A globetrotting cattle rancher who goes by the name ‘The Lost Cowboy’ has traveled across six continents to prove that you can wrangle cattle anywhere on planet Earth.
JB Zielke is an author, filmmaker, and agriculture expert, who chronicles his travels on social media, in short films and in an award-winning recent book.
He grew up in the traditional ranching states of Colorado and Wyoming but has taken his interests across the globe as a rancher-for-hire.
‘Pretty much everywhere I went it was, “Can you take this wild, angry, spoiled, half-psycho horse that nobody has touched in three years and get a day’s work done on it?”‘ Zielke says.
After a brief career as a bull rider, he has dedicated his life to herding in some of the most far-reaching and least visited places on the planet.
A globetrotting cattle rancher who goes by the name ‘The Lost Cowboy’ has traveled across six continents to prove that you can wrangle cattle anywhere on planet earth
JB Zielke is an author, filmmaker, and agriculture expert, who chronicles his travels on social media, in short films and in an award-winning recent book
He’s been delighted to see that many of his locales have resembled the old west in the United States.
‘People sometimes say they were born 100 years too late. They are nostalgic for a time gone by,’ Zielke told Cowboy State Daily. ‘Well, the truth of the matter is you still can go back. It still exists. These places are kind of like time capsules that you can jump back into.’
He’s visited every continent but Antarctica in an attempt to ply his trade.
‘Meeting people with hustle and drive was very motivational to me. People like that everywhere that adapt in different ways to the hand they are dealt,’ Zielke said.
‘I learned a lot from them. It’s something I aspire to be every day.’
Some of his favorite experiences come from visits to Australia’s Cape Town in Queensland when he was 21 years old.
Zielke has been everywhere from Sweden to Australia to Mongolia to herd cattle
After a brief career as a bull rider, he has dedicated his life to herding in some of the most far-reaching and least visited places on the planet
He’s been delighted to see that many of his locales have resembled the old west in the United States
‘The biggest thing about my time in Australia is it made me realize how big the world is. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around how many more people there are out there,’ Zielke said.
He often had to herd feral cattle using trucks and motorbikes in a style he compared to the film Mad Max while surviving waters infested with crocodiles and being chased by wild dogs.
The biggest problem, he says, was a breed of green ants.
‘The green ants got me. You always think it will be the biggest animals that are the most dangerous,’ Zielke said.
‘I had been warned about them and I guess I didn’t know about them or how they behaved. I was just told never to hit one of their nests or they would all come out and tear you up.’
He said the ultimately, the trip 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 very different way but still get the same, if not better, outcomes than the way I knew to do things.’
Those better outcomes left him with the reputation for being a ‘ringer,’ or an expert cattle wrangler, as well as a devil-may-care attitude and a desire to see the world as a cattle herder some more.
He often had to herd feral cattle using trucks and motorbikes in a style he compared to the film Mad Max while surviving waters infested with crocodiles and being chased by wild dogs
He collected many of his stories into a book that shares a title with his own nickname – The Lost Cowboy
Zielke visited every continent but Antarctica in an attempt to ply his trade
His next experience, on a five-star ranch in Argentina, was less to his liking, saying he didn’t get to work with horses enough and everything was too fancy. He also didn’t like the way the country treated its horses, comparing it to how some people treat their cars.
‘I did see that great horsemanship and horse culture Argentina is known for. But also, for the first time, I saw a culture where horses were not held in high regard,’ Zielke said.
‘I saw a lot of things I did not agree with. They were pretty 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 work in Sweden, where he found himself disenchanted with the social democratic government’s infringement in agriculture.
‘It was eye-opening to go from where things were pretty lawless, where policing and government had no strength at all, to the other end of the spectrum where government was stepping into your life every day and telling you what to do,’ Zielke said.
He described the country as ‘a lot of rural Americans’ worst nightmare’.
‘Sweden is a country where lots of decisions are out of your hands and government has a lot more power and influence over your life.’
Zielke says despite seeing the beauty of the world, he was also robbed on multiple continents
He advises people with dreams similar to his to just give it a shot and go
From there, he went to South Africa as a trainer for young farm workers, where again he was robbed.
‘My travel experience was making me more callus toward strangers — maybe not quickly enough,’ he said.
‘It’s unfortunate because some of the nicest people and coolest things I’ve done only happened because of trusting a stranger. But multiple times I was hoodwinked. I learned to put up a guard where I don’t trust like I used to, but still try to remember the world is mostly full of good people.’
Once there, however, he found the continent beautiful and ‘soul-shaking,’ despite having to deal with runaway horses at one point.
‘There is just an ever-present feeling hanging over you the whole time, an inherent sense of how old the culture is. How this land 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 ton of death, which taught him the lesson of always trying to live in the present.
After returning to work in Wyoming, he took on a winter job in Mexico, which he found dangerous and tough work and dealing with powerful cartels.
‘I do my best not to scare people from going there. Yes, there is danger. Yes, I was in the middle of an actual shootout,’ Zielke said.
‘But there was also some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been and amazing people I’ve ever met down there. I wish people would visit and see real Mexico. I don’t mean Cancun and the insulated all-inclusive places.’
Some of his most recent work happened in Mongolia, where he found that the culture does respect horses.
‘Mongolian horses, I think, are technically not actually horses at all. They are more closely related to donkeys,’ Zielke said.
‘They are really small. One interesting thing I noticed was they would bob their head constantly — up and down — while standing still. At first, I thought they were trying to get flies off their face, but there were no flies around, so it wasn’t that. They all did it and I never figured out why.’
Eventually, the pandemic slowed down his globetrotting and he now shoots music videos for a company he founded and owns out of Texas.
He advises people with dreams similar to his to just give it a shot and go.
‘I mean, sell your stuff and move to Mongolia or Argentina. They don’t have phones. They don’t check their email. A lot of them can’t read and write. They’re riding horses to get their food and everything else,’ he said.
Zielke worries that places like those may not be the shroud of olden days they once were.
‘And, unfortunately, a lot of them are vanishing. So to me, it was important to go see those before they were long gone.’
