monolith. Trump country replaced the words flyover country. All of those terms just really angered me, because that didn’t reflect my experience or the diversity of political thought or belief that I knew to be true in rural communities like my home community.
DY: Tell me about how you started your podcast, Reframing Rural.
MT: So I applied to grad school, and in the letter, I said something about, like, wanting to do something with rural storytelling, and I didn’t really know what that would look like. And then in grad school, I used all of my courses to end up building Reframing Rural. I took a class called creating podcasts. Podcasting was a nice marriage of my creative writing love, and I’m also a musician, and love sound, and I love film, too, but I’ve always been daunted by learning how to shoot film, and so like sound and audio and writing, it just all came together. And so I was like, why don’t I just try to make a podcast? I flew home and I decided to interview people I thought of when I thought of home, and to kind of try to counter that urban-normative view that rural is “less than desirable.” The first season was really audio memoir-driven, and then I have a background in creative writing and working for NPR, and so I used those skills for Reframing Rural.
Reframing Rural is itself a grant funded organization. I’m fiscally sponsored by a really cool nonprofit called the Department of Public Transformation. When I moved back to Montana in 2023 I was able to fully dedicate myself to the podcast. Now there’s a team of five of us working on Reframing Rural.
DY: What do you wish people in cities knew about rural places and people? What do you think that people are missing?
MT: I think people have this misconception that rural areas lack culture or lack education. For instance, my dad, he has an associate’s degree in agribusiness, but he is one of the smartest people that I know. And one of the things that he has that isn’t really acknowledged right off the bat is embodied knowledge. That’s knowing how to use his body in physical space to accomplish amazing feats. I think that people write off farmers and ranchers, because they might not have a degree from Yale.
DY: The most recent season of Reframing Rural is about succession stories, about passing down land and agriculture to the next generation or different people. You come from an agricultural background and have experienced your own succession story, which you share in the podcast. What does succession mean to you, and what do you hope that people take away from this season of the podcast?
MT: One of the biggest takeaways is the question of, what are we leaving behind to the next generation? We’re asking ourselves in the face of climate change, in the face of succession, in the face of so many global changes that are happening right now. So that’s kind of what succession means to me. On a micro scale, it’s farm and ranch succession. So it’s looking at the change of farmland or range land, into the next set of hands.
There’s numerous challenges that farmers and ranchers are facing, and so that’s kind of what this season is examining. For instance, the need for more labor as farms and ranches continue into the next generation. This season focuses on five families who plan to pass it down to another family member, but those operations often have to grow in size in order to make it viable to potentially have two generations coexisting at the same time. And that’s something that’s been happening in agriculture since “get big or get out,” that Nixon era edict. The Secretary of Agriculture at the time, Earl Butz, was saying that farmers need to get really big in agriculture or leave the industry. I think that has left a real impact. For instance, my dad had to expand the farm in order to make it viable. With that also comes a question of labor, are you going to have enough people to help manage the farm and ranch? When my dad retired, my cousin hired two employees from South Africa. A lot of the families who I interviewed this season have foreign workers. A lot of people are asking themselves the question of, like, how big is too big?
One other thing I guess that I’ve learned about succession is that the greatest generation, which was my grandfather, and people born in the [19]20s and so on, didn’t really talk about succession. They didn’t have things like podcasts to learn about succession and probably workshops and events that you could attend and learn about how to do it thoughtfully. So a lot of them didn’t make succession plans, and they kept a lot of information to themselves. People didn’t find out what their succession plan was until after they died, which is really difficult on families. That’s a change right now, the baby boomer generation is opening up to the conversation that needs to happen. And I think the younger generation is often encouraging it. Reframing Rural’s new season is really like one piece of that puzzle. One niche that I wanted to fill was telling stories that had a lot of emotional vulnerability, and that talked about more of those soft skills of interpersonal communication and family dynamics. So that’s more what I focused on.
DY: Yeah, I think that’s so important. That’s one of the strengths of storytelling. What advice do you have for people who are aging out of being able to physically do this work and want to keep their land in agriculture, because I see that too in my community, which is a very agricultural community in southwest Colorado.
MT: Yeah, 40% of the nation’s farmland is owned by people over 65. According to American Farmland Trust, over the next 20 years, it’s estimated that one-third of all farmland in the lower 48 states will change hands. So that’s around 300 million acres. And then one statistic that comes up a lot in like agricultural outlets talking about succession and agri-legacy is that only 30% of family farm businesses transfer to the next generation, and only 12% transfer to the third generation.
One of the things to do is to donate [a farm] to American Farmland Trust or an organization like Ranchers Stewardship Alliance that will keep it in agricultural use in perpetuity and prevent it from being sold to a developer or an out of state investor who might have more interest in its recreational potential. For example, hunting, rather than keeping it in agriculture.
And then for people looking to pass their farm or ranch down outside of their family, one resource is called Land Link. They operate all over the states, and they connect people looking for land or looking for work, and vice versa, people who are offering land or offering work.
DY: So you have your first film coming out at the end of February, called Mother Range, and it’s a story about two first generation ranchers and mothers working together. Tell me more about the film and tell me about the process of working on this film compared to some of your audio projects.
MT: We knew we wanted to tell a story about a woman in agriculture, and Jamie Stoltzfus was the first character that we had envisioned. And then we learned that Jamie was collaborating with Amber Smith. They’re both first generation ranchers. Amber raises calves on her land on the Great Plains of eastern Montana, and then those calves are sent to Jamie’s, where she has a lot of luscious grass in the mountains, and they’re grass finished there. And then Jamie sells that meat through her meat label, Cowgirl Meat Company. So it’s really cool to see these women thinking outside of the box. Most ranchers participate in the commodity market, and those ranchers receive between $0.37 and $0.39 on every dollar that’s spent on beef in the grocery store. Amber and Jamie are circumnavigating that by going direct to the consumer. And that requires a lot of work, but it has a lot of payoff as well.
I was really inspired to be part of the project as someone who didn’t maybe see a lot of women in positions of power on their farms and ranches, and Amber and Jamie are really leaders in their ranching communities, and being an inspiration to other women and ranchers of how to do things differently. And then the film also looks a little bit at how being mothers changes these women as ranchers, and it was serendipitous that I became a mom during the making of this film. It’s been really cool to think about how storytelling changes me as a mom and how my work changes with my new identity as a mother, and to watch them be badass entrepreneurs as well.
DY: Wow, yeah, life imitates art, doesn’t it! Megan, tell me what is next for you, and where can people find more of your work?
MT: I’m currently working on season five of Reframing Rural: Rural Motherhood, and I started reporting recently. A couple of stories that we’ve been working on have been about farm stress and maternal mental health and also child care in rural communities. That should be coming out in the beginning of 2027 so we’re working on it all year. And the Mother Range film will have its world premiere at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival on February 22. If you’re in Missoula, it’ll be screening at the historic Wilma Theater at 1:00pm on the 22nd. [Otherwise, it will be viewable online for 4 days through the festival website.] It should be available online indefinitely later this year or the beginning of next year. And, of course, Succession Stories is on Apple podcasts and Spotify, and all the other places that podcasts are heard.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Megan Torgerson Is Reframing Rural Conversations appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
