A traveling cattle rancher who goes by the name ‘The Lost Cowboy’ has crossed six continents to prove that you can herd cattle anywhere on Earth.
JB Zielke is an author, filmmaker and agricultural expert and describes his travels on social media, in short films and in an award-winning recent book.
He grew up in the traditional ranch states of Colorado and Wyoming, but has spread his interests around the world as a tenant farmer.
“Pretty much everywhere I went it was, ‘Can you take this wild, angry, spoiled, half-psychopath that no one has touched in three years and work on it for a day?’ says Zielke.
After a brief career as a bull rider, he has dedicated his life to herding some of the most far-reaching and little-visited places on earth.
A traveling cattle rancher who goes by the name ‘The Lost Cowboy’ has crossed six continents to prove you can herd cattle anywhere on Earth
JB Zielke is an author, filmmaker and agricultural expert and chronicles his travels on social media, in short films and in an award-winning recent book
While there, he was pleased to see that many of his locations resembled the Old West of the United States.
‘People sometimes say they were born a hundred years too late. They are homesick for a bygone time,” Zielke said Cowboy stands daily.
“Well, the truth is, you can still go back. It still exists. These places are like time capsules that you can jump back into.
He has visited every continent except Antarctica in an attempt to ply his trade.
‘Meeting people who are driven was very motivating for me. People like that all over the world, adapting in different ways to the hand they’re dealt,” Zielke said.
‘I learned a lot from them. It’s something I strive for every day.’
Some of his favorite experiences come from visits to Cape Town, Queensland, Australia, when he was 21.
Zielke has been everywhere, from Sweden to Australia and Mongolia, herding cattle
After a brief career as a bull rider, he has dedicated his life to herding some of the most far-reaching and little-visited places on earth.
While there, he was pleased to see that many of his locations resembled the Old West of the United States.
‘The best thing about my time in Australia is that I realized how big the world is. It was hard for me to think about how many more people there are,” Zielke said.
He often had to herd wild cattle with trucks and motorcycles in a style he likened to the movie Mad Max, while surviving waters infested with crocodiles and being chased by wild dogs.
The biggest problem, he says, was a species of green ants.
‘The green ants have got me. You always think the biggest animals are the most dangerous,” Zielke said.
‘I had been warned about them and I probably didn’t know how they behaved. I was just told never to touch any of their nests or they would all come out and tear you apart.”
He said the trip ultimately showed him there was more to the world than just his backyard.
‘To go to the other side of the earth and meet the people there. To see them working in agriculture and doing things in a completely different way, but still getting the same, if not better, results than the way I knew how to do things.”
These better results earned him a reputation as a ‘ringer’ or an expert cattle dealer, as well as an attitude of ‘devilish care’ and a desire to see the world even more as a cattle herder.
He often had to herd wild cattle with trucks and motorcycles in a style he likened to the movie Mad Max, while surviving waters infested with crocodiles and being chased by wild dogs.
He collected many of his stories in a book that shares the title with his own nickname: The Lost Cowboy
Zielke visited every continent except Antarctica in an attempt to ply his trade
His next experience, on a five-star farm in Argentina, was less to his liking. He said he didn’t work with horses enough and that everything was too luxurious. He also didn’t like the way the country treated its horses, compared to the way some people treat their cars.
‘I did see the great horsemanship and horse culture that Argentina is known for. But I also saw for the first time a culture in which horses were not highly regarded,” Zielke said.
‘I’ve seen a lot of things I didn’t agree with. They were quite hard on their horses and heavy-handed in their training techniques.’
Zielke was also robbed for the first time while living in Argentina
He then traveled to Sweden, where he became disenchanted with the social democratic government’s encroachment on agriculture.
‘It was eye-opening to go from a situation where things were quite lawless, where the police and the government had no power at all, to the other end of the spectrum where the government walked into your life every day and told you what to do. had to do,” Zielke said. said.
He described the country as “many rural Americans’ worst nightmare.”
‘Sweden is a country where you cannot make many decisions yourself and where the government has much more power and influence on your life.’
Zielke says that despite seeing the beauty of the world, he was also robbed on multiple continents
He advises people with dreams like his to just try and go
From there he went to South Africa as a trainer for young farm workers, where he was robbed again.
“My travel experience made me more sensitive to strangers – maybe not fast enough,” he said.
“It’s a shame because some of the nicest people and coolest things I’ve done only happened because I trusted a stranger. But I was fooled several times. I’ve learned to put up a guard where I don’t trust anymore, like I used to, but still try to remember that the world is mostly full of good people.”
But once there he found the continent beautiful and ‘shaking’, despite having to deal with runaway horses at one point.
“There’s an ever-present feeling about you all the time, an inherent sense of how old the culture is. How this country feels like the beginning of time and still today is simple. Food, way of life, it’s all incredibly simple in the best way possible.’
He also saw a lot of death, which taught him the lesson of always living in the present.
After returning to work in Wyoming, he took a winter job in Mexico, where he found dangerous, tough work and dealing with powerful cartels.
‘I try my best not to scare people into going there. Yes, there is danger. Yeah, I was in the middle of a real gunfight,” Zielke said.
“But there were also some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been and amazing people I’ve ever met. I wish people would visit and see the real Mexico. I don’t mean Cancun and the isolated all-inclusive places.’
Some of his most recent work took place in Mongolia, where he discovered that the culture respects horses.
‘I don’t think Mongolian horses are technically horses at all. They are more closely related to donkeys,” Zielke said.
‘They’re really small. One interesting thing I noticed was that they were constantly moving their heads up and down while standing still. At first I thought they were trying to get flies off their faces, but there were no flies around so that wasn’t it. They all did it and I never found out why.”
Ultimately, the pandemic slowed his globetrotting and he now makes music videos for a company he founded and owns in Texas.
He advises people with dreams like his to just try and go.
‘I mean, sell your stuff and move to Mongolia or Argentina. They don’t have phones. They don’t check their email. Many of them cannot read and write. They ride horses to get their food and everything else,” he said.
Zielke worries that places like this may not be the veil of the past they once were.
‘And unfortunately a lot of them are disappearing. So it was important for me to go and see them before they were long gone.’