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Thank you. (gentle music) - [Narrator] In Wyoming's
harsh open landscape there's a survivor
from a wild past. - This is the country
that bison evolved with so they know how
to deal with it, not just the types of grasses
and forbs that grow here but also the weather, the
environment that comes with it. - [Narrator] Pushed
off the land and driven to near extinction,
this keystone species is making a comeback. - [Jason] The last
buffalo or bison taken from anywhere near
this reservation was 131 years ago. (singing in a Native American language) ♪ You have served us well (singing in a Native American language) - And, now we're
finally able to kind of put things right again. (somber music) - [Narrator] For
ranchers, bison present a new path forward, a means
to restore prairie ecologies while regenerating their
agricultural way of life. - The whole thing, it's
a web that is connected and the animals play
a huge role here in this environment, you know,
the till that went through with the bison as they
grazed it, dunged on it, urinated on it,
trampled it, et cetera. - The resurgence that
we're seeing today came about not
because of, you know, altruistic conservation efforts, although they certainly
played an important part, but primarily because of
the free market economy. - There's a wide variety
of people who show interest in our products, people who call because they have heart
issues, cholesterol issues, diet issues, their doctors
told them they need to eat red meat that's
really low in fat, you know, the Paleo crowd
who is very interested in a specific type of eating,
all of those people combined are driving this market forward
because it's a healthier, more ecologically sustainable,
and more natural animal for this environment. - The sustainability aspect of
it is really important to us. And, then also the nutrition. - It's important for people
to begin eating it again. What I'm hesitant about
is the commodification of buffalo as it
becoming another cow. (gentle music) - [Narrator] Bison, on
this Farm to Fork Wyoming. Funding for Farm to
Fork Wyoming is provided by Wyoming Community Bank, your
locally owned community bank in Riverton and
Lander and on the web at www.wyocb.com. And, by viewers like you. Thank you. (ethereal flute music) - [Jason] The buffalo is
probably the most important because it was seen as
a gift from the creator not only Shoshone and Arapaho
people, but other tribes recognized this animal as
being central to who we are as a people. We wouldn't be here
without that buffalo. - [Narrator] Prior to
European expansion, the bison sustained
a vast population of North American tribes. - [Jason] There were 30
to 60 million buffalo here that would've been
interspersed with elk and deer and antelope and wolves and
bears and other predator species that were highly dependent
on this keystone species. It was life's commissary. It was a life-giving being
in that it provided food, clothing, shelter,
tools to our people and other Native
American tribes. The buffalo, because of
its size was primarily the best one for making
teepees or lodges. It would take 14 to 16
hides to make one teepee, so if you had a large
community, imagine the amount of buffalo that it would've
taken to just make the lodges. But, also because of
their thick hair and fur, was extremely insulative. - Back in the 1850s and
1860s, I mean this is still Little Ice Age, how did
those guys deal with the plains environment
when the temperature was 40, 50 below and they're
out in the middle of nowhere? - [Jason] One buffalo hide
would be able to keep you warm in a winter. - [Michael] Full length buffalo
coat and you will be toasty. - [Jason] We have,
we've tried it and they're extremely important for being able to
survive in the cold. - [Narrator] Bison ranchers
today have come to admire the toughness of these animals. - The weather is something
that they can handle no matter how it comes,
blazing heat, blizzards, and they face into the wind. The big one in '84 was four
days and we couldn't get to 'em for four days. By the time we got out to
'em, they had broken up into small groups, they were
grazing up on the hilltops where the snow had blown off. They were right smack in
the middle of calving. There was probably
500 baby calves on the ground at the time. We think they stopped
calving during the blizzard. We never found a dead calf. Our fences were lined
with dead cattle and sheep from the neighbors. - They hadn't drifted
with the storm. It's because these
animals have seven times the amount of hair per square
inch that a beef cow has and seven kinds
of different hair. But, in the wintertime,
they also go into a sort of hibernation. So, when the temperature,
when you hit that deep cold, then the bison essentially shut
down their metabolic systems and they don't need to
burn nearly as many kcals to stay warm as a beef cow
does in the same temperature. (somber music) - [Narrator] Despite their
dominance through the millennia, bison and the tribes were
no match for the invasion of European bullets and disease. - [Jason] When Lewis and
Clark got here in 1804, it only took 100 years
for them to be reduced to less than 1,000 animals. - We talk about what
happened to the bison in the late 19th
century and in 1874, there were four million
to 4.5 million bison in the great northern herd. So, we're talking about the
bison in Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, Idaho, the
great northern herd. And, by 1883, nine years, there were 20,000 bison left. 25,000 bison left. And, yet we know that
good healthy bison, if you've got four
million healthy bison, they're gonna have about
800,000 calves a year. The kill that can be documented
by the federal government, never exceeded 840,000
animals a year. So, the bison were basically replacing themselves every year. - You could simply not have
shot that many animals. And, we have historical accounts from people like Charlie
Goodnight and Yellowstone Kelly talking about in the 1860s
coming onto the plains along the shores of
the Yellowstone River and along the Little
Colorado in Texas, where there are so
many dead bison, Charlie Goodnight said it
looked like a pumpkin field with all the dead bison. Now, the interesting thing is
this is exactly the same time in late Plains history when
Texas cattle were being pushed north into Montana. And, we know that they were
carrying splenic fever with them which has an 80% mortality rate. So, the whole point of this
is is that most of the bison die off was probably as
a result of epizootics, diseases which were introduced
from European livestock into these herds which were
not susceptible at the time. - [Kathleen] So, you've got
around 350,000 human beings and maybe 10 million stock
animals coming across the overland trails and
the bison were introduced to anthrax to malignant
catarrhal fever, the Texas tick fever, and
a host of other things that they did not
have any immunity to, they were European diseases. It literally divided
the great northern herd from the southern herds. - So, in essence, the
animals that we have today, our modern bison are
really the survivors, the ones who had those
genetics to allow them to make it through this. (flute music) - [Narrator] In the aftermath,
ranchers began rounding up small, isolated bands of bison. - You had five fundamental
ranchers who went out and gathered up the last bison. Walking Coyote in Montana,
the Goodnights in Texas, and several others. - There was also cattle genes
introgression brought in. - [Narrator] In captivity, some
bison were bred with cattle. Other than the catalo, more
commonly known as beefalo, those efforts met with
little commercial success, but some of the offspring were bred back into
the bison herds. - So, 90% of the
bison that we have in the United States today
have cattle gene introgression. When these buffalo were reduced
from 30 to 60 million bison and there were less
than 1,000 animals left, there were less than
100 left in Yellowstone, there was about five
individuals who recognized that the buffalo were
gonna go extinct. So, William Hornaday
and Theodore Roosevelt started the American
Bison Society. Some animals were
taken to the Bronx Zoo, others to other
states to establish these satellite populations. Those have become areas
of genetic importance because those are the
genetically pure bison that exist today. - So, we are coming out
of the hole where bison were almost extinct
in North America. And, it really started
to pick up, let me see, in 1960 I believe it was,
there were 20,000 bison in conservation herds
in North America and there were about 20,000
bison in private herds in North America. Now, there are about 30,000
bison in conservation herds in North America and there
are around 400,000 bison in private herds. (upbeat music) - [Narrator] Over the past 50
years, the Flocchini family has built the biggest
herd in Wyoming. - It was in 1965, and
there was around 500 bison on the ranch, most of
which had come right out of Yellowstone National Park. Unfortunately about 40%
of 'em had brucellosis. - [Narrator] Brucellosis
was brought to the New World by European livestock. Once widespread in cattle, it
has been virtually eradicated since the 1990s. - There are two herds
of bison in the world who have brucellosis or
what's called Bang's endemic. One is owned by the
Canadian government at Wood Bison Provincial
Park and the other's owned by the United States government in Yellowstone National Park. As of this filming, there is no private or state conservation herd anywhere
that has brucellosis endemic in the population. As an industry it was
wiped out among bison 15 years ago. And, periodically we'll get
some kind of an outbreak. It's generally caused by elk. - We got down to about 350
animals and from that point on we started building the
herd mostly internally. We built up to nearly
4,000 animals at one time. And, through a series of
about eight years of drought we learned that we needed
to reduce our stock numbers. - [Narrator] Today, the
Durham Ranch is known for its sustainable
ranching practices and being a leader in
the bison industry. - [John] For the last several
years we've been running around 1200 breeding age
females on the ranch. And, it's been a good
comfortable number for us. (gentle music) - [Narrator] Bison seem the
perfect fit for ranchers looking for solutions
rooted in nature. - The herd right now is
somewhere between five and 600 with the calves. We won't know exactly
how many we have until we round them up
later in February or March. We spread that over, those
animals are over 2,000 acres. We were looking animals
that would do well in this ecosystem. So, it's more than
just the bison here that we're trying to manage. It's all the other
wildlife, it's the soil, it's, you know, everything
that comes together. So, it's more than just
the bison on the land. - [Jason] We know that
if you put buffalo back that they increase
biodiversity not only in plants but birds and insects
and other species. - Some of this stuff is
kinda like Field of Dreams. If you build it they will come. I mean, the seed bank is in
the soil and it's waiting for the right conditions
to express itself. - Our diversity of
grasses has increased. The number of woody
plants has decreased. The nutrient value of our
grasses has increased. We test our grasses
routinely about twice a year. The nesting birds out here, the number of nesting
birds has increased. So, you see, well-managed bison, they're good for
the environment. They really are. - We do range monitoring. So, we've go 27 different
transects across the ranch and so we can monitor
our plant species that are coming up,
grasses, forbs, brushes. We monitor what
our basal cover is. We monitor how much
bare ground we have. And, so we've got
measurable results if what we're doing is
improving or declining something and if there's areas we maybe
need to hit differently. - If you manage your bison
the same way that would manage your cattle herd,
they will overgraze. But, if you take bison
and you allow them to move in the natural way
that they move, they cover a far
broader range of area. - [Pat] And, that's what
we're trying to manage. We're trying to mimic to
some degree what it was like historically with the bison
running three, 400 years ago in large groups,
moving constantly. - [Kathleen] Bison, their
grazing really does shift so that, for example, in
September they will move to C3 grasses which
we would consider the cool season grasses. For the most part they're
standing dead in September, but they've still got
the green at the bottom. So, their protein content
has dropped dramatically, but the bison are still
getting an incredible amount of nutrients out
of that C3 grass. - [Jason] They can adjust their
metabolism at certain times of the year to be
able to digest plants that aren't as nutritious. - [Michael] The
molars in a bison jaw have twice the occlusive
surface that a beef cow's which means twice
the grinding surface. And, that food bolus travels
more slowly through the system so they get more out of it. - They eat a lot of things
that a beef cow won't eat just because they spent
200,000 years evolving with the native plants
in North America. - This is all yucca. When we bought this
ranch 25 years ago, we probably had 60
to 80 acres of yucca. And, the bison have pretty
much extirpated most of it, but this damage here
was all caused by bison especially in the
wintertime they use yucca as a grazing resource. So, bison do significantly
change the land just as far as the way that
they use the resources. 'Cause with the yucca gone, that means that more
threadleaf sedge, we have some needle
and thread here, some western wheat
grass over there. So, all of this resource
that was in yucca and some of the juniper
is now being turned back into grassland again. (gentle music) - So, there's an argument
that cattle replaced the ecological role of bison and that's just not true. Bison are well-adapted to many of the ecological niches throughout the Americas. They were very adaptable
to the conditions. They are top grazers rather
than removing the whole plant. - Cattle can flair their
lips to use their teeth to eat down to the dirt
and bison cannot do that. So, you've always got a
little bit of grass left which is a nutrient provider
for the roots of those plants. - So, they eat the
top and move on. Buffalo have a unique
wallowing behavior that is pretty significant
in that they create these micro-depressions in
their dust bathing behavior that's important for
water accumulation. - [Kathleen] We can see
it here in a microcosm on our own ranch. So, they create all these
wonderful little ponds that during spring
runoff or any time you have precipitation,
become little water holes. - Holding that water means
that the surrounding grasses that the root systems
have access to that. And, so when you go and look
at it in the springtime, you'll notice that the grass
around the buffalo wallows tends to be three or
four inches taller than it is in the
rest of the pasture. - And, it supports
toads and salamanders and a variety of species nest
around the buffalo wallows. So, they become their
own little habitat. - And, so there's kind of
(upbeat music) a marriage between conservation
and entrepreneurship in raising the animals. It's yes, you're very
in love with the species and so you wanna
protect the species. But, at the same time,
this is a resource and we're utilizing
the resource to market that incredible species. - [Pat] In a way I feel really
proud in that I'm stewarding the landscape of North
America in my own small way simply by purchasing and
selling these bison products because it allows people
the economic availability to make a livelihood
out of raising bison. - [Narrator] As this industry
grows, it tries to avoid some of the pitfalls
of the cattle industry. - [John] This is the animal
mother nature designed. And, we don't want an
animal that is reliant upon us and that we have to
vaccinate two times a year and all this stuff. - [Kathleen] We don't use
subtherapeutic antibiotics. We don't use hormones. And, first of all it was tried and it didn't work with bison. Just like castrating a bison
does not cause the bulls to grow bigger. So, there are a lot things
that we do differently in the bison industry because
it's better, we think, for the animals and
for the human health. - [Narrator] While
many smaller producers like the Gears and Prairie
Monarch, only feed their bison on grass, most of
the industry today has gone to grain finishing for the last three
to six months. - It's under 10% of
the bison out there that is fully grass
fed and finished. - [Narrator] For many, the
idea of feeding bison grain is counter to the whole
idea of sustainability. - [Dylan] If we're bringing
all these other feeds in, what is the overall footprint
of producing that steak at the end of the day? As we're doing everything
on these 2,000 acres, you know, all of the inputs
are here and it's just grass. - [Narrator] But, supplying
grass finished meat to the general
public has drawbacks that most consumers
don't realize. - It's not that easy (laughs). There's a lot of art to it. There's a lot of art to it
with just finishing period. - And, you really can
taste the difference between the animals that come from one piece of
land or another. - [Narrator] For many, the
flavor and texture can be gamey and challenging to cook. - [Dylan] Cooking a really
lean, entirely grass fed animal is a little bit more challenging
than cooking something that has that margin of
error built in so to speak because of the grain finishing. So, when you end up feeding
grain, it kind of homogenizes the flavor and every
animal tastes the same. - [Narrator] It takes years
to perfect pasture forage and grazing strategies
to get the mild flavors and texture that most expect. - [Dylan] What we have here
is with the legumes mixed in with the grass, I
believe it creates a really good flavor profile. - [Narrator] Because
of the cyclic nature of the grass finished diet,
harvesting these animals is typically limited to just
a few months out of the year. - The main objectives
of grain finishing is to have a consistent,
high-quality product available throughout the
year, 12 months of the year on a fresh basis. - We might not have seen
the consumer demand pick up had it not been for creating a consistent product year round. The grass fed, you know
we've got a few month window when we've got prime carcasses. It's not like we can produce
those coming out of winter. - [Narrator] The Durham
Ranch recently added a feeding operation to better
manage their own finishing and reduce the
stress on the herd. - We've talked to other
producers that finish at home and have great success with it and don't have problems that might be associated
with a traditional feed lot. The animals get free
choice alfalfa hay, free choice grass
hay, and free choice of the wheat midd-based
pellet that we feed as we don't get into
the acidosis problems that you get into with finishing
like in a feed lot scenario with beef cattle. It's a pretty cool diet
and it's not a lot of corn. That's a hot diet. And, so this is a pretty
mild mellow diet for 'em. - It's a small proportion of
the time that they're alive, but I do see both sides
of the argument there of why it's advantageous
and I can also see why there are people and
producers who choose not to go that
route and make that one of their main
marketing strategies. (jazzy music) - [Narrator] Ideas
around bison restoration continue to evolve in
Indian country as well. - Cultural revitalization
is not mutually exclusive from economic or ecological
revitalization efforts. (Native American chanting music) All of it's intertwined and
being able to restore buffalo, being able to bring
our language back, be able to pray and
practice our ceremonies in the way that
they're intended for are all ways that we
can begin to rebuild and kind of heal
from the atrocities. (gentle flute music) A lot of tribes are torn between
what they can actually do. I think of Fort Peck
in Northern Montana. They've realized the economic
importance of buffalo to their economy. They established a
commercial herd of buffalo that have some level of
cattle gene introgression, but they use it as an
economic venture to sell tags, they market the meat, and
they feed their people with that meat. They also have
recognized the importance of maintenance of
the genetics, though. And getting Yellowstone
genetics and establishing a population with those
pure Yellowstone genetics has been an important step
for them to take as well. It's incredibly
important that we create satellite populations of
genetically pure bison, certified disease-free
bison, but also bison that can exist under
natural regulating factors like climatic
conditions, predation, and actually just buffalo
being wild buffalo. And, so there's very few
places that that can happen. Here at Wind River,
we have the land base to do that. We actually have more
habitat here at Wind River than what's available
for bison in Yellowstone. We've been successful
at managing six of
the seven ungulates as well a predator
species that were here when Lewis and Clark arrived. We could potentially
manage them as wildlife under our game code. When we have the capability
to give this animal the greatest respect
it deserves and we, as Native people, honor
this animal in our songs and our stories, in our history, if we can't do that by
managing them as wildlife, then we're shorting ourselves
and we're shorting our kids because we have that
capability to do it and we're not yet. How do we shift from a
paradigm of treating a buffalo like a cow to that of
treating it like wildlife? And, that is a huge step
to take because nationally we don't do that. - [Narrator] In Wyoming,
the greatest obstacle to managing bison as wildlife
is controlling brucellosis among free roaming populations. - Once you get that in your
herd, your herd is quarantined. I mean and then you
are under the thumb of the federal
government while they try to cleanse the herd. - Well, as a cattle
producer, I mean, that's definitely worrisome
and getting quarantined, but we deal it with bison too if they're a positive
herd you're quarantined, so there's concerns there but
I think it's more political. - We didn't want to jeopardize
the cattle industry. We recognize that there's
a lot of tribal members that utilize cattle
for their livelihood. We didn't wanna
jeopardize any of that. We know that cattle and
buffalo can exist together on the landscape without
a threat to one another. There's never been a
documented case of a bison giving a cow brucellosis. There has been,
though, with elk. So, we have a disparity
between the science and the management when
it comes to how we manage buffalo versus elk. And, when it comes to
bringing buffalo back, it's seen as a threat. (gentle music) It doesn't have to be. Why aren't buffalo
managed as wildlife outside of parks and refuges? All of the other
ungulate species are. But, we have yet to treat
buffalo like wildlife. - [Narrator] This program
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