Rising prices and powerful outside buyers are driving longstanding livestock ranches across the US to sell — but some owners are taking a more creative approach to succession.

Montana ranchers Dale and Janet Veseth recently opted to donate their 38,000-acre ranch in Phillips County, Montana, rather than see it fall into outside hands.

Veseth, 63, had dedicated decades to stewarding the land, passed down to him through his father and grandfather. The operation is known as Veseth Cattle Co.

News of the gift, valued at $21.6 million, made national headlines. And its recipient, the Montana-based Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, is already fielding calls from ranchers eager to follow Veseth’s lead.

“We’ve had calls from folks as far as Kansas that are interested, and that’s a long way away from our demographic,” Haylie Shipp, the communications director of RSA, told The Post.

The Veseths’ donation is a first for the nonprofit, Shipp said, which is now in the midst of deciding how to will manage a potential influx of gifted acreages.

“This really is unprecedented,” Shipp said.

Veseth’s decision represents not only the largest working ranch donation in Montana history, but the largest land donation ever recorded in the state, according to RSA.

Shipp said Veseth — rather subtly — announced the couple’s intentions at the end of an RSA board meeting in the spring of last year. The generous gift was met with stunned silence, Shipp said, followed by tears.

Veseth helped establish RSA in 2003 in response to outside interests buying up land in northern Montana. The nonprofit offers education and conservation funding to working ranchers, organized around the philosophy that ranching is a critical part of conserving Montana’s precious grassland and the rural communities that depend upon it.

“Every time that land comes out of agriculture, it’s just a struggle to get it back,” Shipp said.

Veseth has said wants to see his family’s land continue producing under future ranchers, especially those who lack the abundance of capital necessary to buy land and afford the labour necessary to maintain it.

“It’s not going to be something that becomes condos or becomes a hunting property exclusively,” Shipp said. “Bar none, it’s going to stay in production agriculture.”

Climbing prices and dwindling numbers have pushed ranching families in Montana, Wyoming and the wider Mountain West to sell off their long-held homes in recent years.

A massive 110,00-acre ranch in New Mexico bigger than the city of Denver listed for $68.5 million in March after 45 years under a single family. Another grazing empire — located in Wyoming and larger than the state of Rhode Island — made a splash in August when it hit the market for a grand total of $79.5 million.

Even the Wyoming ranch upon which the iconic Marlboro Man once rode across went up for sale in early October, asking $52.8 million for the nearly 100,000-acre working cattle property.

“There is a lot of pressure from folks from different backgrounds to purchase land,” Shipp said. “And they’re well-funded.”

In September, the ranch brokerage Live Water Properties documented a 250% surge in massive ranch listings over the previous year.

The wave of sell-offs was reportedly hastened by the “Yellowstone Effect,” in which the hit Paramount series inspired billionaires and A-listers to relocate from their gated mansions to seek greener pastures in the American West.

In addition to enticing outside offers, a shrinking livestock industry and internal family dynamics are also driving ranchers away.

“For people to go out and pay $20 million to have an average job, that probably isn’t going to work,” Veseth told Cowboy State Daily.

Sky-high property costs and stubbornly low wages for ranchers make it hard for younger generations to justify the investment of ranching, and aging ranchers have plenty of motivation to sell.

The average age of an American rancher is now up to 60 years old, and many of them will continue turning their sights towards retirement. Exploding prices for cattle further sweetens the pot, Shipp said.

Even in a ranching family they have the means and the heirs, branching family trees and the inheritance of a sole asset — the land — presents a whole new challenge.

Veseth and his wife have no heirs, nor any nieces or nephews that work on the ranch, Shipp said.

When the Veseths decide to step down, the nonprofit intends to lease the land in a way that continues benefitting the local community and the wildlife, Shipp said.

“It’s very likely that we’ll be able to use this land to help out the neighbors get a little bit more land to graze on, maybe bring in some younger ranchers that want an opportunity to have access to land, allow them to have some cattle on it,” Shipp said. “Really create an opportunity where more than one person can now graze on this property, and expand what they are able to do.”

The future of the ranch under RSA is still a ways off. In the meantime, the Veseths plans to continue operating the property, moving their cattle 170 times a year across the vast ranch.

“I don’t think that any of us want to think that that is the future of ranching in the state, because there still is definitely a sense of pride with having your own deeded land and being able to have some property that has your name on it.” Shipp said. “But it definitely is one creative way that we can bring land to ranchers.”