This years rainfall finally came in early May, alleviating our drought worries that had started to settle in. The rain continued to come and come. This is a good problem to have when you are a grass farmer/buffalo rancher, as the grasses will be in good supply for all the native species that rely on them for grazing for months to come. The abundant rainfall does not come without its effects; like flooded roads, washed-out dams, and fences blown out or covered in debris from the river swells. When the excess surface water dries up the repairs begin. For us, the main repair is fencing, a lot of fencing, which means extra, needed help. Our good friend Gervase Hittle came to the rescue. The guys work in the hot, humid days when time allows. A catered lunch is often required to keep up their strength, and they welcome recipe testing’s. The Beer Bottle Bacon Wrapped Stuffed Buffalo Burgers were a big hit! And, the cold beer at the days end was welcomed too. The thunderstorms continue to move in and out, creating beautiful skies and landscape. The wild flowers sprinkle the pastures with colorful dots of purple, yellow, and white, reflecting the colors of the sky. And, the prairie dogs stay busy mowing their green prairie lawn to keep a close eye out for predators, which the buffalo assist with as they pass through. A pretty glorious site!
Happy Mother's Day!
What Mother’s Day looked like on Mother, Earth Day, at Wild Idea Buffalo Companies, Cheyenne River Ranch.
From Birds To Bison
Wild Idea Buffalo Company, LLC and Dan O’Brien were recently featured in the April 19th, 2015 edition of the Rapid City Journal in an article titled From Birds To Bison.The article examines the genesis of Wild Idea Buffalo Company and why Dan O’Brien shifted his focus from endangered birds of prey to bison. Click Here to read more.
Salami, Onion, & Jalapeno Sandwich
This sandwich received national attention on NPR, during Dan O’Brien’s book review for Stolen Horses. In the book the sandwich is constructed with great attention to detail and is a laugh out loud scene. The sandwich is as delicious as the novel! Serve with milk, to balance the jalapeño heat, or use pickled jalapeños to avoid the heat. Ingredients: (per sandwich) 2 – slices sourdough bread, cut on the bias 4 to 6 – slices Wild Idea Buffalo Salami, cut on the bias 1 or 2 slices – Vidalia onion, cut on the bias 1 – fresh jalapeño, sliced very thin Dijon Mustard Preparation: 1) Prepare all ingredients as suggested above. 2) Generously spread the Dijon mustard on both slices of sourdough. 3) Nestle the salami slices into the mustard, as many as you like, on top of one of the mustard covered bread slices. 4) Top with one or two slices of the Vidalia onion, and desired amount of thinly sliced jalapeno. 5) Cover with the other mustard covered bread slice and cut in half. Excellent, sublime, divine, and bueno!
The Tragedy of Phiney Flat
The north end of our ranch is part of a many thousand acre, level piece of ground known as Phiney Flat. By the county soil maps I know that the Flat is a fertile place for this part of the world and, in the places where the native, perennial grass still grows, it does extremely well. But people have been trying to farm other parts of the Flat since homesteading began in the early part of the twentieth century. For the most part, the efforts of these farmers were not successful. When we moved to this area, the neighbors with farming tendencies joked sheepishly that they only got a crop every three or four years, but that the federal government paid out for these “disasters” and so farming was profitable. Some of them would not meet your eyes when they talked like this but some actually winked. We are not crop farmers, we are farmers of grass. We know that plowing up native grasses destroys an ancient ecosystem of plants, animals, birds, and insects that have evolved here for thousands of years. Along with the plants, animals, birds, and insects goes the unique system that pulls CO2 from the air and, with the help of some microbes in healthy soil, splits the carbon (C) away from the oxygen (O2) and deposits it in the ground where it can’t create havoc in the atmosphere and cause climate change. As a happy side effect, the native grasses expire those two atoms of oxygen and make them available for us to breath. The reason that the native, perennial grasses do such a good job of this nifty trick is that sometimes 90% of a perennial plant’s mass is below the surface of the soil. It keeps growing every year and carbon builds with the root system. Of course, when someone plows up such a plant and root system and replaces it with an annual plant, which only lives for one year and has no time to build an extensive root system, the ability to sequestering carbon is reduced by a huge percentage. The fertility of the soil is hauled away in grain trucks each fall and the carbon is released into the atmosphere. Many people would disagree, but one of the lucky things about the American Great Plains is that, for the first hundred years of settlement, there was seldom enough rain to grow grain. The Great Plains was always considered one of the world’s greatest grasslands, but a poor place to farm. From the time of the buffalo right up through the era of the cowboy it has nourished countless herbivores. The buffalo, elk, antelope, cattle, and sheep grazed on the renewable grass and the fertility and the carbon stayed in the ground where it belongs. But now, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century all that is beginning to change. To get the whole picture you have to understand a few things about farming: Farming is about nurturing a single kind of plant and destroying all other plants that can compete with that chosen plant. In places where moisture is in short supply a farmer’s job is to make sure that the crop that he chooses to grow gets as much of the rainfall as possible. On most of the Great Plains, crops like corn, beans, wheat, and sunflowers do not get enough water to grow unless all the competition is killed. We call the other plants that try to grow in a farmer’s field weeds, and for generations the only way to get rid of them was to mechanically …
It's a Baby Buffalo!
Finding the first baby buffalo of the year, in a thousand acre pasture with last years remaining four foot grasses, is a little like finding a needle in a haystack. The new baby was greeted by many of the other buffalo with licks and soft grunts. The mother tolerated a few at a time before pushing them off and welcoming the next bunch. This was a new experience for us and it was fantastic to witness. A close by, Short Eared Owl, kept a watchful eye over the exciting welcoming party. *Short Eared Owls nest in the Great Plains grasses. The mother kept nudging it along as she grazed, until it had to stop for a little nap. She allowed me close enough to get a photo, before she moved it along into the dusky night. Help us welcome Wild Idea’s first baby buffalo of 2015!
DREAMING LIKE A BUFFALO
I watched my paint horse, Camo, stretch his nose out and sniff the nose of a young bull buffalo. They sniffed deeply and then, in unison, turned to look across the Cheyenne River and into infinity. It was hard to tell what was in their minds but I want to think that their daydreams are like mine: an enormous blue sky and rolling grasslands to a distant horizon. There is a steady breeze bringing the scent of possibilities. There are no restraints, no boundaries, and no limits. History merges with the present and the past. I don’t think that my daydreams are unique. I think that, many Americans dream like horses and buffalo. It is as if we can stand in their skins, stare with their beguiling dark eyes, and let the rare prairie rains drip benignly from our sturdy coats. We imagine ourselves as country boys or strong, young women with long smooth muscles – solid bodies, and steady hands. We feel a kind of innocence, tempered with confidence and power. There is the thousand-yard stare of wisdom, patients, and endurance. When we dream like horses and buffalo we can imagine ourselves as the center of the world. Yet the horse stands a little taller than the buffalo and there is something sad about the buffalo. They have long been misunderstood, exploited, commoditized, mystified, and abused. Even their identity has been hijacked by a succession of cultures. They are the animal with two names, buffalo and bison. The first name stems from the confusion of the Europeans who landed their puny boats on the eastern shore of America. Those crude men thought they were on a different continent and that the large, shaggy animals they found were a variant of the water buffalo they knew from Asia or the Cape buffalo they had heard of in Africa. It was centuries later that stuffy European taxonomists decided that the American bovine was a unique specie and named it Bison bison. A better name might be Tatonka, the name given by the nomadic natives of the Great Plains that, at least for a time, knew the buffalo best. It is a word that embodies not only the animal but also the habitat and the spirit of the animal. There is nothing erroneous or taxonomical about the name Tatonka. The buffalo that we know have been the center of a huge, continent-wide drama for perhaps 5,000 years but, before them, there were several other varieties. The first buffalo were native to what is now Asia and Europe and crossed into North America on the famous Baring land bridge. It is hard for us to imagine how different the world was back then – the continents all ajar, molten rock surging up from below, and sea levels rising and falling as a result of ice caps varying in thickness from mere ice sheets to gigantic water repositories many miles thick. But there was a window of about 50,000 years that all sorts of creatures made the trek across the land bridge. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of species moved. They traveled both ways – the ancestors of animals like camels and cheetahs heading for Asia and mammoths, ground sloths, and like on their way to America. Later, a few wretched humans trailed along behind the mammoths. I like to think of the tiny, eight inch tall great-grandmother of the modern horse moving carefully beside the giant ancestor of our buffalo, Bison antiquus. Did they size each other up in a long grassy valley between two mountain ranges somewhere in what is now Alaska? The ancient …
One More Afternoon Of Love
There is a tiny adobe cabin nestled in the sand dunes of far eastern New Mexico. No real road leads to it, just two faint tracks among the mesquite, love grass, blue stem, and cholla cactus. The dimensions are 16 feet by 20 feet with a small courtyard on the south side. A faded blue doorway, three windows, and a small stove pile protruding through the roof. For water, we tapped into a buried stock-tank line that ran behind the dying elm trees of the original homestead. There is a simple shower in the northwestern corner of the cabin, but there is no indoor toilet. By any standard it is Spartan living, but that is the way we planned it. The plan was drawn up in 1987 on an old, oak, kitchen table that I still use as a writing table. Erney, my oldest friend, and I built the outhouse in portable sections in the workshop on the old Broken Heart Ranch, where we lived together for twenty-five years. The vegas, bond beams, and the fourteen inch square column that holds up the roof came from a little sawmill in the Black Hills. It all fit into a battered horse trailer that made it to New Mexico with only two flat tires. The building site was on Jim Weaver’s newly acquired ranch where I had been spending part of each winter since sometime in the late 1970’s. Jim’s New Mexico Ranch is not what most people picture when they think of New Mexico. There are no mountains in sight. No fancy Santa Fe architecture, arts colonies, ancient pueblos, or timeless Spanish culture. This is hardscrabble Roosevelt County, New Mexico, settled by Arkansas homesteaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, organized in 1903, and dried out before 1930. The population had risen to 12,000 by 1910 but was only 6,500 in 1920. When Jim found this place in the 1970’s the land had been long ruined by homesteaders, ignorant of the needs of the fragile landscape. They scratched out farm fields in the sandy soil and begun communities, but by mid-century those fields had blown into massive sand dunes that supported very little life. Most of the people had moved away. The few that remained on the land were practicing a brand of farming that depended on government subsidies and a personal austerity seasoned with skullduggery. There was very little to recommend Roosevelt County, New Mexico to entrepreneurs. But for a few people interested in birdlife it has always been a Mecca. I was in my early thirties, working seasonal jobs and toiling over my second book about bird migration and the Great Plains. The idea of the book was to travel south with the lark buntings, raptors, waterfowl and meadowlarks. I’d made the trip many times before and I knew that, when I got to Jim’s ranch most of the birds that had left South Dakota, would be there waiting for me. In addition to the migrants there would be the year-around residents: birds like bobwhite quail, road runners, thrashers, white necked ravens, and probably the world’s greatest concentration of lesser prairie chickens. In those days there were tens of thousands of prairie chickens on Jim’s ranch alone and, in my naiveté, I could not see that it would not always be that way. But, of course, environments are always in flux. The few circle irrigators that I passed on my early, eight hundred mile trip from South Dakota to New Mexico seemed like insignificant straws drilled down into the immense and inexhaustible reservoir known as the Ogallala …
The Third Plate
If you haven’t yet read Dan Barber’s new book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, you should. This is not a book review but it needs to be said that Barber is a wonderful writer who can tell an important and complicated story as easily as chatting over dinner with old friends. The setup of the book is that three different “plates” can symbolize the evolution of food in America. The first is what many of us were raised on: meat and potatoes. The second plate is where we are now: more progressive ideas such as grass-fed, heirloom, and farm to table. The third “plate” is about serving up a delicious meal that “begins to reflect what the landscape can provide”. That is where Barber captured my attention – the place where “The Third Plate” merged with the philosophy of Wild Idea Buffalo Company. Though Barber admits to knowing nothing about the Great Plains, he includes the deterioration of grasslands on a list of ills brought about by a sick agricultural system – along with eroding soil, falling water tables, collapsing fisheries, and shrinking forests. He rightly connects the environmental crisis with the menus in white tablecloth restaurants and a food system that is more about the system than about the food it produces. The book is full of enlightening stories of the maiming effects to ecosystems from monocultures of corn and wheat and the assault on the ancient and sacred labyrinth of bio-diversity. Fighting these effects and the system that creates them are all imperatives that have shaped the evolution of Wild Idea Buffalo Company. Barber relates his efforts to fight these same effects at his Blue Hill Restaurant at Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture. At first glance Wild idea Buffalo Company – connected to many thousands of acres of remote buffalo country – has little in common with a supper-inventive, gourmet restaurant on an 80 acre farm dedicated to small scale, sustainable farming. But when you look closer, you find the missions of both to be very much the same. One of the memorable stories in the book is about the love and care taken by the livestock manager at Stone Barns farm when he moves the sheep from one pasture to the next. It mimicked the grazing pattern of our buffalo, except the buffalo make their own decisions about when to move. The fertility of New York sheep pastures must be thousands of times greater than our humble Great Plains, so it follows that instead of dealing with pastures of tens of thousands of acres the livestock manager at Stone Barns farm likely deals in football field sized pastures. The most notable similarity between Stone Barns farm’s moving of sheep and our moving of buffalo is the way the animals react to the fresh pasture – they love it, they need it, it is in their genes. The most notable dissimilarity is the fact that the fresh pasture at Stone Barn Farm is “managed by man”. The vegetative composition of the pastures at Stone Barns is likely a selection of annually planted tame grasses. Wild Idea pastures are mostly made up of the perennial, deep-rooted grasses evolved to thrive in drought conditions. In fact, what was left out of entire book, “The Third Plate”, was the realization that, in a few parts of the North American continent, there are places that remain, to a large extent, the way they were when Europeans first began to alter the environment. One of the stories in the book, that was news to me, was …
EXCERPT FROM DAN'S NEW BOOK
Dear Friends – I have neglected my duties as a blogger, as I have been traveling around to book stores and conferences doing readings from my new book. It is a memoir about the last ten years of our lives and the life of Wild Idea Buffalo Company. It is peopled with folks that many of you know from your connection to Wild Idea. Here are the first few pages from chapter one. Very Best – Dan WILD IDEA Buffalo & Family In a Difficult Land CHAPTER ONE Some nights, when I step out onto my ranch house porch, I am met by the immense, roiling waves of color from the northern lights. But in other seasons I find coiled rattlesnakes or perhaps a wind so cold that skin can freeze in minutes. By any economic ciphering, choosing the Great Plains for my home has caused me to slip behind my contemporaries who chose New England, or California, or the hills of Georgia. Still, like loving a drunk, I had little choice. For over forty years the prairies have been my home and I’ve shared them willingly with all of the species that also called them home. It took many years for me to understand that this place is not only a chaotic jumble of species clawing at each other to assert themselves, but a complex web of life clawing to keep its balance. I love the wind that stokes me as I sit on my front porch, even when it is too cold to endure. It is the wheezing breath of a single, huge, living thing, and I am a part of it. For the years between 1972 and 1990 I worked as a biologist, first for the State of South Dakota and then for the Peregrine Fund, based at Cornell University’s famous Ornithology Laboratory. I had no formal training in biology so my duties were really the work of a technician, always seasonal, always in the mountains and plains of the Intermountain West. The focus was on helping to reestablish the endangered peregrine falcon to the cliffs along the Rocky Mountain Front, but my mind always wandered to the entire ecosystem that the birds depended upon – the rolling, untold miles of grass that we call the Great Plains. The falcons were raised from captive parents, first at Ithaca, New York, then Fort Collins, Colorado, and finally at Boise, ID. My colleagues in the labs hatched the chicks and I picked them up at about one month of age. My job was to get the chicks to one of several dozen release sites, then to do my best to see that they learned to fly and hunt for themselves. It was wonderful work, freewheeling and physically challenging. I traveled by pickup, horseback, helicopter, and on foot to a different site every day. Almost everyone who helped in the effort to reestablish peregrine falcons was young, but it was more than youthful exuberance that kept us going. We were driven by the conviction that we were doing something of real value. Early soldiers in the environmental struggle that is still searching for definition, we sensed that our lives were under siege by immense forces beyond our control. DDT, used aggressively for decades by agri-business, is a powerful insecticide that increased crop yields around the world. But it was clear to most of us that the benefits were grossly outweighed by the harm. The toxic chemical quickly spread into the entire food chain and did damage to all sorts of species, from soil microbes to human beings. In 1972, DDT was …
Kirkus Review
KIRKUS REVIEW WILD IDEA Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land by Dan O’Brien South Dakota novelist and memoirist O’Brien (The Indian Agent, 2004, etc.) delivers a bracing portrait of the pleasures—and considerable pains—of ranch life on the lone prairie. “The best definition of success on the Great Plains is the ability to move from one disappointment to the next without losing your enthusiasm,” writes the author, who, long ago, had the odd idea that he might just try his hand at raising buffalo—“a unique species that thrived only in the center of the North American continent”—in somewhat the same way as one might raise cattle or sheep. Underscore somewhat: O’Brien and his partner realized early on that becoming just any old livestock producers would yield just any old livestock, and “neither Jill nor I wanted anything to do with forcing buffalo through the cattle production model.” Instead, working with like-minded friends, O’Brien resolved to produce organic, free-range bison before those words were current. Passages of his memoir are not for the squeamish, especially those involving the evisceration, joint loosening and beheading of captive animals. Overall, however, this is a deeply humane book that looks at ranching as a sustainable enterprise, a way of life more than an economic engine. The author’s critique of the cycle of debt, techno-lust and more debt that the economic engine calls for will be both familiar and welcome to fans of Wendell Berry and Gretel Ehrlich. The best parts of the book, though, are O’Brien’s portraits of the people of the Plains, such as a friend and partner who, self-taught and immensely hungry for both knowledge and experience, still melts down at the prospect of driving in a big city in which he has no business. There may be plenty of disappointments out on the Plains, but this book is not one of them. Dan will be at the South Dakota Book Festival in Sioux Falls this friday and saturday, September 26th & 27th. For a complete event schedule go to http://www.sdbookfestival.com
SEVEN MILE POINT
Almost fifty years ago I was a freshman at Michigan Technological University. I did not go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for academic reasons – not interested in philosophy, mathematics, or engineering like almost everyone else. Those years spent way up north – actually on the Keweenaw Peninsula in the heart of an important copper mining region and hence the home of what was begun as the Michigan School of Mining and Technology – were actually a sort of placeholder for my life. There wasn’t much time for studying. The Vietnam War was raging and a lot of the energy that remained after girls and beer was absorbed by our conflicted feelings about the war and a changing society. My career as a college athlete did not last much past the first football season and since I had only enough interest in studying to get by, any extra time I found during that first snowy winter and all the falls and springs to come found me outdoors. In the autumn, my friends and I hiked for ruffed grouse and sat stone still, staring into the yellow, orange, and red treetops for black squirrels. In winter, we snow-shoed and cross-country skied. In the spring we canoed and fished the Sturgeon River. Years later, when I finally read Hemmingway’s famous short story, Big Two-Hearted River, I was convinced that the Sturgeon River was indeed the Big Two-Hearted River that kept the hero of the story, Nick Adams, sane in the face of war. Forty-five lightening years passed before I revisited the Keweenaw Peninsula. I was lured back by local fraternity brothers who, like me, had scattered to all corners of Earth but, in retirement, were filtering back into the Copper Country. Jill came along to see if the college stories had any basis in fact and to see the soggy, forested countryside that had had such a powerful effect on this self-confessed denizen of the treeless, dusty Great Plains. For two days we ate and drank way too much. The stories of glory days gone by were told, edited, and told again. By the morning of the third day I was longing for peace and quiet. I could have sneaked away and re-read those Hemmingway stories or the Upper Peninsula stories of Jim Harrison but had only brought along Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, The Bully Pulpit. It is a great book, but just then, it seemed all wrong. To paraphrase the Cross Canadian Ragweed band – it’s too damned serious and way too long. I needed to get away to the dark, cut-over, white pine forest where there were shady game trails paralleling the Big Two-Hearted River and moss-covered foot paths that might be the very ones that led Brown Dog to the Lake Superior shore. I suppose Jill could see it in my eyes and that is why she came up with a way to get off by ourselves. “We have a Wild Idea customer in Ahmeek.” She said this, seemingly out of context when everyone could hear. “We should go visit them.” Only twenty miles away was the small Keweenaw community of Ahmeek. It looks like it has seen more prosperous days and that the population has dwindled since the era of big copper. But there are signs of the bustling commerce of yesteryear, a burgeoning tourist trade, and, just beyond the old frame houses, is the wild Upper Peninsula that I hoped had survived the commercial onslaught of the last fifty years. Among the faded houses is the historic Ahmeek Streetcar Station, which features Wild Idea Buffalo meat and delicious, locally-made …
Wildness Retained
*This essay appeared in Patagonia’s recent catalogue focused on falconry. It is reprinted with permission from Patagonia, Inc. For fifty years my days and dreams have been haunted by falcons, eagles, and hawks. I have been fortunate enough to live close to them. I know the strength of their talons and have felt their surprising weight on my fist. I’ve studied the perfect intricacies of their feathers and smelled their sweat, clean breath. But anyone who has spent much time out-of-doors knows them too; a dark streak across your path, a spot circling high in a limitless sky, a rush of wings behind an accidentally flushed duck. If you are lucky, you have experienced a frozen instant through a car window, when your eyes meet a cold stare from a fence post. In that breathless flash it is sometimes difficult to tell if the eyes are ferruginous, goshawk, or merlin. There is no recollection of color pattern or body shape. The guidebooks fail us, but we know it was a bird of prey. We can feel it. Of course we are connected to everything. But with the birds of prey, our connection is uniquely one of envy. Of the great triumvirate of human allies – dogs, horses, and birds of prey – only the birds of prey have remained rooted in the natural world. Our relationship to these three species was originally based in hunting for human survival. These are the species with whom we became partners and the holdover from those ancient days is that dogs are valued for their loyalty, horses for their strength, and birds of prey for their ability to inspire us with a wildness that we have forsaken. While mankind has moved away from their environment, birds of prey have remained part of it. It is not happenstance that the symbol of many civilizations is a falcon, eagle, or hawk. Their images are cast into coins, shields, sculptures, and elegant jewelry. In his book, “Birds over America”, Rodger Tory Peterson put our relationship with the peregrine falcon into provocative terms. “Man has emerged from the shadows of antiquity with a Peregrine on his wrist. Its dispassionate brown eyes, more than those of any other bird, have been witness to the struggle for civilization, from the squalid tents on the steppes of Asia thousands of year ago, to the marble halls of European kings in the seventeenth century.” The eyes that Peterson wrote about in 1948 continue to witness our struggle for civilization. While they still observe conquest, invention, and human exertion toward truth and beauty, they have taken on an additional role. In these days of the great environmental crisis, birds of prey have become our conscience and our guides. They choose not to not live in crowded, polluted places. They thrive on pristine landscapes and lead us to what is right and good about the world we are threatening to destroy. I am forever amazed at the number of environmentally conscious people who were led to their realization of our place on Earth by birds of prey. From childhood I have spent many days at the top of cliffs waiting for a tiny glimpse of a golden eagle or a prairie falcon. I’ve walked endless white-sand beaches and New England woodlots. I’ve cruised the Great Plain in winter, hoping to see gyrfalcons or rough-legged hawks. There have been many companions who have blossomed into scientists, philosophers, visionaries, and eco leaders. Over the years our conversations have been far ranging but, when we found the bird of prey that we were looking for, words always …
The Case For Selling Bison Meat
The Great Plains are enormous – about 32 million acres – but they are not limitless. In fact, the vast majority of the land that was once a healthy, bio-diverse buffalo range is now taken up by industrial agriculture – crop production, feedlots, and cattle grazing. There are only a few places where large-landscape, free-roaming buffalo husbandry is possible and the cost of that land exceeds its value when figured on a production analysis basis. No entity – non-profit conservation groups, wealthy individuals, or government agencies – has enough money to expand the modern buffalo range to a meaningful size. Those of us who are interested in that goal must turn to a realistic economic model that can create a cash flow that is up to the tasks of 1) operating large-landscape buffalo ranches and 2) gathering the necessary capital for expansion to the limits of the realistically available land. The huge buffalo herds of the pre-European Great Plains were kept in balance by large predators – mostly grey wolves and Native Americans – but also grizzly bears and mountain lions. All of those natural culling forces are gone. In their absence, and without the advent of new forces, modern buffalo herds would over populate their range to the point of ecosystem destruction in a few years – long before enough capital could be accumulated to acquire new land. The thoughtful and humane harvest of the excess buffalo mimics the effect of those natural forces. Selling the healthy red meat that would have gone to the large predators to modern people in search of healthy, truly grass-fed buffalo meat is the best, and perhaps the only, way to finance the recovery of America’s great buffalo herds.
Meaning of a Name
Many of the fathers in my family have been saddled with the deceptively simple, yet unusual, middle name of Hosler. It was my great grandfather’s last name and, though he blinked out of our scraggly family tree with an awkward Catholic divorce, the name lived on as the middle name of uncles, cousins and nephews. Most of the fathers in my family are Hoslers. My own father was William Hosler O’Brien. I am Daniel Hosler O’Brien. But I am not a father. My family has no grand and esteemed genealogy. I am garden variety American boy who knows almost nothing of lineage or legacy – nothing much in the way of ancestral knowledge beyond my own father who died young. For all I know the fathers that came before me might have sprung full grown from Midwestern soil. I never imagined that my middle name could have a history. For me it had no meaning at all and, I suppose that is not unusual. Only if you are saddled by a particularly odious first name would you care about your middle name. If your name is Clarence David or Ethel Marie you might opt for using your middle name. But if your first name is all right and your middle name is a little odd, you’re probably going to go with the first name. I didn’t think that Dan was bad so I went with it. Dan O’Brien. Short and sweet. There is nothing strange about opting for your first name, almost everyone does it. But here is the really strange part: I had no curiosity about my middle name. Didn’t know if it was English, Irish, German or Hawaiian. Had no idea if it had a meaning in its land of origin or if it was a just another name screwed up at Ellis Island. Fact is, I have never been much of a family guy. When they passed out passions, hobbies, and obsessions I missed the ones for succession, family mythology and legends. What I got was a great love for all things wild and particularly, for all wild things with feathers. I am a lover of birds, I watch birds. I hunt birds. I eat birds. I dream about them. I had homing pigeons before I had a Teddy bear. But I’ve never had any children. Luckily, I picked up a couple older step-children in my marriage to Jill. Lucas and Jilian have viewed me as their Father for fifteen years and, although it is not quite the same as fathering your own, it is close enough that I have had some pretty good Father’s Days. In fact, I’ve benefitted from a lot of the perks of fatherhood. I’ve watched a lot of basketball games. I’ve done multiplication tables thousands of times. I’ve awoken reluctant students very early on frosty the mornings. I’ve given scary driving lessons. I’ve sat through graduations and laid awake worrying about slippery roads. All those experiences were gifts that are usually reserved for fathers. I sometimes feel like a thief for stealing those experiences. I have gathered a mountain of life’s good stuff for which my claim is shaky and I can’t help thinking that the legacy that is supposed to pass from father to children is tattered at best. The balance sheet of gifts given and gifts received has been tipped in my favor for years but this spring it came off the rails. Jilian and her husband, Colton Jones, had a baby boy. He is the first new-born I have been around. I’d never made stupid faces to an infant. …
Celebrating The Earth From The Ground Up
Spring is the easiest time of year to celebrate the earth because burgeoning beauty is everywhere. Our connection to our environment is heightened. For the first time in many months there is color in our gardens and in the trees. Birds flit between branches like sparks of blue, red, and yellow. Warmth and the promise of plenty begin with the newly powerful sunshine being absorbed by Earth. Energy from a hundred million miles away is being gathered by our planet and stoking the incubator of life. As a sort of an Earth Day prayer, we like to get down on our knees, dig our fingers into the warm April soil, and feel life regenerating in our hands. The riot of gold finches buzzing around the house distract us momentarily from the sensual feel and scent of Earth. It is the commonest of wonders but without it there is nothing. The dirt in our gardens is fueling those gold finches. The dirt is stimulating the micros that create fertility. It is nourishing and supporting the roots of our grasses. Out here on the Great Plains the roots and root hairs of plants sometimes burrow twenty feet deep and amount to miles in total length. The mass of unseen roots is the part of our perennial grasses and make up nearly 70% of the plant’s living volume. They pump the sun’s energy into the soil. They suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it inside the earth. They move water from below, sort the oxygen from hydrogen, and give us the very air that we breathe. The respirator of all the Wild Idea Buffalo ranches is the soil and the grasses that the buffalo walk upon. We take dirt very seriously out here. We work with Mother Earth to keep it healthy because the health of our buffalo and the meat that they produce depends on it. So turn you face to the April sun, breath deep, and know that you have a reason to celebrate Earth Day. It is your mother’s special day. She is watching out for you! Celebrate with us from the Ground Up, and take advantage of our 25% off Ground Earth Day Special! Plus receive “free shipping on all packages” to your door, all at a neutral carbon footprint.
Bluebird Days
My Sibley’s Field Guide to the Blue Bird says that there are three kinds of bluebirds in North America: Eastern, Western, and Mountain. The first bluebird that I remember seeing had to have been an eastern. It was standing on an Ohio fence post in the late 1950’s. Two posts down there was one of twenty-five bluebird house that I had helped build. It was a controversial grade-school project dreamed up by my biology teacher. Looking back over the last fifty-five years it is hard to imagine, but the idea of increasing the population of songbirds by supplying them with nesting boxes was a new concept. Those were different times. Bird watching was not an industry when I was a boy. I had heard of only one person who had a bird feeder in his backyard. He was a kooky, bespectacled, old guy named Mr. Price who had a low-level job at a local newspaper. He was thin like Ichabod Crane and he had gained renown as a whacko for approaching a group of high school kids who were picnicking in their car and throwing all their trash out the windows. Another thing that is now difficult to believe – littering was perfectly accepted. There was no such thing as a trash bag in a car, no roadside waste receptacles, and no such thing as a ticket for littering. The road ditches of nineteen-fifties Ohio looked a lot like the highways in many third world countries – bottles, cigarette butts, hamburger wrappers, and steel beer cans strewn with abandon. Mr. Price was ahead of his time. He had a big, brown, paper bag and walked all the way around the teenager’s car, picking up the trash. When the bag was full he went to the driver’s window, leaned in, and dumped the whole mess in the kid’s lap. Our little community went ballistic. Who was this guy that thought he could infringe on other people’s rights? What gave him the right to impose his views on the youth of our community? Complaints were aired on the Ed-op page of the newspaper where Mr. Price worked. His job was on shaky grounds. The sheriff’s department interviewed him and he got off with just a warning. Besides the biology teacher, Mr. Price was the only adult who helped us build the bluebird houses. By the time I graduated from high school and was on my way to spend the rest of my life on the Great Plains, eastern blue birds lined the roadsides of most of Ohio’s neat and tidy roads. From then on bluebirds were scares in my life. The distribution map in Sibley’s Field Guide indicates that there are eastern bluebirds in South Dakota, but the South Dakota Ornithologist Union says they are uncommon, especially in the western half of the state. I’ve never seen one out here. But on the grasslands, in mid-April we have an invasion the subtle, powder-blue cousin of the eastern bluebird, the mountain bluebird. They are common nesters in the high meadows of the Black Hills and farther west in the Rockies, but I have never seen one nest on our ranch. It is frustrating that every spring, for the past thirty-five years, a day comes in April when they are suddenly everywhere – ten or twelve to the mile, flitting iridescent blue along our fence lines. I want them to nest on our ranch but, when I look closely at Sibley’s distribution map I see a thin but ominous crescent of yellow arching from extreme southwestern South Dakota up and into central North Dakota. …
A Case for the Limping Metaphor
The trip back from a grazing seminar took me right through the center of the Black Hills. Jill was in the seat beside me, but we didn’t talk much. We were all talked out from spending most of the week in a classroom setting considering a holistic way of looking at buffalo grazing on the Great Plains. There were a dozen other people in attendance and so there was a lot of talking. It was a late winter afternoon and the roads were deserted. We were content with watching the Black Hills grow larger in the windshield. When Jill fell asleep, I turned on the radio but could only find a few country stations. I fiddled with the dial until I found one that played the old, classic stuff. Johnny Cash was walking the line, Bob Wills was singing about the yellow rose of Texas, and I was flipping back through the ideas in the grazing seminar. A lot of the topics concerned how grass grows and how buffalo eat it. That process is more complicated than you might think – it has a lot to do with the symbiosis that results from co-evolution. There had been a few “Christians” in the class and I wondered how they squared their professed faith with the evolutionary bedrock of life on the Great Plains. Soon after Jill and I entered the Hills, we passed through an 83,500 acre area of forest that burned in 2000. It was called the Jasper Fire and it burned hot and fast through country that I had surveyed 30 years before for peregrine falcons. That evening we drove through miles and miles of barren slopes. The hills looked like the Land of Oz where the wicked witch lived, but I noticed scores of white-tailed deer grazing on the grassy slopes between the charred remains of ponderosa pines. We did not find peregrines back in the 1980’s but we spent weeks walking the bottom of Hell Canyon and, in all that time, I didn’t remember seeing a single white-tailed deer. The Jasper and Hell Canyon area isn’t a grassland, but some of the same concepts that we talked about in our grazing seminar applied. Plants and animals have a natural succession in the way they regrow after devastating events that are common in natural settings. In the eyes of humans, fires, floods, and droughts are catastrophic, but nature simply begins again. Life forms with the lowest requirements stand ready to lead the charge. Years before, the Jasper fire area had begun its comeback with small annual plants. Those plants began to stabilize the soil with their roots and more complicated plants had gotten toe-holds in an empty environmental niche. The perennial grasses that the white-tailed deer were munching on came next. Now they were giving way to small brushy plants that would eventually allow the ponderosa pine to re-start. It was the same with The Green, Green Grass of Home that Porter Wagoner was singing about on the radio. Most prairie plants respond to stress by growing vigorously. One of the main concepts of the grazing seminar was that Great Plains grasses need the grazing stress from large herbivores. Those grasses were originally dependent on the pressure of the buffalo as the buffalo were dependent on them. The wolves and grizzly bears were dependent on the buffalo, and the coyotes were dependent on the larger predators. Everything broke down the sun’s energy that was stored in the plants and animals – the prairie dogs, the snakes, the toads, frogs, and all the ground nesting birds. Even microbes preform …
Wild Idea & Dining Around
Dan & Jill O’Brien recently made a trip out to San Francisco to attend the annual Sustainable Food Summit. During their time in San Francisco they were invited to participate in Joel Riddelle’s Dining Around radio show. It was a fantastic opportunity to share the Wild Idea story with listeners in the San Francisco area. Our segment starts at 17.15 (about halfway through)…Listen Here
Sustainable Practices?
I am sometimes astounded by how little people know about agriculture. But when I stop to think about the immense demographic changes in the United States since its founding, I begin to see how such a tragic loss of human knowledge could come about. From a country of nearly all farmers we have become a nation of 83% city dwellers. Our rural population declines by about 1.5% every year and with that decrease comes an erosion of the intimacy with land that makes us human. Before 1960, most farms were small, integrated operations growing a garden and some small grains with a few cows, hogs, chickens, maybe a couple turkeys and sheep. Those animals would roam around the farm all summer, choosing their diet from the vegetative biodiversity offered up by the land. They ate a diet that they had evolved to eat – a lot of grasses, forbs, and sedges that came ripe depending on the weather in that particular year and at that particular location. They ate leaves, and seeds, and insects, and nuts, and berries they found growing on their farm. In the winter they ate forage, mostly in the form of dried grasses that the farmer called hay. The forage was cut from local fields during the growing season. The animals ate excess or waist grain that the farmer couldn’t sell or use for food for his family. They didn’t eat much grain; they did not get terribly fat. The animals moved around their farm and spread their manure (sometimes with the help of the farmer) across the land so that the sun and rain could break down nutrients and dissolve them back into the soil. Energy from the sun worked its way through the plants and animals on the farm, from the microbes in the soil to the final product the farmers ate or sold. Things staid in a rough equilibrium and the biodiversity of the farm was not threatened. That is the way grazing operations like Wild Idea still work. All that should be common knowledge, but we have visitors to the Wild Idea ranches who ask where the buffalo’s food comes from. Do we replant the grass every year? What do all the birds, prairie dogs, antelope, and deer eat? Of course the only additives to our ranches are sunlight and the nitrogen that the plants pull from the atmosphere. Everything on the place evolved to eat the grass or something else that eats the grass. Our brand of agriculture could be described as the maintenance of the natural biodiversity of the landscape. Then came the use of the technologies that made industrial farming possible. For the most part those technologies had to do with ways to manipulate the natural flora and fauna. Suddenly farmers had powerful tractors to plow up the ground and alter it from a bio diverse farm to a field, where only one species could grow. All other plants, animals, or insects could be destroyed with chemicals or mechanical cultivation. If the natural fertilization systems were destroyed in the process, they could be replaced by chemical fertilizers. Fertile farms became monocultures where tremendous amounts of one crop were grown. Driven by the machinery and chemical companies, legislation was passed to make this transition from fertility to sterility easy and profitable for farmers. They were able to exchange the lifestyle of farming for the businesses of industrial agriculture. The age of the row crops was born. Row crops can be about any plant that is planted in rows with space left between for cultivating out the wild competitors that steal water and …
Food For the Love of Land & Sea
A couple of weeks ago Dan and I were in San Francisco attending a Sustainable Food Summit, which disappointingly was mostly about getting certifications to put on your products. In short certifications have become their own multimillion-dollar industry. Although some of this work is very important, and certifications can be very helpful, we prefer hanging with the front line doers. More on certifications, to follow at a later date. Luckily we had other business to attend too, which brought a group of like-minded foodies and environmental conservationist together for a dinner. This was a dinner that would make any food lover giddy! It was held at the Renaissance Forge, a Black Smiths welding shop owned by artist, hunter – gather, foodie extraordinaire, Angelo Garro. The address to the Forge led us to the end of a back alleyway. Not knowing quite what to expect, we entered through a heavy door, below the metal works sign. In the middle of the room, illuminated by candles, was a long table laid with linens, crystal and a centerpiece of tangerines and artisan baked bread. The warm glow provided just enough light to take in the workshop details of shelve lined walls, filled with leftover iron parts and pieces that may be needed someday. It was beautiful! We continued through, carefully walking on old, buckling, wooden planks. The worn wood floor stopped and we stepped down onto a polished dirt floor. There we found Angelo, with Yvon & Malinda Chouinard, talking about the wild caught Sockeye Salmon that was grilling on a large open grill, over amber colored, wood coals. A cutout in the roof served as the exhaust system. The Chouinards are the founders of Patagonia and continue to be business leaders for environmental change. They also started 1% for the planet. Dan & Yvon had met years ago during the Peregrine Falcon DDT crisis. Beyond that was a wonderful cluttered commercial style kitchen full of people, including Wes & Dana Jackson. Wes Jackson is a long time environmentalist and is the founder of “The Land Institute”. He is currently developing a perennial grain called Kernza. This perennial grain, with a deep carbon sequestering root system, would require only harvesting and milling. A giant step, in the right direction! Around the corner coming out of the walk in closet, which had wild boar hocks, and homemade sausages hanging from the rafters, was Alice Waters with an arm load of Angelo’ homemade Pinot Noir. We made our introductions and helped her with the bottles of wine. Alice is the owner of the world famous restaurant Chez Panisse and is the Vice President of Slow Food International. She also started the Edible Schoolyard, which has taken on nationally. The meal was a collaboration of sustainably produced foods, simply and artistically prepared by Angelo and friends. The first coarse was handmade Kernza Pasta with Truffles, which was earthy, rich and wonderful. This was followed by grilled, wild caught, Sockeye Salmon with a hint of citrus. But the showstopper was the Wild Idea Bison Tenderloins, simply seared with herbed salt and pepper. The wine, the bread, and the freshly picked tangerines, were all fantastic as well. Words of encouragement were shared, glasses were raised and waning spirits were renewed by the shared passions. The setting, the food and the company made for a memorable, magical night. The long seminar days that followed joyfully ended with good meals as we ate our way around San Francisco. There is a heightened environmental awareness in the city, and it is often reflected in the food. Food choices for the love …
Hearing the Rattle
There was some disturbing news on our local radio station this morning. A couple herpetologists were on NPR explaining that some rattlesnakes in our area seem to be losing their ability to rattle. The sound of a rattlesnake is guaranteed to stop a human being in his or her tracks – it erases the illusion of luxury and modernity and sends us back to our biological beginnings. The sound is chilling but not loud, nothing like the screeching of truck tires, the rush of an oncoming train, the cough of a midnight lion, or the piercing chorus of wolves beyond the campfire’s glow. It is really more of buzz than a rattle – like a tiny exhaust fan with a bent blade. If it weren’t for our genetic memory it might go unnoticed in any modern kitchen decked out with labor saving devices producing heat and in need of cooling. But we have evolved to know what the sound of rattlesnake means. Our response is atavistic: we hear the buzz and register fear. One of my favorite children’s books is SOFT CHILD: How Rattlesnake Got It’s Fangs. It is a Native American folktale that explains that, after the Sky God made all the animals, he brought them together and said that each creature could choose a method to protect itself. Some chose speed, flight, claws, teeth, or camouflage. At that time Rattlesnake was soundless and very vulnerable, so to keep other animals from stepping on him, he asked for a rattle to let them know that he was there. It was only after Rabbit and Skunk ignored the rattle and began harassing Rattlesnake that the Sky God gave him fangs. That was when the buzz became the warning that lives in the human soul. Around our ranch we hear the sound of Rattlesnake several times every year. Over the years, a few dogs, mostly dumb puppies have been bitten. None have died of the bite, but we have spent too many nights comforting them and too many dollars at the veterinarian. People are rarely bitten and, when they are, it is usually because they are fooling around with the snake – like the puppies, or Rabbit and Skunk. In fact, the fangs that the Sky God gave Rattlesnake are seldom used for defense – the rattle works just fine as long as people heed the warning. Even if people are too frightened to give rattlesnakes their space and go searching for the source of the buzzing sound with a shovel, it still works out. But the balance is upset when too many people encroach on the habitat of the rattlesnake. It becomes a very small example of what happens when one species over populates and moves into the domain of another. Everyone is reacting in the way their genes are driving them. The rattlesnakes are trying to warn the humans away and the humans are trying to protect themselves by killing the snakes that could hurt them. The trouble is that, when large numbers of humans misread the rattle of a snake and kill them, they become unwitting actors in the evolution that puts the humans in just the sort of danger that they think they are avoiding. As they kill the frightened rattlesnakes that try to warn them to stay clear, they select for rattlesnakes that give no warning before they resort to the fangs that the Sky God gave them. The irony is that humans make the snakes more dangerous. I have to admit to the murder of more than a few rattlesnakes. We love our pleasant yard. …
Thinking Like A Mountain
The Sunday after Thanksgiving, just as the sun was lightening the sky, I sat in my pickup truck on an enormous flatland above the Cheyenne River. I had just finished flying my gyrfalcon, Sally, and she was happily having her breakfast on the ground beside the truck where I could keep an eye on her and frighten off predators that might see her and move in for an easy meal. Usually, I sit beside her in the grass as she eats, sharing a little time with her. She enjoys taking her meal in the fresh, clean, Great Plains air and every morning that I could, I tried to be with her, to simply be quiet for an hour before my day got crazy. But that day, I sat in the truck for two reasons: first, Thanksgiving had assured in a blast of cold air that I was not yet acclimated to, and second, there was a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition that I wanted to listen to. Being an arctic bird, Sally was loving the fifteen degree temperature and the fifteen mile per hour wind. She stood proud and defiant, facing the wind and clutching the last of this year’s migrating mallards. Her eyes were large, solid ebony, slightly squirted, and unblinking into the sun that was now a full hand above the horizon. On that distant horizon, on the other side of the Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, in the area called the Conata Basin, one of our buffalo herds moves through native grass like a couple hundred tiny, black phantoms of the forgotten past. At six o’clock that morning NPR had gotten my attention by mentioning the very land that I was looking over. They had promised to talk about the black-footed ferrets of South Dakota’s Conata Basin. Now, as I watched Sally watching the very land that Elizabeth Shogren was talking about, I began to recognize names of people and places that I knew well. Randy Griebel, Travis Livieri, Dean Biggins, Badlands National Park, an assortment of mesas and drainages. Elizabeth Shogren was talking about the center of our nation – my stomping grounds – a place where I could travel, literally for days without seeing another person. I’ve never been shipwrecked but now have an idea what it must be like to be rescued. Thirty years before, I drove the same trails and ridges that Elizabeth described with a biologist who only found a few ferrets in his entire career. In the first six years of this century, when the ferrets were doing well, I rode them again with biologists Randy Griebel and Travis Livieri. We drove in total darkness listening to the likes of Eddie Van Halen and watching for green eyes. I helped trap them, measure them, and give them physicals. I touched them and smelled their musky scent. I stared at them and tried to understand what it would be like to teeter on the edge of extinction. Here is what I learned about ferrets that some people may not know: Thrilling as it is to spot the green flash of their eyes, magnificent as they are to behold, they are most precious for what they represent. They stand in for all that is wild; the coyotes, the swift fox, the burrowing owls, the badgers, and thousand other species. They are a piece of something much greater than anyone alive today has ever seen. And, when our Wild Idea partner bought some ranch land in the Conata basin and began running Wild Idea buffalo on it and the associated federal land leases that supported …
After The Blizzard
Last Saturday, National Bison Day, we awoke to a beautiful sunrise and the promise of temperatures in the mid sixties. I decided to let the day warm. Then I set out into the buffalo herd, for a few updated buffalo snapshots. It was the first time that I had been in the herd since we gathered them after the blizzard. I was greeted first by a Buffalo Cow. She was a beauty, so I started snapping some photos and asked her to show me some love. She stuck out her tongue, which I interpreted as her blowing me a kiss. I continued moving through the herd, and was hoping to find this years summer calves that had lost their mothers in the storm. I found them as fat as bears and safe under the protection of their aunts and uncles. The youngest calf, that was only a couple weeks old when the blizzard hit, is doing fine too. The calves behind and beside it, were born in the summer, which is identifiable by their size difference. Their winter coats are coming in nicely, which is timely with todays new fallen snow. Our own Dan O’Brien participated in the local celebration of National Bison Day, at the Museum of The American Bison in Rapid City. Check the link below to hear a short interview with Dan and to learn more about the museum.Stay warm..maybe with a pot of Buffalo Chili! http://www.newscenter1.tv/stories/14658.aspx
U.S. to Celebrate Second Annual National Bison Day this Saturday
Noted Buffalo Author and Rancher Dan O’Brien to Speak at Museum of the American Bison in South Dakota RAPID CITY, S.D.— The buffalo—revered for its exquisite nature and large size—will be celebrated across the U.S. on Sat., Nov. 2 as the country celebrates the second annual National Bison Day. This year, for this first time, the U.S. Senate has passed a resolution designating the date as National Bison Day. Award-winning author and buffalo rancher Dan O’Brien will be one of the featured speakers at the Museum of the American Bison (www.bisonmuseum.org) in Rapid City, S.D. O’Brien is the author of Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch, the true story of how he returned buffalo to his land after an absence of more than 150 years. O’Brien is the owner of Wild Idea Buffalo, the largest e-retailer of 100% grassfed buffalo (www.wildideabuffalo.com). Other events on Saturday at the Museum include a buffalo chili cook-off, feather painting demonstration and Native American dancers. “Perhaps some might consider it odd that a buffalo harvester is part of National Bison Day. But the truth is we need to keep working to re-introduce buffalo to the American diet for our benefit and the overall survival of the animal,” Dan explains. “My vision is to restore the Great Plains through land and animal management practices are as close to nature’s intentions as possible.” O’Brien is a two-time winner of the National Endowment for the Arts individual artist’s grant, a two time winner of the Western Heritage Award, and a 2001 recipient of the Bush Creative Arts Fellowship. Wild Idea Buffalo is lean and low in calories, fat and cholesterol but high in Omega-3s. The animals are antibiotic and hormone free, non-confined, free-roaming and humanely, field-harvested. Wild Idea Buffalo is a Cooking Light Taste Test Winner and Bon Appetit has said it’s “faintly sweet, thoroughly meaty, and utterly delicious.” The ranch was recently featured on the Food Network. Buffalo is the only red meat recommended by the American Heart Association. Further details about National Bison Day are available at www.votebison.org/events.
Conversations with the Vegetable Guy
This is a short keynote address given to the Mill City Farmer’s Market in Minneapolis on Sept. 8, 2013. A dozen years ago, during a semester when I was teaching at Carleton College, I wandered down to the Co-op to see what it was all about. I had never been inside a food co-op and I was curious to know what drove the people who worked there. I found the vegetable guy way in the back stocking the coolers. He had been one of the founding members and he knew a lot about food, the food industry, and how tough it was to compete with the factory farms. He was an older, hippy-type that barely raised his head to look at me as he stocked the lettuce, green beans, squash, and rutabagas. He wore his graying hair in a ponytail with a hair net. “The big food companies just do everything as cheaply as they can,” he said. “That’s kind of the idea isn’t it?” I’d been thinking a lot about business lately and I was sincere in what I said, but he looked up at me with deep exasperation in his grey eyes. “Your view of business is the standard party line: Markets will work everything out.” My comment had touched a nerve. “That idea only works if you add in ALL the costs.” He had a rutabaga in his hand and tossed it up and down like a pitcher contemplating a fast ball. “At the top of Monsanto’s list of crimes, misdemeanors, sins, and oversights is the accounting error of grabbing profits while pushing the costs down the line.” “Like to the next generation.” “Like to the next generation. Bull’s eye.” He was still tossing the rutabaga up and down. “Now take this humble vegetable. It was grown about six miles from here. No pesticides, herbicides to worry about cleaning up. No water stolen from some imperiled fish.” He stopped tossing the rutabaga, held it in front of his eyes like Hamlet considering the skull of Yorick. “This is a rutabaga that comes with no I.O.Us. It is what it appears to be. A simple rutabaga. No future medical bills attached. No animals, plants, or microbes have been abused in its production. The world has not changed because it has come to be.” He tossed it into the air one more time, caught it neatly, and placed it on the growing pyramid of rutabagas. The vegetable guy told me that he had been in the sustainability business since the late sixties when he dropped out of college to join a commune in New Hampshire. “Been at it a long time,” he told me. “Composting, biological controls, organic, free range, local, polycultures, CSA’s, farmer’s markets.” He waived his free hand to indicate there were a lot more labels that he just couldn’t think of right then. “You name it, I’ve been there.” His eyes went wistful and his arms stopped moving. “Started off working with Caesar Chavez. I ran the mimeograph machine.” He gently picked up another rutabaga and I knew that he was thinking back over the years since he had first peeled himself away from the direction that American agriculture was heading. I wondered how he thought of himself and the choices he’d made. “Are you doing any good?” I asked. He was dreamy again and it took a moment for him to come back to our conversation. When his eyes finally found mine, they could not quite latch on. “I don’t know,” he said. There was a tiny shake of his head. “It depends on the …
The Strenuous Life
We harvested buffalo just north of the small southwestern North Dakota town of Bowman. It was our first time harvesting in North Dakota and we drove up the night before to meet the Director of North Dakota’s Meat Inspection Program and her Senior Inspector. Though a lot of paperwork had passed between my desk and theirs, it was the first time they had actually walked through the Mobile Harvester. They liked what they saw and we spent an hour and a half ironing out the slight differences between South Dakota’s meat inspection regulations and North Dakota’s. The whole crew was tired when we hit the sack but we were up at five o’clock to get out to the buffalo ranch by six o’clock and be set up at seven. The inspectors were there by seven-thirty and we checked and cross checked to be sure that everything was just right. Before Jerry and the Senior Inspector drove out to shoot the first buffalo we all stood at the rear of the Mobile Harvester and went through the safety procedures. Shane went down the list. “Always be thinking safety. We got sharp knives, guns, slippery floors, and heavy buffalo on high rails. Steady is better than fast. Everybody think.” Jerry drove the semi and carefully shot the buffalo, Shane and Cory were on the skinning floor, and my brother, Scott, and I were there to move the heavy offal barrels, hides, and heads away from the Harvester as the animals were processed. By the end of the day we had moved over two tons of not very pleasant material to sanitary places. It was hot, dirty, and windy work but the day sped by. By three o’clock eight perfect buffalo carcasses hung cooling in the refrigeration room of the Mobile Harvester. The inspectors were gone for the day but they would be back the next day to do it all again. We finished sterilizing the harvester and pulled it out of the pasture. Everyone was tired and needed a bath, but the skinners were the most tired and ready to go into town to eat and get some serious rest for the next day of harvest. But Scott and I weren’t ready to quit and it occurred to me that we were only sixty miles from one of America’s most interesting historical sites. “You every been to Medora?” I asked. “What’s Medora?” he asked. “Medora was just an old cow town. But the area is all about Theodore Roosevelt. The national park is named for him and he had two ranches in the Little Missouri River badlands.” “How far? “Hour by the asphalt and maybe two by the gravel.” We took the gravel and as soon as we turned west the land changed from huge islands of grain fields to rolling prairie that soon became the breaks of the Little Missouri River. Our gravel road converged with the deep and beautiful portion of the badlands near where Deep Creek and Sand Creek snake down from the south. In a matter of a few miles we left the grain fields behind and burst onto the high ground overlooking the hundreds of square miles that were the domain of Theodore Roosevelt between 1882 and 1887. Here, not forty miles from where we had harvested that day, was the site of Roosevelt’s first meeting with the last of the great herds of buffalo that for centuries have defined the Great Plains. Roosevelt arrived here when buffalo numbers were at their lowest ebb. The remnants of the millions had found temporary refuge in the rugged badlands …
Saying goodbye to summer…..
This August has found me at the Wild Idea office on more of a fulltime bases. I have really enjoyed working with the plant crew (more on that in September’s newsletter), but it has also made me really appreciate my weekends. I try to get out in the buffalo at least once on the weekend. Sitting amongst them, centers me and also gives an occasional opportunity to capture “the photo”. I didn’t capture it this month, but here are a few that I thought were worthy of sharing. The growing calves are really playful and fun to watch, and seem so big compared to the new late calves. Dan is enjoying his new falcon “Clarence”. He is flying free and has had some successful hunts. We are looking forward to the shared duck, grouse & pheasant meals! ____________________ We currently have a smokin’ hot special on our Wild Idea Ground Buffalo sampler. So when I received a call from “ a soccer mom / football mom” who is on a tight budget, asking what I would recommend when feeding a bunch of hungry 11 year olds and teenagers, I gave her my recipe for “Buffalo Sloppy Joe’s”. To confirm it would satisfy, I made a batch for the plant crew at Wild Idea. It was a hit and fed 12. Wild Idea Buffalo Sloppy Joe’s (Serves 12) Ingredients: 2 tsp. olive oil 1 onion, diced fine 2 lbs. Wild Idea Ground Buffalo 2 tsp. each: black pepper, cumin, mustard 1 tsp. each: salt, chili powder 2 Tb. brown sugar 1 Tb. garlic, chopped ¾ cup ketchup ¾ cup water 12 hamburger buns Instructions: In heavy skillet over medium high heat, heat oil. Add chopped onion and sauté for 4 minutes. Crumble ground buffalo into pan, stirring together and breaking into smaller pieces. Add spices while meat is browning and stir in. When meat is browned, add ketchup and water, stir to incorporate and let come to full heat. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve on hamburger buns or smaller slider size buns for smaller kids. Great for casual dinner, after the game or tailgate parties! ___________________________________________________ I’ve had a couple of requests for updates on the puppies, and since it is the dog days of summer it seems only appropriate. Below are brother’s (Henry Dog’s children), Shiner, and Huckleberry, taking a break from their fierce battle that I interrupted. And Fargo, who is in training for this year’s hunting season. Then there are the birds, which are starting to gather and slowly vacate, leaving the ranch a little quieter with each passing day. I caught two songbirds at the bird feeder the other day sharing a meal; a baby Chickadee and Gold Finch. I remain obsessed with photographing Jilian and Colton’s chickens and guinea’s. They are such characters and their colors are so intense! While driving around in the cottonwood pasture and along the river, I started noticing wooden animals everywhere. Here are a few of my favorites – named in what I feel is obviously appropriate. Do you see anything else? Would love to hear your thoughts. As we start to say goodbye to summer, we are taking in as much of the outdoors as possible, and are really looking forward to the Labor Day weekend. We plan to take in a PowWow on the Cheyenne River Reservation. A couple of the Wild Idea artisan butchers have their children participating in dance competitions, and they are also going to be setting up a food stand, selling delicious Wild Idea Buffalo Burgers! Definitely not to …
Back At It, After The Wedding
The wedding is over and we are starting to get back on track, (wedding photos to come in July’s newsletter). To unwind from it all, I got out and stalked the wild things that live on the ranch with us. The below photos are of a Carolina Sphinx Moth and of a Screech Owl that fledged a week ago from the bird box just beyond the house. This same bird box has housed Wood Ducks, and Kestrel’s. We also celebrated my almost 50th birthday, with a small dinner party, cooked by son Lucas. A good time was had by all! Some may have over birthday caked? Back at it, means back to work. My favorite part of working at the office in town, is drive home. In the photos below I am 7 miles from the ranch. One is looking west and the other is looking south east to the ranch. It always takes my breath away. Toward the end of the month we entertained a group of 16. All had a wonderful time. Our evening included; a drive through the buffalo herd, a sundowner on the bluff overlooking the ranch, and a delicious Wild Idea Buffalo dinner to end the evening. A big thanks to the kids (Lucas, Jilian & Colton) for all their hard work in helping make it a success. I am back to a little food photography, Dan is back to writing, training a new falcon and eating the food photography! Wishing you all a wonderful weekend and a red, white and buffalo 4th of July!
The upcoming wedding plans are coming together
With many of the larger upcoming wedding plans in place, we are down to the details. As a caterer, I have been a part of many weddings, and have taken care of the “food” details. But, with the wedding at the ranch, the “other” details seem endless. In the last few weeks, I have traveled with Dan to the Cheyenne River Reservation to harvest buffalo at Rocky & Pam Afraid of Hawks. I bring my camera, snap a few pictures or video, ask a few questions and try to be quiet. I watch Rocky bring subtle actions to his nephew’s attention. Dan and I leave the ranch at 5:00 a.m. and by the time we are headed home around 1:00 p.m., I feel at peace, my body is heavy, and I am in a deep sleep after 5 minutes of being in the car. When we arrive home the sedation lingers. I chalk it up to a day in the outdoors. The next week we return to the Afraid of Hawks, and by the time we are ready to go home, the same sedation comes over me. This time I give it more consideration, and wonder if I’m under a buffalo spell, or if it’s the simplicity and slow pace of life on the reservation. I start assessing my current world of crazy details. Rocky approaches me and I am snapped out of my daydream. “Dan said you had some questions?” I inform him that a TV food show has contacted us, that they would like to film a harvest at his place, and possibly have a traditional Lakota meal after. He nods his head up and down as I speak. I ask if he would be ok with that. He stops nodding and seriously says; “Yeah, that should be ok. We could have a pizza party at the community center”. I pause for a second, thinking about what to say next. Rocky starts laughing, and puts his hand on my shoulder and says “I’m just kidding; I think Pam could cook something up.” I start laughing too. We say our goodbyes, and head for home. Moments later I am fast asleep in the car, only this time I dream of pizza. This month’s recipe is…you got it: pizza. I use Piadina, an Italian flatbread, as the crust. The flatbread is delicious on its own, but topped with our artisan Buffalo Italian Sausage, and freshly grated cheese, it becomes a quintessential Italian masterpiece. Salute! Jill Click here for Jill’s Buffalo Piadina Recipe Buffalo Piadina ( Serves 8 ) Piadina is Italian Flat bread that is delicious by itself or used in replace of bread to make a sandwich or as a crust for pizza. The dough is wonderful to work with and the aroma will bring volunteer taste testers to your door. Great for easy entertaining, just prepare your crust, have toppings ready and have guests build their own! Piadina Dough Ingredients: 1 pkg. quick yeast ½ cup warm water ½ cup flour 3 ½ cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup cold water 2 tablespoons olive oil Buffalo Piadina Toppings: 8 oz. fresh mozzarella, sliced 1 portabella mushroom, sliced 1 lb. Wild Idea Buffalo Italian Sausage, coarse crumbled and sautéed 4 Roma Tomatoes, sliced, sprinkle with salt & pepper 1 cup fresh basil, julienned 4 oz. parmesan, grated + more for passing Mix yeast, water and ½ cup flour together. Cover and let rest for 20 minutes. Mixture will be double in size and bubble. Add remaining flour, salt, water and olive oil, knead together for 5 minutes. Place …
Now available at Wild Idea Buffalo Co. – Dan O'Briens latest novel "Stolen Horses"
Jacket description: McDermont, Nebraska is a pleasant, scenic western cattle town situated in the Pawnee River valley-just the place for people seeking refuge from their hectic city lives. It is also just the place for those who have made their homes on this haunting prairie since the late 19th century. Ideal for both the native inhabitants and for those looking to escape the city life. As the native residents wrestle with the arrival of outsiders, a local journalist uncovers a medical scandal epitomizing the problems facing the divided community. After the death of two men, it falls to the ancient but powerful district attorney to mediate a resolution between the clashing interests of the new and old West.And the Thurston family, descended from the town’s first citizen, sets out in their own way to fight the forces threatening to destroy it. This is a story of new and old interests colliding, of small western plains towns confronting the forces of “progress.” Buy the book now!
Hearty Zucchini Bread
This year Dan & I put in a bigger garden. We built 4 raised beds and planted a variety of vegetables and herbs. We were very excited about reaping our rewards at harvest time, but unfortunately our garden – well, it was a dud. At first it looked promising, lively & healthy. We had spring lettuce and were hopeful for sugar snap peas, green & fava beans, but something black came over them and they just never took. We were still hopeful for the rest of the crop, and then the grasshoppers invaded. They ate everything, everything that is but the zucchini & tomatoes. I’m not quite sure why they left the zucchini & tomatoes – but we are very glad they did. We pride-fully pick them as the precious gifts that they are, and have yet to tire from either. When the zucchini occasionally gets ahead of us, it’s Zucchini Bread making time. My recipe for it is as follows, (although I must admit not as good as the one I lost many years ago from a Fireman’s cookbook), but still pretty darn good. Enjoy! 1½ cup wheat flour 1 ¼ cup unbleached all purpose flour ¼ cup flax or cracked wheat 1 cup walnuts/pecans, ground 1 tsp. baking soda 1 tsp. baking powder 1 tsp. cinnamon 2 tsp. salt ½ cup pure cane sugar ½ cup pure cane brown sugar 1 cup light olive oil 3 eggs Zest & juice of 1 lemon 4 cups packed grated Zucchini 1.) Mix ingredients adding one at a time in order as listed, mixing well. 2.) Pour mixture into 2 lightly oiled loaf pans. 3.) Bake at 350* for 1 hour or until firm. 4.) Let rest at room temperature until completely cooled. Zucchini bread is best after it rest for awhile. It can also be stored in the refrigerator and freezes nicely. Slice and serve with butter or cheese. It is also a great accompaniment for stews and roasts. Wine Pairing: Campo Viejo Tempranillo Reserva 2004: From the Rioja region of Spain, this is a medium bodied red, layered with a nice balance of fruit, a bit of ash and mineral, and a full soft finish. Goes nicely with hearty breads and cheese, but would also stand up well to stews and roasts.
Jim Harrison & Buffalo Bacon Cheeseburger
Our last visitor in July was author Jim Harrison. Jim and Dan have been friends for years, and up until a few years ago I had only been a fan. The first time I met Jim, we had been invited to Livingston by another author / friend who was doing research for a book on falconry.