Each year an unusual holiday catalog arrives in my mailbox:  the non-profit organization Heifer International’s book of “Udderly” original gifts – gifts of livestock that make a difference in the lives of poverty-stricken families around the world.  And each year I send Heifer a check to cover a gift of honeybees, a share of a llama, or a trio of rabbits.

Heifer’s mission is commendable:   to work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the earth.  They accomplish this by giving cows, goats and other food and income producing livestock to impoverished families around the world.  But it wasn’t until I attended a recent conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, that I understood the full scale of this organization’s impact. 

The conference featured an optional trip to Heifer Ranch, a working farm and ranch with certified organic gardens and a conference and retreat center that promotes sustainable solutions to global hunger, poverty and environmental degradation.  The Ranch also has a low and high-challenge course, on which participants learn the value of community support when they scale a 15 foot climbing wall.  Because I wanted to learn more about Heifer International’s work, I immediately signed up for the tour.

            The Ranch, just forty-two miles northwest of Little Rock in Perryville, Arkansas, spans 1,200 acres in the midst of the beautiful Ouachita Mountains.  It is the centerpiece of Heifer’s educational efforts, and one of three learning centers owned by Heifer (the other two are in California and Massachusetts). 

More than 50,000 people visit Heifer's learning centers each year to participate in seminars, service learning projects and in-depth educational experiences.  Ranch visitors learn about world issues while identifying, on a personal level, their social responsibility and gaining a better understanding of how their choices affect the world. 

Ranch volunteer Berta Rieby met our bus as we arrived, then led us to a building where we’d watch a video narrated by Ed Asner that would tell us about Heifer’s history.  The organization, we learned, was launched on June 18^th, 1944 -- just 12 days after the D-Day invasion in Europe.  In a campaign of a different sort that would save millions of lives, Heifer International began its first four-footed attack against hunger – a shipment of dairy cattle bound for Puerto Rico.

Five years earlier, Indiana farmer Dan West, a relief worker in the Spanish Civil War, had been forced to choose who would receive limited milk rations and who wouldn't – possibly deciding who would live and who would die.  West knew that relief aid would never be enough.  When he returned to the United States he formed Heifers for Relief, a group dedicated to ending hunger by providing families with livestock and training, allowing them to feed and care for themselves. The group, in cooperation with the U.N., shipped thousands of cattle to war-torn areas of Europe in the late 1940s. 

Now called Heifer International, the organization buys animals locally then trains people around the world in environmentally sound agricultural practices, integrating crops and animals.  Heifer International bought the ranch in 1971 to educate people about the needs of the world.