Carbon County has long stood at the center of Wyoming’s ranching industry. In the 1930s, more than one million sheep lived in the county, which shipped more pounds of wool each year than any other county in the United States. Today cattle dominate ranching there, with nearly 100,000 head in the county. The dry desert area, with normal annual precipitation of less than 11 inches, produces rough forage well suited to raising disease-free, all-natural beef cattle. The land is predominantly federal, with interspersed state and private holdings, and much of the area’s diverse wildlife depends for water on private lands and on waters developed on federal lands by ranchers. Many ranchers who continue to steward this land are descendants of those who first arrived in the late 1800s, and their mission has shifted from feeding an expanding western frontier to supplying a global marketplace.