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GOURMET NEWS DECEMBER 2017 www.gourmetnews.com YEAR IN REVIEW 2 2 BY LORRIE BAUMANN Montana is called "Big Sky Country," but to most Americans, this is Flyover Country – part of the wide expanse of the U.S. that they'll most often see only from the window of an airplane while they're passing over it. Down on the ground, the Rocky Mountain landscape just northwest of Yellowstone National Park is breathtakingly beautiful. This is a land of moose, wolves and grizzly bears as well as pine forests, the Gallatin River and the Madison mountain range, whose bald gray peaks were still splotched with the remnants of winter's snows as late as the Fourth of July weekend. When I ar- rived from my home in the Sonoran Desert, it was astonishingly green as well as bliss- fully cool. But beautiful as it is, you can't eat scenery, and on a landscape with too few frost-free nights and too much up and down to be suitable farmland, agriculture often implies the raising of large bovines, and that's what 650 of us, mostly from around the U.S. and Canada but a few from Europe and Australia, were there in the shadow of Lone Mountain to talk about. The International Bison Association, which had invited me to attend its 2017 conference, wants to increase the number of bison in North America from around 400,000 to 1 million animals by 2025. Maybe sooner, if they can manage it, which they plan to do partly by persuading the American public to think of Wednesday as "Bison Hump Day," a weekly reminder to celebrate America's national mammal. Bison at Home on the Range Montana is home to just over a million peo- ple, and they're outnumbered two to one by the cattle grazing on the tallgrass prairie that slopes east from the Rockies. More than half of the state's total acreage is clas- sified as farm and ranch land, with well over half of that used as pasture and range. It's every city-dweller's idea of the real West, complete with broad-shouldered men dressed in blue jeans, plaid shirts, western boots and their summer straw hats that stay on indoors. In prehistoric times, though, this land was roamed by wild bison. It's been esti- mated that before European immigrants and their descendants made their way onto America's high plains, up to 30 million bison might have lived in North America. The arrival of the railroad put a last spike in that, and by the late 1800s, the number of bison throughout the U.S. had been re- duced to less than a thousand animals. The species was in danger of extinction. In 1902, the population of the bison herd in Yellowstone National Park was counted at just 22 animals, according to David For- gacs, a PhD student at Texas A & M Uni- versity who is using genome analysis to study the past and present of the Yellow- stone herds. Today, the Yellowstone herd has recovered enough to require intensive management and population control, For- gacs said. "Bison are resilient and can seem- ingly get past any kind of barrier," he said. "It's a conservation success." Across North American, there are now around 400,000 bison, after you've counted up those in national parks, on tribal and First Nations lands and in private herds where they're raised as livestock. It was ranchers who saved the species, they tell you here, by providing bison to restock the wild herds from the herds they'd been keeping on their own lands. Conservationists and Ranchers Working Together At first glance, this seems like an unlikely partnership, conservationists who view bison as a wildlife species still recovering from the threat of extinction and ranchers who view bison as livestock destined to be- come meat for American tables. Yet these two groups, with their very different points of view, find themselves united, sometimes reluctantly, in the conclusion that the best way to ensure the survival of a species may be to eat the individual animals. It's putting meat on tables that assigns these ani- mals a dollar value that assures that a hungry humanity will cooperate in preserving the species as a whole. Keith Aune, Di- rector, Bison Con- servation, for the Wildlife Conserva- tion Society has spent much of his career as a wildlife biologist working to save the species, and he's known in some circles as the "Fa- ther of the National Mammal" because he was a driving force in the U.S. Congress's 2016 designation of the bison as the na- tional mammal of the U.S. It is the Wilder- ness Society's goal to bring back the bison to the point where multiple large herds are roaming freely across their historic range, interacting naturally with other animals and with human cultures, Aune said. To that end, he's working with other wildlife conservation groups, federal land manage- ment agencies, Parks Canada, tribal and First Nations groups and anyone else he can find who's got an interest in preserving the species, now classified as "near-threat- ened," which means that it's no longer con- sidered vulnerable to extinction. "We're very, very hopeful. I think it looks very good," he said. "We've got to stay on this path." The list of organizations that Aune is working with includes the National Bison Association, a group of livestock producers who are raising bison as meat animals, as well as cattle ranchers who have concerns about f r e e - r o a m i n g bison as a vector for diseases that can also infect their cattle. "There are still human conflicts – espe- cially with agricul- ture," Aune said. "That's what's left right now – the really hard work." Restoring the Grasslands Both environmental activists and bison producers say that this increase in bison numbers to 1 mil- lion animals can be achieved while also improving the health of America's grasslands. Daniela Ibarra-Howell is the CEO and co- Founder of the Sa- vory Institute, an organization that's working to save the world's grasslands from desertification. She's a slender woman old enough to order a cocktail without produc- ing identification and careful enough to have minimized the effects of sunlight on her complexion. The two of us perched on the man-sized, leather-covered easy chairs under the jaws and claws of a bronze griz- zly bear in the lobby of the resort hotel at- tached to the conference center to have our own conversation about how grocers can respond to shoppers who are concerned about whether their meat consumption necessarily damages the planet. Her eyes lit up when I asked the question. The Savory Institute, she explained, is an organization that's dedicated to restoring grasslands globally and helping to ensure the continuing livelihood of the people who depend on that land by reversing the desertification that's currently happening around the world. It's a grassroots effort with hubs around the world that educate farmers and ranchers on production meth- ods that regenerate the land and restore local ecosystems with diverse communities of plants and animals. She's a firm believer that livestock is part of the solution. "I be- lieve that meat is not all created equal," she said. "The issue is not the livestock; it's the management of the livestock." When properly managed, the outcome of large animal grazing can be positive for the environment, she and university re- searchers affiliated with Savory maintain. Texas A&M Professor of Sustainable Rangeland Management Richard Teague is one of those who shares that belief. He's not a pie-eyed optimist; he started a 2014 speech at Tufts University by telling his au- dience that "we've ruined every ecosystem we've occupied." He's found in experiments on commercial ranch lands in Texas that In 10 Years We're Gonna Have 1 Million Bison holistic grazing systems did a better job of sequestering carbon and retaining water in the soil than did conventional pasture man- agement. Holistic management also im- proved species composition, stabilized soil and fertility, enhanced wildlife and biodi- versity and even improved economic re- turns for the ranchers, he said. "Ecologically sensitive, regenerative man- agement of ruminants in crop and grazing agriculture contributes positively to critical ecosystem benefits," he has concluded. According to Michigan State University Associate Professor of Animal Science, Beef Cattle and Forage Utilization Jason Rown- tree, who is also affiliated with Savory, sci- entists estimate that, "If these conservation approaches were completed on 25 percent of our crop and grasslands, the entire car- bon footprint of North American agricul- ture could potentially be mitigated." "We use our animals to mimic nature," Ibarra-Howell explained. "What we're doing through planning and disciplined grazing is removing the negative influ- ences. Letting those things go unchecked is desertification, and that is what we're try- ing to reverse. That is accomplished through a strategic process called 'holistic planned grazing.' We want the plants vi- brant as much as possible, actively photo- synthesizing.... It's more strategic and thoughtful, and it requires more knowledge of the complex system we are managing and more planning around that complexity, using livestock to create the conditions for everything to thrive, including the live- stock." Savory is working on a plan to give con- sumers a way to identify agricultural prod- ucts that are produced in a way that represents progress toward healthy envi- ronmental goals. The organization is devel- oping a new Land to Market verification program that will identify food and fashion items, including leather, derived from live- stock that was properly managed through practices verified to enhance water avail- ability, soil health, carbon sequestration and wildlife habitats. The program is cur- rently being prototyped in 14 regions around the world with market partners in- cluding EPIC Provisions and White Oak Pastures, among others. In the fourth quar- ter of this year, Savory plans to start rolling out its program with fine-dining chefs and other philosophically aligned brands. "The Continued on PAGE 23

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