TWIN FALLS, Idaho — Idaho ranchers and land managers recently gained a long-awaited ally on the range when the University of Idaho hired Jessica Windh to fill the role of extension rangeland economist.

That position had remained vacant following the retirement of Neil Rimbey — a highly regarded collaborator with the ranching, range science and land management communities.

In November, Chris McIntosh, head of the university’s Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology, said the university has been trying to find a replacement for Rimbey since 2015 and finding Windh was like finding a unicorn.

“There’s not a lot of us range economists,” Windh said.

Rangeland economists take everything range scientists are promoting as best practices and determine the bottom line for ranchers and land managers or what could be done to make it pencil out, she said.

“So it’s the last puzzle piece to get rangeland management implemented on the ground,” she said.

Winding road

Windh’s path to the field, however, was anything but straightforward.

She is from Central California in a region of grape vines and citrus and fruit trees. Her family contracted out grape acreage, and all her friends growing up were farm kids.

“But there wasn’t any ranching,” she said.

After graduating from high school in 2006, she headed to Reedley College, a community college, where she focused on chemistry and earned an associate’s degree in biological science. She also was employed by a plant pathologist working with pesticide applicators at the University of California Kearney Agricultural Research and Extension Center.

Her sights were set on a career in chemistry, but she changed her mind at Fresno State.

Scrubs to shrubs

She was trying to figure out what she wanted to do and ended up taking a break from college. She got an Emergency Medical Technician certification and worked for an ambulance company for a couple of years, finding she liked health care as much as agriculture.

“The deciding factor was I wanted to be outside, and as a nurse that wouldn’t be an option,” she said.

She returned to Fresno State and studied animal science and environmental science. A single paragraph on rangeland management in an environmental science textbook piqued her interest, and she asked her professor if she could do a term paper on the subject. He agreed but didn’t think she would find much information on it.

Not only did she find plenty of information, she learned there were degrees in the field.

That took her to the University of Wyoming in Laramie to study rangeland ecology and rangeland management.

Bottom line

But she kept asking herself: Why would a rancher practice rangeland management; it was expensive, whether planting seedlings or removing juniper trees. It became clear it was the economics of rangeland management that interested her.

Her master’s project was an experimental, collaborative, adaptive range management project in Colorado, where she compared economic outcomes of the project with conventional ranching.

After earning her master’s degree, she worked with a professor at the University of Nebraska evaluating the economics of integrated crop and livestock systems.

She knew she wanted to work in extension and hired on at the University of Idaho last fall.

Since then she’s been focused on meeting as many ranchers and land managers as possible so when winter breaks she can hit the ground running.

Open door

“I’m just a sponge at this point, just trying to learn everything I need to know to do the job properly,” she said.

Extension is a two-way process, and her door is always open, she said.

“I need to hear from people who have the problems to know what research to do,” she said.

Windh has joined a collaborative study involving the University of Idaho Rangeland Center and the U.S. Forest Service on dormant-season grazing in the Caribou-Targhee National Forest and the Curlew National Grassland.

She’ll also be working with university extension rangeland researchers on a project analyzing “virtual” fencing in the Salmon-Challis National Forest.

Jessica Windh

Occupation: University of Idaho Extension range economist

Location: Twin Falls Research and Extension Center

Age: 35

Education: Bachelor’s degree, rangeland ecology and management, 2016, University of Wyoming; master’s degree, agricultural economics, 2019, University of Wyoming; doctorate, agricultural economics, 2023, University of Nebraska