A CHANGE IN TENORHolistic ranchers aim for harmony with the land and its occupants,and that means finding common ground, not common enemies

BY JEFF WELSCH

PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS LEE

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On a sun-drenched early summer morning, Bryan Ulring and Hannibal Anderson are standing shin-deep in Timothy grass, the mountains of Yellowstone National Park less than 3 miles away, while roughly 40 black Angus cattle

huddle curiously around a rotted carcass. The men start to discuss the most recent “big event.”

A few days earlier, a neighbor just down the gravel road in Tom Miner Basin—a classic Montana movie backdrop—shot and killed the alpha male of the Steamboat wolf pack, which had roamed the basin and denned there without incident for several years. The wolf had wandered by the wrong person at the wrong time.

Such news can still elicit accolades at watering holes in the Northern Rockies, but not on this ranch. And not on a growing number of spreads across Montana where ranchers are evolving to more holistic thinking toward their land, water and wildlife—and discovering, perhaps counter-intuitively, that ecological and

economic prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive after all. In the process, they’re embracing a third and unexpected

reward: enhanced quality of life in a business where tunnel vision toward the financial bottom line has long meant a dawn-to-past-dark, week-to-week, season-to-season grind.

“When you’re holistic you’re always thinking about the ecological benefits but simultaneously about making money and quality of life,” says Ulring, a Rapid City, South Dakota, native who co-owns Yellowstone Grassfed Beef, which is counting on consumers who value wild places and wildlife to pay a little more for healthy beef raised in healthy environs. “If you’re work-ing 18 hours a day and you’re always on a treadmill of reaction, that’s not very fulfilling, it’s not very sustainable and it’s really not financially sustainable.”

Yellowstone Grassfed Beef, co-founded with Ulring by Rockefeller heir Peggy Dulany and fifth-generation Montana rancher Zachary Jones, is on the leading edge of what Ulring calls “an experiment,” but YGB isn’t alone.

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Kathleen McConkey herds cattle to a new patch of grazing on the Twodot Land and Livestock Company south of Harlowton. McConkey says they use horses on the ranch because they are more precise, slower, quieter and more selective than four-wheelers.

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Some 300 miles to the northeast, where grasslands and tilled fields extend to distant horizons, the American Prairie Reserve’s ambitious effort to preserve and restore a vast “American Serengeti” of native prairie includes its fledgling Wild Sky Beef program. Participating ranchers are setting aside entrenched suspicions about conservationists and accepting monetary incen-tives to conduct wildlife-friendly, premium beef operations.

At Yellowstone Grassfed Beef and Wild Sky Beef, holis-tic means not only coexisting with wildlife but also monitoring soil, water, vegetation and, in Ulring’s case, even cow patties. When he walks through a pasture at one of the four Montana ranches where YGB’s cattle are raised, he routinely bends down and flips over a crusty chip in hopes that it’ll be crawling with dung beetles, a prime food source for the struggling sage grouse, among other species.

“It’s a different lens,” explains Anderson, a longtime educa-tor who in retirement has returned to the property his father bought in 1955. “Humans are pretty linear. We’ve simplified systems to get the results we want and know. Now we’re shifting

from linear to results-oriented. It’s a set of relationships more than just a fiscal bottom line.”

Cattle ranching is fraught with peril. Disease, drought, light-ning, stray dogs, coyotes, eagles and even modern-day two-legged rustlers stealing $1,200-a-head calves. And then there are the costs of nurturing cattle from birth to the slaughterhouse: planting, irrigating and harvesting hay and other forage; antibi-otics for disease in crowded feedlots; hormones to promote rapid growth; and herbicides to kill invasive weeds.

Eradicating nuisance wildlife, especially predators, has been as much a part of the ranching regimen as barbed-wire fences, lonely windmills and American-made pickup trucks.

Yet the thinking has shifted dramatically at the American Prairie Reserve and at Yellowstone Grassfed Beef, where two of the ranches, the Anderson place in Tom Miner Basin and the 20,000-acre J Bar L Ranch in the remote Centennial Valley along the Montana-Idaho border, accept wolves and grizzly bears as part of the complex landscape.

In fact, news of the alpha male’s death is unsettling.

Stuart Phelps, left, and his partner, Kathleen McConkey, look over the ranch grazing plan before heading out for their day’s work. They keep track of grass growth, weather, water quantity and other data.

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The Steamboat wolves have survived for years on the region’s healthy elk population and, as Anderson put it, “have been well-behaved.” From his 1879 Victorian stone home, he even occa-sionally sees them wander past the cattle without causing undue stress and the weight loss associated with it.

Removing a leader creates pack dysfunction that could cause younger wolves to go rogue and seek other prey. Anderson and the other hands, including the range riders who provide a human barrier between predators and cattle, will need greater vigilance.

“People see a wolf and their automatic reaction is they want to get rid of it,” Anderson said, shaking his head. “They never see the bigger picture.”

For yellowstone grassfed Beef, that picture is crys-tallized by Hilary Zaranek, Hannibal’s daughter-in-law and the resident predator expert. After earning a degree in wildlife biology from the University of Montana and volunteering with the Yellowstone Wolf

Project, Zaranek spent a summer in Tom Miner, where she met Hannibal’s son and her future husband, Andrew Anderson.

“I’m not sure the alpha male being killed changes their

vulnerability,” she said of the cattle. As long as the alpha female remains alive, she explains, “[She] will determine pack struc-ture. When the alpha female is killed, 97 percent of the time the pack will dissolve and the younger wolves won’t have food sources [so they might prey on cattle].”

Andrew and Hilary split their time between Tom Miner and the J Bar L about 100 miles to the southwest, in the heart of the remote Centennial Valley, where full-time residents can be counted on two hands. The Centennial is about 50 miles long and not half that wide, bounded on the north and south by mountains and, at 6,700 feet on the valley floor, inaccessible by wheeled vehicles much of the year. Thousands of cattle graze on its forbs and grasses, yet the Centennial also serves as a critical wildlife thoroughfare between Greater Yellowstone and the wilds of central Idaho and northwest Montana.

As Ulring gently herds summering cattle that have managed to escape a Centennial Valley pasture enclosed with a white, single-wire portable “hot” fence, he spies a cow patty. He kicks it upside-down to reveal a pungent, moist underside where hundreds of dung beetles are scurrying about, startled by the sudden exposure. From under his cowboy hat, Ulring looks up and nods in approval.

He points to an area of knee-high grass nearby, a breeding

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lek where sage grouse perform their flamboyant mating rituals. Grouse are candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act because of shrinking populations due to habitat loss.

“We’re thinking about sage grouse, we’re thinking about trumpeter swans,” Ulring said. “We’re thinking even more about dung beetles. If you go into a pasture and two weeks after the cows are removed the pies are gone, it means you’re feed-ing wildlife. If people can make a living with nature rather than against it …”

When Peggy Dulany came upon the Centennial in 2000, after a dusty 56-mile ride on dirt roads, she was on a lengthy search for open spaces and a place to raise a small cattle herd. She saw range and stream banks so denuded and eroded that the federal Bureau of Land Management had placed rigid restrictions on public grazing allotments. But Dulany was nevertheless smitten by the solitude at altitude.

“The Centennial was one of the remaining valleys with wide-open spaces that animals could cross,” she said. “It’s also still almost totally an agricultural valley of high mountain grass, which is the most nutritious. And then, of course, there’s the beauty.”

Dulany, a philanthropist who took her surname from her mother’s side of the family to minimize the perceptions of privi-lege attached to the Rockefeller label, spent a year acquainting herself with the landscape before purchasing cattle. A visiting friend told her about an innovative program called conserva-tion beef: paying ranchers a premium of 10 cents more a pound (it’s much higher now as conservation-minded beefeaters learn about the program) to raise cattle in a wildlife-friendly way while improving the range. For economic diversity, Dulany also restored three crumbling homesteads on the ranch and turned them into vacation rentals.

“So the idea gradually took shape,” she said. “It was in part because I believe in doing it that way, in part because I came to believe in the economic viability, and maybe in part because I came to believe if I could do it and was willing to risk new things to see if it could work, then maybe other people would see what we’re doing and be interested in some of the same things.”

In 2007, Dulany hired Ulring, a Montana State University business graduate who was running a fly-fishing program for a travel company at the time. Ulring always had a passion for agri-culture from visiting his grandparents’ farm in South Dakota. They, along with Jones of the Twodot Land and Livestock Co. near Harlowton, created Yellowstone Grassfed Beef, which turned its first profit in 2013.

Ulring and Jones were—and remain—avowed disciples of Allen Savory, a Zimbabwean ecologist who had once been vehe-mently anti-livestock. Savory evolved to believe that managing domestic livestock to mimic historic patterns of native animals, such as bison, was the only solution for reversing range damage caused, ironically, by livestock. Jones cofounded the Savory

Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which is dedicated to promoting “large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands through holistic management.”

Following Savory’s methods, Yellowstone Grassfed Beef rotates more than 1,000 head of cattle between four ranches and keeps them for at least two years before sending them to slaugh-ter, compared to as little as 14 months for traditional operations.

Almost all mother cows are kept at the undulating 12,000-acre Twodot Ranch, where calving takes place in May and June, to emulate the patterns of native ungulates and avoid the misery of cold-weather calving, and where the young animals are far from Yellowstone’s large predators and its prevalence of brucel-losis. Weaned calves spend their first winter in Twin Bridges. As yearlings, they spend the summer in the Centennial before

Portable electric fencing is used to confine grazing animals to the intended piece of pasture on the Twodot.

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returning to Twin Bridges for one more winter. Steers and spayed heifers are “finished” by gaining up to three pounds per day on the nutritious grasses in Tom Miner, weighing as much as 1,200 pounds when they go to market.

Copious spreadsheets detail range conditions and other vital signs. In the Tom Miner and the Centennial, cattle are rotated frequently within those single-strand electric fences, which are powered by small solar panels.

The results? Ulring points to a four- to five-fold increase in grass density in the Centennial, notes a relaxing of the BLM’s grazing restrictions, and directs a visitor toward Peet Creek, where vegetation is returning to eroded banks.

Equally important, working within nature’s rhythms is enabling the company to write its bottom line—and quality of life—in black.

“We’re making money and the land is telling us what we’re doing is good and we’re producing meat that’s good for people,” Ulring said. “We’re moving cattle between four counties and it sounds like a hell of a lot of work, but it’s not. It’s different work. We spend more time herding and less time doctoring.”

Added Anderson: “It’s just a more satisfying place to be. You feel better.”

That’s reassuring news to Mike Phillips, executive director of

media mogul Ted Turner’s Endangered Species Fund in Bozeman. Most of the prime wildlife habitat in the West, he points out, is in private hands. The future of wolves, grizzly bears and other iconic species ultimately rests on landowner attitudes.

“Private lands can do more for imperiled species conserva-tion,” Phillips said. “Diversification on wild working landscapes is also a great way to ensure increasing the health of rural economies.”

Nonetheless, there are skeptics and critics among conserva-tionists and ranchers alike.

“The proBlem is that the arid west is about the worst place you could choose for a livestock operation—if you were to do a full accounting of the real economic and environmental

costs,” says George Wuerthner, author of Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West.

Wuerthner rattles off a litany of issues: Prolific use of scarce water supplies to irrigate hay fields. Trampling of streamside vegetation. Compacting of soil, which reduces water filtration.

Phelps leaps a small creek toward a herd of heifers and steers, grazing in a riparian area. Holistic ranching doesn’t exclude riparian areas from grazing, Phelps says. Rather, animals graze and move on quickly, allowing healthy grass growth, but not damaging the stream banks.

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Competition with wildlife for forage. Spread of weeds and diseases in native wildlife.

Wuerthner adds that the J Bar L and ranches like it are “a fluke, so to speak,” because they have the resources to experiment.

Not everybody sees it that way. Michelle Fox, a fifth-gener-ation rancher and a member of the Gros Ventre Indian tribe, certainly doesn’t count herself among the resource-rich—at least financially. Her family raises cattle on Peoples Creek near Hays on the impoverished Fort Belknap Reservation in north-central Montana.

The Foxes are among the four cattle-ranching operations that have joined American Prairie Reserve’s Wild Sky Beef program to date. They signed up in 2014, after spending a year discuss-ing whether they could meet Wild Sky’s biodiversity-oriented parameters, and became fully integrated into the program this past summer.

Though the partnership meant her children could no longer plink at prairie dogs with .22 rifles for sport, Fox opted in with-out the deep suspicions shared by some neighbors who believe APR’s agenda is to banish them from lands they’ve ranched for generations. She values APR’s mission to create a natu-rally functioning 3.5-million-acre prairie reserve, primarily by purchasing private lands and working with managers of adjacent public lands.

“First and foremost, it’s a business decision,” Fox said. “But I think we’re natural conservationists by birth, and ranching on the Indian reservation...we’re much more communal. We have to take care of the land because it’s all we have left.”

The genesis of Wild Sky Beef was a visit by APR President Sean Gerrity to southern Africa. He saw models for “predator-friendly beef” in places where conservationists and ranchers had long been at odds. Gerrity envisioned a similar concept succeeding on the reserve.

“We had to find a way to work with our ranching neighbors,” says Laura Huggins, Wild Sky’s director of business develop-ment and marketing.

After a year, and without a major marketing push, Wild Sky is in about 70 outlets nationwide and averaging $85,000 per week in sales touting its “wildlife-friendly beef” label, Huggins said. APR Managing Director Pete Geddes said Wild Sky Beef is typically priced about 5 percent higher than “other natural, grass feed and finished beef products.” The early focus has been on the east and west coasts, “just because they have a little bit more discretionary income to buy higher-priced beef,” Huggins adds. But Wild Sky recently signed an agreement with the 200-store Meijer grocery chain in Michigan.

Huggins said Wild Sky hopes to have as many as 50 ranch-ers on board within the next three years, but the program will always have to acquire cattle from producers across the

northern Great Plains—all from operations with similar holistic philosophies.

“There just aren’t enough cattle in that part of Montana,” Geddes said, adding that increasing the number of participating ranches will at the same time require APR to raise the money to support paying them.

At the Fox ranch, Michelle’s family has learned to appreciate the prairie dog, an ecologically important species traditionally shot or poisoned. As for finances, they recently purchased her aunt’s ranch after living and working on it for three years. With the help of Wild Sky money—payments for wildlife-friendly improvements, plus the higher price they get for their cattle—they have rebuilt three miles of fencing that allows pronghorn antelope to pass beneath it, raised a metal barn and built a greenhouse.

“One cool thing is we’re now seeing antelope cross between the [tribal] buffalo pasture and our ranch,” Fox said.

Also cool? “I don’t know any other way to say it, but Indian cattle are

getting the same prices as non-Indian cattle,” Fox said, citing

Peggy Dulany owns the J Bar L Ranch in Montana’s Centennial Valley.

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a historic disparity at auctions. “Our beef is raised on the Fort Belknap Reservation and it is going places it’s never gone before. It’s really cool.”

Given the success of the three-legged stool of ecology, economics, and quality of life, the question arises: Why aren’t more ranchers involved? Ulring and Fox say traditions die hard in the culture. Many fear the financial risk. Others are simply content with the status quo. Yet they see change coming.

“Ten years down the road,” Fox said, “It’s going to look very different.”

Ulring recalls a predator presentation by Zaranek to ranchers in Dillon. Zaranek’s approach, rooted in the belief that the West is a better place with both ranchers and predators thriving on the landscape, is simply to share the J Bar L’s success stories.

“Killing wolves hasn’t made any impact whatsoever,” she told the crowd. “Even when you kill wolves more wolves come. It’s better to know the wolves we have and make it work. We know where they den and we know where we should put cattle. So far, everything we’ve tried has worked.”

The reaction, Ulring said, was “unbelievably receptive.”Whether holistic beef ranching succeeds, though, ultimately

will depend on the American consumer, Ulring and Fox agree. “From an economic standpoint, I wish people would put their

money where their mouth is more often,” Ulring said. “If you love wolves and wild places, pay what it costs to raise animals here. Everybody gets to vote with what they eat.”

To make that easier, Yellowstone Grassfed Beef offers free delivery in the Bozeman and Livingston areas and offers its products in stores from Lewistown to Columbia Falls to Yellowstone National Park, in restaurants and the University of Montana’s dining halls (see www.yellowstonegrassfedbeef.com for more information).

Up in tom miner, Ulring and Hannibal Anderson move closer to the cattle and what turns out to be the hair and stripped bones of a deer, cause of death unknown. High above, on a grassy hillside, an elk herd emerges from a forest of

aspen and fir. Mountain bluebirds flit in the breezes. Ulring is gratified to see the cattle so tightly compact and alert around the carcass, all part of Zaranek’s training.

“Like bison mob grazing,” he said.They move through the cattle, ruminate about “big events,”

and pause every so often to absorb surroundings they’re now filtering with hope, landscape seen through a new lens.