The placid beasts are key players in the state’s economy—and ecology.
By Isaac Eger
Growing up in Florida, I’d see them off the side of the road behind barbed-wire fences, mindlessly chewing their cud on pastureland that shrank each year while new developments rose and grew around them. I pitied those cows. I thought they were out of place and unnatural—woeful creatures dangling numbered plastic earrings and destined for a heartless slaughterhouse. I did not eat meat in those days, and vegan propaganda warned me of the scourge of cow burps that released methane into the atmosphere and exacerbated climate catastrophe. I figured Florida and the world would be better without them. I imagined a Florida free from cattle.
How silly I was.
Only recently did I learn that the cow and Florida are inseparable. For the last half millennium, cattle have woven themselves into the land. I now understand that cattle ranches are the last thing standing between our remaining green spaces and an empire of parking lots and concrete structures. This became clear when I spent a week traveling through the last vestiges of wild Florida on the Great Florida Cattle Drive.
In December 2022, I followed 500 cows through 80 unbroken miles of what remains of Florida wilderness alongside 350 other horseback riders. It was the fourth time in 25 years that the event was organized by the Florida Cow Culture Preservation Committee. It reenacted cattle drives from centuries past and revealed fragments of an ancient Florida that disappears daily.
For seven days and six nights I was either riding a stout brown trail horse named Penny under the big Florida sky or sleeping on my back under the stars. We walked, trotted and cantered through pine forests, prairies and oak hammocks and got to see a Florida without the scars of civilization.
On this drive, I first truly considered the cow.
The cattle drive was intended to celebrate the arrival of Juan Ponce de Leon to the peninsula in 1513. But it didn’t celebrate the man. It celebrated something he brought with him. On his ships, Ponce de Leon carried with him violence, disease, hogs, horses—and 40 Andalusian cows.
Ponce de Leon wasn’t long for Florida. He was killed by the Calusa with a spear steeped with the poison of the deadly manchineel tree. He fled to Cuba and died. But the cattle took to the land and thrived.
Their burly Andalusian DNA was suited to the wet swamp heat. They found nutrition in the forage and shrugged off the bugs and diseases of their new home. They became sinewy and headstrong. Their horns, which originally pointed to the ground, evolved to point upwards to help them navigate through the thick, low brush of Florida. They were now creatures of the land.
It appeared on the drive that we were in control. We directed the cattle where to go and rounded up loose heifers that had separated from the herd. But most of the time, we were following their swaying haunches through acres of saw palmetto. The cattle were the trailblazers, and we stayed a healthy distance behind. They didn’t need feed or shelter. They ate wherever they pleased and stopped at watering holes when they were thirsty. I felt like I was being guided through Florida by them. They showed me the land as if I was their guest and this was their home.
After 500 years we can no longer consider the cow a stranger to Florida. Cows have been around longer than other residents’ family trees can claim. Older than the coconut tree. Here much longer than any orange grove. More senior than the brown anoles that dart about our yards. Longer than the Seminoles, even. What makes something native? We are almost all from somewhere else somewhere down the line. If you shape a place and it shapes you and you thrive together, is that not where you belong?
Centuries after the conquistadors, the cows went forth across the land and multiplied. Their presence beckoned poor country folk from the north into the thick of Florida. For the promise of meat and coin, the settlers cracked their whips and rustled the cows out of the swamps and palmettos. These folks looking for a new life in the southern frontier would become the Florida Crackers.
The origins and sentiments around the word “Cracker” are many. Those who use it as a pejorative don’t understand the affection the people here have for the term. Some say it comes from the making of cracked corn. Others will say it’s from the crack of the whip that cow hunters would snap to rustle loose cattle out of the tangled Florida brush. Academics make a case for its Spanish roots, theorizing it comes from the bastardization of “Cuaquero,” which means “Quaker,” a term Spanish settlers might have applied to Northern newcomers of that religious persuasion. Whatever the truth, these early men and women who came across the Florida-Georgia line did not bend the cattle—or the land—to their will. Rather, they learned to work with the often harsh environment, developing practices and a culture that would nurture their land and animals and define their way of life.
The first of many blows to the cows and Florida was the 1949 fence law. Cows used to roam wherever they pleased, searching for the best grass to eat. But postwar Florida began to lay down road for all the newcomers, and cars kept hitting cattle. On June 7, 1949, Gov. Fuller Warren approved Senate Bill 34, requiring that cattle stay behind fences and crowning the automobile as the king of Florida.
But at least when it comes to agriculture, cows still play a significant role in the state. Close to 900,000 graze on Florida’s 4.5 million acres of pastureland and woodlands. Florida is the ninth-leading state in the production of beef cows, and the cattle and dairy industries account for about 6 percent of all agricultural income.
Perhaps more importantly, cows are responsible for some of the most significant wildlife conservation in the state. They need healthy, wide-open pastures. The ranchers provide that with thousands of untouched acres. Ranchers keep wetlands and flood plains intact. Those lands then absorb and filter the water that human communities will drink. Florida’s wild creatures, both big and small, depend on large tracts of land to survive. Without these vast ranchlands, the Florida panther and the Florida black bear would have nowhere to roam.
It’s not that there aren’t efforts to keep the cows and green in Florida. In 1959, lawmakers voted for the “Greenbelt law” to protect farmers and prevent the overdevelopment of open spaces. The law provides significant property-tax discounts on agricultural land. Property taxes are based on the current use of the land instead of its speculative, future value as a new development. The aim was to save farmers and ranchers many thousands of dollars and prevent their land from being sold.
But where there is money to be made, human beings will find a way to exploit good intentions. Today, the Greenbelt law is used by developers to save billions of tax dollars. Investors eyeing land for subdivisions and shopping centers purchase thousands of untouched acres and lease the land to cattle grazers so they can claim the agricultural tax exemption. Some throw a few cows on hundreds of acres and wait until they can reap the most profit, then kick the cattle off and build, build, build. Critics call their racket “Rent-a-Cow.”
Adding insult to injury, the developers hire desperate ranchers to take care of these placeholder cattle. It’s like asking a man to dig his own grave and be grateful for the work. Many of the cow folk I met on the drive told me that caring for those cows is all the work that’s left for them. Otherwise, they would have to head west if they want to be cowboys.
Billy Davis, an eighth-generation Florida Cracker in his 70s who rode beside me for a while, told me he doesn’t have much hope for the future. “There’s just not enough land to carry on,” he said. “You look at what all is being sold and promised to be developed, it just don’t add up. They’re going to have to build on everything. The people coming in don’t give a damn about the water or land or anything else.”
Traveling through the state by car instead of horseback, I now imagine where all the cows used to be. In my research I found century-old black-and-white photos of cattle crossing the main streets of towns and cities. They wandered from coast to coast. They used to wade udder-deep into the Gulf. I don’t think the cows miss the beach the way I miss them there.
But now that they are confined behind fences, they play an important role in preserving and protecting the lands where they graze. Those cows, and the people who tend to them, are stewards of natural Florida. If we lose them, we don’t just lose a way of life—we lose an essential part of the state’s ecosystem.
To all the cows—and cowboys—I apologize for ever doubting your rightful place in our state.
Isaac Eger is a freelance journalist and author of the new book The Great Florida Cattle Drive. His work has appeared in Sarasota Magazine, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, VICE, Deadspin and other publications.