International context · Wyoming meaning
The International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) asks the world to recognize rangelands and the people who steward them. In Wyoming, those ideas are lived through ranching, herding, conservation, and community every day.
What is IYRP?
The United Nations General Assembly declared 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists on March 15, 2022. The year is intended to raise awareness of the importance of rangelands and of pastoralists as frontline custodians of these diverse landscapes.
The official initiative connects rangelands to livelihoods, food systems, biodiversity, cultural knowledge, land restoration, and climate resilience. It also works to make pastoralists more visible in research, public understanding, and policy discussions.
Visit the official IYRP siteFrom global to local
The international observance has inspired recognition in the United States and in Wyoming—connecting a worldwide initiative to the working landscapes and communities featured in Grit & Grace.
National recognition · S. Res. 645
Introduced on March 17, 2026 by Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis with a bipartisan group of cosponsors, S. Res. 645 recognizes 2026 as the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. It also encourages federal agencies, universities, and organizations to expand education, research, and outreach related to rangeland management.
Read S. Res. 645 on Congress.govWyoming proclamation · September 2026
At the Wyoming Agriculture Hall of Fame Picnic on August 12, Governor Mark Gordon signed a proclamation designating September 2026 as Rangeland and Pastoralist Month in Wyoming. The proclamation encourages Wyoming businesses and community members to celebrate the contributions rangelands and pastoralists provide to the state.
Read the Wyoming proclamation coverageTogether, these actions connect an international observance to a national recognition effort and a Wyoming proclamation. The film adds the people, practices, and lived experiences behind that recognition.
Why it matters globally
They are ecological, agricultural, economic, and cultural at the same time. IYRP brings those relationships into one public conversation.
Rangelands support livestock production and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people, often in places where crop production is limited.
Rangelands sustain wildlife, plant communities, local knowledge, cultural identity, and the pastoral systems that have adapted to those landscapes.
The global initiative calls attention to restoration, responsible stewardship, sustainable food systems, and climate action grounded in working landscapes.
Shared language
Terminology varies across regions and cultures. The official guidance treats these as broad, practical ideas—not a narrow stereotype of one landscape or one way of moving livestock.
Read the terminology guidanceExtensive lands where native vegetation—such as grasses, grass-like plants, forbs, and shrubs—can be grazed. The term can include grasslands, shrublands, deserts, steppes, tundra, alpine communities, wetlands, and other ecosystems.
People who raise livestock on rangelands, including ranchers, nomadic herders, and transhumant herders. Mobility may range from highly mobile to largely settled, depending on the place and production system.
of Wyoming is classified as rangeland
Why Wyoming belongs in the story
The Society for Range Management describes pastoralism as a sustainable, adaptive form of animal husbandry on expansive grassland environments—and notes that the definition directly describes Wyoming ranching. Across the state, livestock producers work with variable weather, forage, water, wildlife, invasive plants, private land, and public land.
Grit & Grace translates that global language through recognizable Wyoming practices: raising cattle, moving range sheep, using goats for targeted grazing, building markets, sharing knowledge, and advocating for agriculture.
Read the Wyoming IYRP perspective
The film’s IYRP focus
October is the IYRP monthly theme dedicated to pastoralist women. The documentary contributes to that theme by centering the knowledge, labor, leadership, faith, entrepreneurship, and advocacy of Wyoming women—not as a side story, but as the story.
Explore the October theme