Betting on herding and herself

08/06/2026

Before the mist lifts from the hills of Panchthar district, Subita Rai is already on the go. At 28, she and her husband manage a herd of 20 yaks and chauris (cross between a cow and a yak) across the steep alpine pastures of Phalelung Rural Municipality in eastern Nepal, tracing routes her parents traced before her, following grass, water and weather through the high seasons.

After finishing secondary school, most of her peers moved to cities - many dreaming of moving to even farther flung places. Subita went home to the mountains. "While my friends wanted to fly abroad, I wanted to come back to my village," she says.

In fact, Nepal loses between 600 – 2 000 people aged 18-39 a day to out-of-country migration, looking for opportunities elsewhere. Instead, Subita saw her village as a place of opportunity.  

When she followed her parents’ footsteps and went into yak herding, a profession traditionally held by men, Subita challenged long-held societal norms and showed that women can take on roles beyond what society expects.

Her decision was not, by any measure, the easier one. Highland herding in eastern Nepal demands a particular kind of endurance — physical and emotional. Living with animals at altitude in harsh weather and across steep terrain requires what Subita calls a steady mind.

"The animals feel your energy," she says.

Alongside the herding, she manages a household and cares for her two-year-old child. The roles do not take turns. They run simultaneously, every day, in some of the most demanding landscapes in South Asia.

Climate change has added new pressures to life. The rhythms that once made highland herding readable — seasonal patterns her parents learned and passed on — have grown unreliable. Rain arrives unpredictably. Grazing patterns have shifted in ways that are hard to anticipate and harder to plan around. During the monsoon months, her animals spread across wide terrain, making them difficult to gather safely. The accumulated uncertainty of each season requires constant recalibration.

"Every season has its own challenge," she says. "But thinking too much about challenges doesn't help. I focus on what needs to be done now."

That disposition — patient, practical, oriented toward action rather than complaint — runs through how Subita talks about her life. It is also, she suggests, characteristic of women in highland farming more broadly. "Women look after the animals, the household and the land at the same time," she says. "That balance keeps our families fed."

What has materially changed the calculus of staying, Subita says, is cheese.

Through a collaboration between the Mountain Partnership Secretariat (MPS) hosted at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Kanchenjunga Yak Cheese Processing and Production Facility, Subita and her family gained access to cheese-processing equipment, improved facilities and training spanning production, business skills, commercialization and value-chain development.

With funding support from the Italian Development Cooperation, the initiative addressed a structural problem that had long constrained highland herding families: yak milk is highly perishable, the terrain is remote, and raw milk markets are difficult to access and unreliable to depend on.

The training the FAO-MPS project provided changed that equation. The milk her family produces is now converted entirely into artisanal cheese — a higher-value product, one that travels better, keeps longer and commands more stable prices. Post-harvest losses, she notes, have fallen. Income stability has improved.

Subita and her husband now sit on the board of the Kanchenjunga facility — a structural role, not a ceremonial one. The training component of the project was designed to help herding families see what they do not only as tradition, but as enterprise.

For Subita, the distinction matters. "For women like me," she says, "herding is not just work. It is our identity and our future."

She speaks without sentimentality about what that future requires. Women in highland farming, she says, carry overlapping burdens while facing limited access to resources, heavy workloads and compounding climate risks. The solution, in her view, is practical: access to mechanization, technology and the kind of professional standing that would allow women farmers to be treated as the economic actors they already are.

"In five to ten years," she says, "I want to see women farmers respected as professionals." She pauses. "And I see myself still here, raising healthy animals and a strong family."

Her confidence, she says, has grown alongside the work itself. There is something clarifying, she suggests, about contributing steadily to a household — about seeing, in concrete terms, that the effort produces results. 

"I am happy with this work," she says. "When you work with commitment, you see results."

In the highlands of eastern Nepal, with a herd of 20 animals and a seat on a cooperative board, Subita Rai is building something durable and making staying work.

The project supported herders and the wider pastoral value chain, extending support across yak cheese processing facilities and commercialization training for yak cheese processors. The project’s added support in the construction and renovation of cheese processing centres, all with the objective of improving hygiene, consistency and processing capacity, is contributing to livelihood enhancement for pastoralist communities.

This year, FAO celebrates the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. Rangelands span half the Earth’s land and support the livelihoods of millions of pastoralists and ranchers. They steward these landscapes through mobility, traditional knowledge and sustainable practices that protect biodiversity and natural resources. Targeted investment and supportive policies can protect pastoralist practices, safeguard natural resources and enable farmers in building resilient, inclusive and sustainable agrifood systems for all.