Livestock ranching on semi-arid rangelands involves some of the most complex decision-making of any natural resource production and land use system. Ranchers continuously adjust to weather, climate, and range conditions that affect livestock production. They must also respond to weather-sensitive swings in feed prices and cattle markets. Studies of ranchers’ drought management strategies can offer lessons for complex decision-making in a variety of weather- and climate-sensitive sectors. Insights gleaned in this setting have the potential to improve our understanding of universal problems in decision-making under uncertainty. Pastoralism has long been studied as a dynamic socio-ecological system (Galaty and Johnson, 1990), and as an exemplar of human adaptation to environmental variability. In their review of global pastoralism studies, Reid et al. (2014) identified a set of key insights into how pastoralists use movement, collaboration, market hedging, and other adaptive mechanisms to thrive despite the considerable natural variability typical in semi-arid rangelands, where “vegetation and water resources are usually ephemeral in time and patchy in space” (p. 219). They noted that flexibility and adaptability, hallmarks of range livestock production, are necessitated by the uncertainty inherent in rangelands, which exhibit nonlinear dynamics, difficult-to-identify tipping points, and responses to different grazing pressures. For example, climate variation can either amplify or attenuate the effect of grazing pressure in determining rangeland ecosystem behavior (Briske et al., 2005; Ellis and Swift, 1988; Wehrden et al., 2012). Livestock production in the western U.S., regionally referred to as ranching, is a form of pastoralism that has evolved into an adaptable natural resource production system exhibiting complex interactions among weather and climate, range condition, cattle and land management, markets, socioeconomics, and policy. Utilizing 55% of land in the United States and producing $64 billion of cattle in 2016, cattle ranching is an important industry that warrants more attention in climate risk management (USDA Economic Research Service, 2017; USDA, 2016). In this paper, we focus our discussion largely on cow-calf production in the Rocky Mountain and Plains regions in the United States.