The Obit Project: Obituary for a Small Town

Sitting in the shade at the 4th annual Old Salt Festival in Helmville, Montana, Megan Torgerson interviews Amber Smith and Jaimie Stoltzfus about their journeys into ranching and motherhood. Amber and Jaimie are both first generation ranchers who have partnered in a cattle, grazing and meat enterprise that is featured in the short documentary film, Mother Range, which Megan produced along with Zach Altman and Anthony Pavkovich.   If you enjoy this conversation with Amber and Jaimie, you can learn more about them and their innovative partnership by watching Mother Range.

This episode about Megan Torgerson's hometown - Dagmar, Montana - originally aired on The Obit Project podcast and on Montana Public Radio, summer 2026. The audio obituary for Dagmar (in-town population: 10), asks how do you know when a town is dead? Megan, a local historian, post master, church goers and farmers and ranchers try to answer the question.  

In collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund's Nature Breaking podcast, we're bringing you a conversation between Nature Breaking host Seth Larson and vice president of WWF's Great Plains program, Martha Kaufmann. In this episode, Megan reflects on her personal connection to the Northern Great Plains, before Martha and Seth explore why the grasslands are overlooked, why people should care about them, the state of the grasslands today and the work World Wildlife Fund is doing to keep grassland ecosystems intact.

Sterling Drake is a musician from Philipsburg, Montana, who is using his platform to talk about mental health in agricultural communities. In effort to destigmatize the topic and connect people to resources, Sterling is talking about it in his lyrics and on the stage. Sterling and Megan met up in May 2025 at Live from the Divide in Bozeman. In addition to the impact he's making on the rural mental health crisis, the conversation ranges from how he simultaneously built a career as a rancher and a musician, to the role of folk music in helping us understand our history and the sonic identity of Montana he is helping to create.

We've teamed up with A New Angle podcast to bring you two back to back episodes from their show  hosted by Justin Angle a professor at the University of Montana College of Business. The first episode features an interview with Megan Torgerson on Reframing Rural's origin story, our latest season, "Succession Stories," and "Mother Range," a short documentary film Megan co-produced that premiered at Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in February. The second episode from A New Angle features Trevor Brown, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Economy and Society at Johns Hopkins University who co-authored the book, "Rural Versus Urban: The Growing Divide that Threatens Democracy."

In this companion episode to our "Succession" season, Megan sits down with author Joe Wilkins to explore the pressures facing rural communities and how fiction can help us understand them more deeply. Joe's award-winning novel "The Entire Sky" follows a ranch family in eastern Montana navigating grief, generational change and the uncertain future of their land. Through these fictional characters, the novel offers a different way to think about succession and what happens when transition is delayed or avoided. Like Megan, Joe also grew up in rural Montana and has since chosen a home elsewhere, but his work is still rooted in the eastern Montana landscape – his "primal place" – where he witnessed how land shapes people and families over time. Together, Megan and Joe also discuss the "tilt," or forces pressing down on agricultural communities today, and the push-and-pull between leaving and returning home.

Megan shares an update from Winnett ACES since her first reporting trip to Winnett, three years ago, then re-airs the season three episode "Winnett ACES: Strengthening Community & Keeping Ranchers on Working Lands." In this story, she visits Winnett, the only town in the least populated county in Montana, where out-of-state absentee land ownership poses a threat to local ranchers. To keep people on the land, preserve the region's intact prairie ecosystem and build a vibrant future for Winnett's main street, the rancher-led nonprofit Winter ACES is furthering economic and environmental sustainability for Petroleum Co. through grassroots community organizing.  

From the archives, we bring you Megan's family succession story "Farm Succession in Northeast Montana," the season three story of Megan's dad Russ Torgerson's retirement. In this episode, Megan shares the intimate journey of her family's farm succession, giving listeners an inside look into the emotional, legal and financial factors at play with succession planning. Curious what the next generation of farmers are facing, Megan also interviews the Jorgensens, another farm family from Northeast Montana who is transferring the management of their farm to their son Tanner. 

You've heard the stories of succession planning from families around Montana this season, and now you're ready to start thinking about succession planning for your own family's farm or ranch. In this bonus episode, we bring you a two-part, practical roadmap for getting started. In chapter one, we take you to Winnett, where Megan hosted a live panel discussion with succession specialists Dr. Marsha Goetting of MSU Extension, Michael Stolp of AgWest Farm Credit, and CPA Stacie Arntzen. They break down what it really takes to begin a succession plan, sharing guidance on communication, business structures, taxes, trusts, and how to approach transitions both within and beyond the family. In chapter two, American Farmland Trust's Farm Legacy Director Jerry Cosgrove discusses succession through the lens of land protection, conservation easements, and what to do when there's no next generation waiting in the wings. Together, these conversations offer actionable steps for families seeking to secure the future of their operation.

Sig Pugrud's ranch sits on a high bench above Flatwillow Creek, in one of the least-populated counties in the United States. Her family homesteaded in Petroleum County, Montana in 1910, surviving drought, the Dust Bowl, the farm crisis of the 1980s, and generations of economic uncertainty with a combination of grit and creativity. As a child, Sig watched her parents gamble on emerging cattle genetics, hauling 4-H calves as far east as Ohio and Kentucky to stay afloat. Decades later, she would make her own high-stakes decision: taking her family's ground out of production and reseeding it back into grass. The move reduced the land's market value, but rebuilt the ecosystem surrounding it. Sig's story is a rare one in American agriculture. Despite having two brothers, she became the sole successor to her family's ranch at a time when women were rarely seen as rightful heirs. Now in her 60s, she is not only a steward of grasslands, but a pillar of her community — serving as a county commissioner, mentoring younger ranchers, and helping lead Winnett ACES, a nonprofit working to revitalize both land and small town. As she plans the next transition for her ranch, Sig wrestles with the same question that has shaped every generation before her: how to hold the land together long enough for the next dream to take root.