This Months visiting writer: Lindsay Wilson, journalist for Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage In its commitment to offer customers the highest-quality products available, Natural Grocers by Vitamin Cottage® continually strives to partner with family-operated, small-scale, sustainable producers. The following article is about a sustainable buffalo ranch that meet, or exceed, our standards for naturally-raised meat. Natural Grocers is proud to support these ranches, their owners, and their products. In this article, we are happy to introduce Wild Idea Buffalo Company. There is a saying among the Native Americans of the Great Plains that buffalo will offer themselves to those who have a pure heart. If that’s the case, then Dan O’Brien must have a heart of gold. A wildlife biologist, falconer, writer, and buffalo rancher, O’Brien’s deep respect for the grasslands of the Great Plains and the wildlife that thrives there led him to buffalo, or depending on how you look at it, led the buffalo to him. It all started with a little herd of thirteen orphaned runts that O’Brien bought from a neighboring ranch after helping with the annual roundup. You could say that it was an impulse buy, as O’Brien had been a cattle rancher for twenty years and hadn’t thought much about raising buffalo, although he had struggled to make ends meet as a cattle rancher and his intuition told him that cattle just weren’t suited to the grasslands of South Dakota. But in this little derelict herd, O’Brien saw salvation. “I was desperate to rediscover purpose in my life…and those thirteen imperiled packages of fur and sinew seemed kindred souls. I wanted us all to move on to a better life, I wanted my ranch to be as balanced and healthy as it could be,” O’Brien recalls in his memoir Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch. And so it began with those thirteen pint-sized buffalo, dubbed the “Gashouse Gang.” That was twelve years ago, and now O’Brien’s herd has grown to more than 600 and his business, Wild Idea Buffalo Company, is thriving. As much a conservationist as he is rancher, O’Brien’s philosophy is to “take care of everything out there, not just the product, because it’s all connected. The reason we’re doing this is for the grass. When the grass is healthy, the whole ecosystem is healthy.” To O’Brien, the buffalo are more than a commodity; they are the key to bringing the grasslands he loves back to their native state. Where the Wild Things Are When I arrived on his South Dakota ranch in early summer, it was clear that O’Brien’s mission was not that of a venture capitalist, but one of a preservationist. Nestled between the Black Hills and Badlands National Park and bordered by Buffalo Gap National Grassland, O’Brien’s Cheyenne River Ranch is more than just a buffalo ranch; it has become a nature preserve. During my tour of the ranch, I saw the prairie through a wildlife biologist’s eyes. As we passed through the sea of rippling grass, O’Brien pointed out a flock of baby grouse; a red tail hawk; a pair of white pelicans (which, to my surprise, are native to the Plains); two golden eagles; and a prairie dog town where we saw four burrowing owls emerge from the tunnels, which O’Brien explained don’t eat the little burrowing rodents, but cohabitate with them. The prairie was teeming with life. And then there were the buffalo. In a small open-air, all-terrain vehicle, O’Brien drove us into the midst of the herd, so close I could smell their sweet musky smell. There’s something quite …