Beyond Kent: Stories of Community and Purpose

Beyond Kent is a new alumni spotlight series featuring Kent School graduates who carry the School’s Mission into the wider world, contributing to the common good. Each story celebrates engaged citizens living with purpose, strengthening the communities they serve, and making an impact locally and beyond. 

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Alumni Spotlight: Malou Anderson ’00 

Malou Anderson is a third-generation rancher, living on the family ranch in Emigrant, Montana, in the Tom Miner Basin. She is a graduate of Montana State University, holding a degree in psychology with a minor in animal-assisted therapies. In 2012, Malou returned to work on her family’s ranch and to manage the neighboring Grizzly Creek Ranch and Retreat, which has a seasonal guest program. She is a co-founder and manager of the Tom Miner Basin Association and a board member of the American Farmland Trust, a national organization dedicated to protecting agricultural land, promoting sound farming practices, and supporting farm families in staying on the land. Malou’s family, including her brother Daniel ’02, who runs the Common Ground Project on the family ranch, all live nearby and remain connected to the ranch. 

 

“We were always told this ranch was our spiritual asset. A place for us to take care of and to hold, and in doing so, it takes care of us and holds us. A lot of the work I do around coexistence and conflict reduction has to do with the notion that we're not imposing, dominating, or taking over. We're really just respecting what feels like a sacred space.”

 

What prompted you to go to boarding school? What was your transition to Kent like? 

We are a ranching family with a big value in education. My father and his brothers were all raised on this ranch and went away to boarding school. My grandparents always told us to find something more. It was really hard for me that first year at Kent because I was the ranch girl from Montana. I showed up in my purple Wranglers, and I didn’t know what this was going to look like for me. I was put with my roommate, Kim [Baxter], and we were the only ones in our class that stayed together all four years as roommates, and we're still, to this day, very, very close. That was pivotal. I really enjoyed things that I didn’t have opportunities to do here [in Montana]. I was deep into sports — rowing and lacrosse. My friends and the community of Kent were so important. 

After graduating from college, you worked in social services in urban areas. What drew you back to the ranch?

All of us were taught early on that we needed to go out and do something unique in the world and not expect to make our living on the ranch by any means. And if it worked out and we were lucky enough to be able to come back to the ranch, that’s great. I was doing social work in Austin and struggling with a very difficult and complex population of people, feeling pretty burned out living in the city, and just needing to get back. And it was around this time that we really started to embrace regenerative agriculture and started educating ourselves as a family, especially my brother Andrew, about how to shift from conventional systems of agriculture to a more progressive, regenerative system. So he said, “You know, this is a great time to get back into agriculture.” And so I did. We came home to Montana and immediately started ranch managing.

You describe your family’s ranch and the ranch you manage as having a “land first” approach. What does that mean?

You can think about conventional agriculture as being very extractive — utilizing a resource, a grass resource, to graze your animals to have the biggest, fattest animals so that you can get the most money for those animals. That's a cattle-first operation. And those are conventional, traditional agricultural systems, [developed] because we had to feed the world. And so “land first” is really the idea of utilizing cattle as a tool to better soil and land. And if you're doing it in a regenerative way, and mimicking the natural movement of other herd animals that have been doing this for eons and eons, and building soils, sequestering carbon, then it’s a win-win. Not only are you building soils instead of overgrazing and degrading soils, but you have a healthy animal on top of it because they're grazing, moving, and eating in a natural way. That's really what ‘land first’ means — utilizing cattle as a tool to better landscapes and practicing low-stress livestock handling on them. 

You’re very much focused on co-existing with the wildlife in your area. Can you talk about that? 

[Our shift to regenerative agriculture] was right around when the wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone Park. This ranch neighbors Yellowstone National Park to the north, so we are [situated] in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem and in a very wild place. We had sheep up here at the time, and instead of fighting the system of wolves, and the politics between wolves and livestock, and all the things that we talk about to this day, we decided, as a family, to get rid of the sheep and not fight a system that we support. We would really love to see a wild place continue to be a wild place. Because we're ranching in one of the wildest places in the world, we have a greater responsibility as producers to figure out that regenerative piece of coexistence, instead of assuming that we can just get rid of everything. 

How is the beef from your cattle distributed?

These cattle are part of a grass-finished program that goes into a co-op called Old Salt, which is a really great new program in the state of Montana that's all about feeding our locals. We need to go back to just feeding our communities, each community feeding each other, and then the urban areas can fold into that as well. So our beef is fed mainly to Montanans. 

Does co-existing with the wildlife in your region require cooperation with other ranchers as well?

[The Upper Tom Miner Basin] is a community of really wonderful families on five large ranches. They encompass probably about 20,000-25,000 private acres and 50,000 public acres. And so it's a community of those ranches really honing in on trying to be agreeable, trying to learn together, even though we all have very different politics and very different opinions. But the most important thing is to support each other and learn from each other. That keeps us really close. 

As a rancher and as someone taking an active role in conservation and the future of ranching, what are some of your concerns?

There is just so much happening now in the modern West that is so incredibly concerning — development and the selling off of ranches, kids no longer coming back to ranches. That's the big piece of my work. Coexistence doesn't really mean anything if we don’t have large landscapes to conserve. You know, ranching is tough. I constantly remind myself and others in my working groups, “Let's remember why we do this.” We want to be close to the land. We're close to the land because it brings us peace and connection. And if we're not feeling that and we’re exhausted and burned out, that's not a regenerative operation.

What are some of the projects that you’re involved in now? 

The big one is range riding. Range riding has taken off because it's successful and it works. My sister-in-law and I are starting a range riding school. There's been more of a need for range riders across the West because of wolves and bears, but it doesn’t have to be just about predators. It’s about having conscious and aware people out on the land helping, finding challenges and solutions, looking at natural systems, and how we can mimic the successful pieces of these natural systems and fold our operations into them. We realize that those people are not just cowboys and cowgirls. They're deeply skilled people with a very strong value and ethic system around how we are on land as people, and how we go out on land as people — not dominating it, but being aware of our surroundings and understanding that there’s already a story unfolding that we’re walking into.

You also have an active equine therapy practice, which is a very different kind of work from ranching. 

My Equus work has really taken off – that’s my heart work, my purpose work.  I went through a two-year program of partnering with horses to help. Amazingly, I have clients who come into the Basin consistently. I ask them to use their drive — it's an unbelievable drive up into the mountains —  to start reflecting, so that once they get on site, we're ready to dive in. But I do a lot of group work too. I do all the wellness retreats and yoga retreats. We do a lot of working circles up here, and many of them utilize the equus as either team-building or one-to-one building. On Monday, I had a group of PTSD veterans up with the horses. And it’s busy enough through word of mouth that I don't have to advertise it, which feels right to me. I'm always amazed that people come all the way up for their one-to-one.

What are your typical days like?

It's very seasonal. In the summer, it's early mornings, and a lot of work outside. My emails and my administrative duties as ranch manager get deeply neglected in the summer because I’m out on land all the time. Now [in fall] I'm coming into the settled season. And it's going to be more working groups, lots of meetings, lots of Zooms, and starting to think about planning for the busy season of 2026 with a few animal things to do through the winter, but not too much. And then once it starts to snow, it'll be feeding horses every morning. But everyone is out to pasture right now and enjoying a big, deep breath before winter really sets in.

What is most rewarding about your work? 

I think the basis of my work is helping connect people to place and place to people, and in that, hopefully, being better and knowing more. I'm really fortunate to be doing something that folds into my value system and my ethics. 

How did Kent influence you?

I think going to Kent was a very brave thing to do, and it's brave for all of us as young kids to go off to Kent and for parents to send their kids off to a place like Kent. That first feeling of being brave really paved the way for me, understanding that I have a voice and I have other things to contribute. And then I'd say, being able to be that independent meant that I also had a really incredible community that supported me and held me at Kent. I feel so grateful. I now see why it was so important for my grandparents and parents to get out and to see the world and to see how other people live and to be in other places and landscapes, so that you can then come home, if you feel like it, knowing that there are many ways to do things. And so Kent was a huge piece of that for me — fundamental in my development of being opinionated and zealous and open-minded and brave.