Production funding for The Real Yellowstone, produced in association with Wyoming PBS, has been provided by the Shepherds of Wildlife Society, educating the broader public about the importance of wildlife and habitat conservation and how the value of renewable natural resources provide for the basic needs of rural indigenous communities around the world.

Bering Global Education Foundation, dedicated to improving the education, health, and well-being of individuals globally by providing comprehensive needs-based solutions and to the needs of the communities enabled by innovative, improving business models and technologies.

Wheelchairfoundation.org, raising awareness of the needs and challenges of people living with physical disabilities and committed to providing a wheelchair to every teen, child, and adult who needs one but can't afford one or doesn't have access.

And Kamp's Family Foundation, educating and inspiring the broader public regarding boots on the ground, wildlife, and its ecosystems.

Fire crews are making progress in battling four fires in Southeast Montana.

So far crews have some containment on three of the four fires, including the Remington fire.

The fire's forged a total of more than 448,000 acres.

It feels like a ticking time bomb that someday it's all gonna catch.

Heat is just intense.

We could see it coming, and if it's crackling and sparking, that's the scary thing with all this grass.

You know, this fire went something like 41 miles and almost 200,000 acres in two and a half days.

People up in the Remington fire that lost 150, 300 cows, those are things that are hard to overcome.

Theres a tremendous cost that we will have to bear.

We don't know how we're gonna land after all of this.

It's your livelihood, your way of life, and... (dramatic music) Sorry.

For centuries, native tribes battled from land and wildlife resources.

Then came European explorers, bringing disease, which led to the deaths of millions of native people.

Without human pressure on wildlife, game rebounded.

But colonial Western expansion and railroads reshaped the land.

Predators and bison were exterminated, opening the plains for sheep and cattle.

For 150 years, ranching has defined the American West.

Ranches across the American West are under pressure, rising costs, falling livestock and grain prices, predators, rich out-of-state landowners driving up real estate prices, clashes with hunters, wildlife regulators, and critics of modern agriculture.

Plus conifer encroachment, a result of lost native burning practices, has fueled wildfire risk and narrow profit margins, rising taxes, and an unforgiving environment.

This isnt an easy life, but ranching has never been easy.

My great-grandfather was the first recorded white child born in the territory of Montana in 1864.

My family came here in the early 1900s.

My family's been here.

There were three brothers that came to this area in 1886.

We've been here in Montana on both sides since the mid 1800s or before.

It was founded by my great-great-grandfather, Henry Seben.

His family immigrated from Germany when he was two years old and his mother died in voyage.

So he was farmed out in exchange for his labor.

They would feed him and clothe him and give him an education.

And he got like the equivalent of an eighth grade education.

And he ended up becoming very successful and he bought and sold the ranches all over the state.

And at the end of his career, he had two ranches and he had two daughters.

And so each daughter got a ranch.

Starting in the 1980s, my uncle Chase, he started to push the envelope with grazing management by doing what's called Guss-Hormay Rest Rotation Grazing Really fairly progressive at the time.

It makes a system where it implements a certain amount of rest period to make sure that these plants have adequate rest after being grazed.

We've since evolved and what we're doing today is called non-selective grazing.

So it's a lot of cattle in a very small area for a short period of time.

So not only are we remineralizing the soil and re-fertilizing the soil, we're also covering the soil and decreasing the amount of bare soil and then therefore decreasing our evaporation rate.

We're capturing more rainfall.

Were extending the growing period.

We're selecting for our desirable species, which are more drought tolerant.

They also have a longer growing period.

And so just by doing that, we've created this ecological resilience from the soil up, it works.

Come on girl, come on.

Come on girl.

The Hibbert family isn't just focused on ranching efficiency.

They've made a big commitment to Montana's wildlife conservation and stewardship.

Devil's Kitchen Management Group is a group that gets together and decides what to do with wildlife management, what recommendations they have for the governor's board every year for regarding regulations for this hunting district.

And that came to be in the 1990s.

Sportsmen wanted access to the elk.

Landowners did not wanna see elk in their stack yards, on their hay fields.

There's a wildlife management area that was created to be a refuge for elk that the elk weren't going to or utilizing.

The elk that we do is a fairly unhealthy dynamic.

So you know what, there's a lot we could do.

We need to start working on this.

How we can manage wildlife, how we can interface wildlife with livestock, how we can allow public access, how we can maintain this landscape.

We started a series of monthly meetings that went on for probably a year and a half or two years meeting every month or every other month.

So as a result, we were able to actually change the hunting season to allow us to achieve that goal of having bull elk die of old age.

We have an obligation as a result to allow public access to these bull elk.

It's been a very successful experiment and the trust has been going about 30 years.

You know, there'll be a lot of people watching this that don't really have any idea about this lifestyle that we lead.

They watch it on TV and get that false impression and they think they know what this lifestyle is about but they really don't have any idea.

What we're doing here is producing the cleanest, best, safest food in the entire world.

The disconnect on food and where it comes from, it's huge.

The Green Revolution was like, okay, we need to feed a lot of people with a little bit of land and now we've become hugely dependent on fertilizer and yet over time, it degrades microbial habitat.

In the last decade, ranching costs have soared, feed, fuel, labor, but livestock prices haven't always kept up, putting ranchers in a tough spot.

You know, I've never had any money.

I never will.

Its everything is a Costco model at this point where you might only make a penny each time but you need a million of them to do it and that model is just squeezing out everybody.

We're not only working for the American consumer, trying to provide the best, safest, healthiest, cleanest beef and grain in the world.

We're working for the fertilizer company, the chemical company, the fuel company, 98 cents goes out of that dollar right back into the economy of the United States.

We're land rich and we're cash poor.

This whole deal is so difficult for people to understand because when they roll into our yard, we got cattle and tractors and we got assets all around us.

Squeezing money out of them is the hard part.

It's very expensive and there's not much profit in it.

Were broke all the time.

We're just, we're broke.

We work, we work, we work.

We have no vacation time really.

So every fall we can go in and pay off our operating note and hopefully pay it off.

A baler costs 30 to $50,000 today.

It costs a hundred thousand dollars.

So we have to run the equipment longer to be able to pencil it per bail or per acre.

Everybody that's coming into this area for retirement or just recreation is driving the price of land through the roof.

We sold an 88,000 acre ranch near Deer Lodge, Montana back in 2004 for just over 30 million.

That ranch today would probably be worth 75, $80 million.

If somebody's willing to bring a ranch to market, the demand is there.

I mean, we have excess buyers in the marketplace.

I'm not sure where you would have to go in Montana to find land that would pencil out.

As far as if you were beginning a beginning rancher or even just trying to expand with the values of land, especially in Western Montana, that would pay for it with cattle.

Cattle would have to go to $10 a pound.

With so much stacked against multi-generational ranching families, who was gonna fight for them?

In Montana, they should be the citizen legislature.

As a fourth generation farmer and cattle rancher and first generation outfitter, I had a little surprise coming in the form of being asked to run for legislature.

At first I said, "No, I'm a farmer and a rancher."

And my outfit, I said, "I'm not a politician."

I never had thought about running for political office until this was pressed upon me that maybe you should think about it because you could benefit< not only your farming around, your outfitting constituents, but you can be a benefit to Northeast Montana as well.

Hi, I'm Eric Albus.

I'm running for House District 28.

And I'd like to thank everybody for showing up tonight.

Nobody understands Northeast Montana, but Northeast Montana.

Hopefully I can get in there and make a difference.

Hi, Im Eric Albus and Im running for House District 28.

I'd like to go to Helena and appreciate your vote.

Years of drought, grasshopper plagues, and a hard truce, their only son, willing to work the ranch, married a city nurse.

Bill and Renita Brown knew the grind ahead.

20-hour days, eight-day weeks year-round.

With sky-high land prices, was it time to sell their 107-year-old ranch to rich out-of-staters?

Weve been on this ranch for 107 years.

It's our history, it's our heritage, it's our family.

Honestly, I was probably 50 years old before I realized that Im a person other than the ranch.

The ranch was my life.

A lot of times I don't even know what day of the week it is because it doesn't matter.

We had some pretty decent years, we're doing pretty good.

So we bought these two pieces of property.

At the same time, I've got a sister decided she wanted to be paid off.

So anyhow, we had to close on the whole package at once.

Immediately the next year and the three years following that, so four years in a row we had severe drought.

Weston married a gal from town.

Of course we all hoped that she'd be adjust to this way of iving, but we didn't know that.

I just thought the economy is favorable for right now selling this ranch.

We put it up for sale, we had it on the market for two years, we got a very good offer, but it was from the wrong people.

It was from American Prairie.

Over 20 years ago, ranchers watched black suburban's roaring up their drives on a cloud of dust.

Inside, suit wearing rich folks talked about saving the Prairie.

From who, the ranchers asked.

That question sparked a culture clash.

A nonprofit American Prairie Reserve started buying up land, a lot of it.

(soft music) In 1999 there was an assessment done of global ecosystems by World Wildlife Fund.

This part of the state, North Central Montana, was identified because of the prevalence of public land.

And that was a result of the failure of homesteading during the Great Depression.

People left.

You don't have to buy all 3.2 million acres, which is what we're trying to assemble, because the private acres come with preferential access to federal grazing leases.

And put together this complex of public and private land, do some biodiversity restoration, open it up to the public and give people a semblance of what was here 210 years ago when Lewis and Clark came through.

(tires screeching) They call it rewilding the land.

It's a very easy thing for them to sell, because it sounds like theyre doing a good thing.

Unless you're one of the people that they're trying to rewild.

First it was this talk about the CMR, the Wildlife Refuge, to the National Grasslands in Canada, as one biome.

The Gold American Prairie is pretty simple.

We're trying to build the largest nature reserve in America and completely open everything to the public as we restore the habitat and all the biodiversity.

After you read their website, you want to send them money.

It's the best written propaganda thing I've ever seen.

And if you hadn't ever been South of Malta, and you read their website, you'd think it was a garden of Eden.

There is no, quote, wilderness prairie in the United States for prairie habitat.

Now, should there be, shouldn't there be, is up for debate.

I happen to think there needs to be some areas that are sort of protected.

They're buying properties that are from people who are selling to build out some ecological space so that wildlife can move freely and they can restore bison.

They're trying to figure it out, I think.

You know, it depends on what you want.

I mean, if you live there and you don't necessarily want to live in this prairie wildlife sanctuary because you ranch and farm and do all these other things, it's definitely a problem.

This is Blackfeet country, land where wildlife once moved freely and families like Beau Michaels built a life with it.

But now an out-of-state billionaire fenced it off, shutting down wildlife migration routes and ignoring the people who've lived here for generations.

But Beau didn't back down.

We're in the north central part of the Blackfeet reservation.

The Blackfeet reservation is a reserve land for the Native American Blackfeet tribe.

So the reservation land was for the Blackfeet people to farm and ranch on.

So the ranch next door to us sold in 2020 to a rich out-of-stater.

When everything was in shutdown and COVID, he bought the ranch to run bison.

Within, you know, the first couple months, they tore out all of the bobwire fences, got some fencing crews out there and literally put this fence up within months.

So an exclusion fence is anything over five feet tall with wires that are vertical and horizontal where a moose calf, elk calf, a deer fawn cannot navigate underneath the fence, which is less than six inches off of the ground.

What is the impact of not only of us trailing our cattle through, but the wildlife and everybody else who's, you know, kind of involved around in the area.

And we're in a very rural area.

So it impacts a lot of people.

We're all really neighborly.

And usually when somebody buys a piece of property, we kind of want to get to know the neighbor.

We've had no interactions with the landowner of Grizzly Ridge or the Double T Bison Ranch.

I think 50 linear miles of exclusion fence has really hurt the migration pattern of the elk, the deer and antelope.

You're affecting people's families that have been ranching on those lands for, you know, hundreds of years now.

The good old American spirit is still here, you know, working and, you know, being a part of this land.

My grandparents coming up on a cattle drive, you know, marrying Blackfeet women that have, you know, ived on this land for centuries.

Montana was made for the wild man.

And that's kind of what it's about around here.

As ranchers improve grazing practices, wildlife thrived.

More prey meant more predators.

One of them, Ursus arctos horribilis, is the grizzly bear.

The ranchers relationship with this apex predator, well, it's complicated.

My husband's grandpa came to Montana from Norway.

I don't know what year, a long time ago.

My dad's family is from Montana for generations.

And so, yeah, we've just always kind of been here.

Hopefully we'll be here forever, but that remains to be seen.

Our job isn't just our job.

It really is a lifestyle.

We care about every single cow that's on this place.

And we work very hard to make sure that they are living their best lives.

Grizzly bears come with a whole set of issues.

Not only do they actually kill calves in the spring, just their presence brings that stress level of those cattle up and keeps it up as long as they're present.

I mean, if there's grizzly bears out here every day with my cows, my cows are gonna be stressed out every day.

And they're not gonna eat as much.

And then of course there's the human safety factor.

I can't walk down there without maybe running into a grizzly bear.

My daughter's never been able to play outside by herself because we have bears in the yard all the time.

in sharp contrast to the Bradley Small Scale Cow-Calf operation, Andrew Anderson runs a large scale ranch with his wife, Hillary, a trained wolf biologist.

They've developed a different strategy to handle grizzlies and other predators.

One of the things that we're doing is we're running more yearlings.

Before we even purchase those yearlings, we know what we can withstand from a death loss percentage on that group of animals.

What we're trying to do, again, going back to the resilient business, is to have a business that can absorb some loss.

No business can absorb a ton of loss, but some loss can be absorbed.

And so yearlings, whether it's wolves or bears at this point in time, have been a better class of animal for us to be running amongst predators because they're usually very healthy, theyre bigger than small calves.

If we do have a problem, we can take a bigger, come a long ways away, pretty easily and simply.

Ironically, during this interview, Andrew and Hillary found a yearling killed by a grizzly.

This bear had already been linked to the neighbor's dead cattle, but while it was caught feeding on the carcass, the exact cause of death couldn't be confirmed.

So what does this cow represent?

This is, you know, one of over 1100 head.

So just with those kind of numbers, we don't have a personal relationship with this particular animal.

This cow also represents wilderness, wild places that we are actively choosing to run cattle in.

It's not something that we're shocked to see.

They're part of the fabric of this place.

We are too.

And so it shouldn't be something that it's one or the other.

I don't know that I have the right to choose what should or shouldn't be here based on what's convenient for me.

They're a part of this place and they always have been.

And therefore, I think if we're gonna cherish and continue to preserve these dwindling wild places, then we should do everything we can to ensure that they're here as well as everything else that's out here.

Though small all the way to the large animals, I think we should be doing as much as we can to promote as much biodiversity as possible.

When a grizzly bear comes in and kills a calf or a cow or whatever that it kills, it's not just a loss.

It's not just that dead calf and that we might get compensated for through the livestock loss board.

It could have been a heifer that we were going to keep as a cow to continue those genes in our herd that she would have lived here for 15 years.

Or it could have been, in my dad's case, a bull.

He keeps his own bulls.

And then there's the obvious loss of the money from that calf that we would have had in the fall if we weren't keeping it as a cow or as a bull, it would have been shipped to market.

And then again, there's the stress loss that we've talked about that is really hard to put a monetary value on, but it's there.

This is our home.

And this is our, like I said, God gave us this place to steward.

And it would be heartbreaking for all of us to have to leave here.

And that is our, God, that is our last option.

There are lots of factors working against us that didn't used to be working against people, especially with technology and social media and all the people that are against doing the things that we do.

And then there's the wildlife issues that have gotten worse because of mismanagement.

As we consider all those factors, we have to think not necessarily for Peter and I to are we going to be able to make it?

Probably at this point we're gonna survive, but is it worth handing that headache over to our daughter?

We're not getting rich here.

We're making a living and that's it.

And it's only gonna get worse.

Land ownership and conservation changes are making private land harder to access for resident hunters, forcing them out of Montana's 33 million acres of public land.

But more pressure on public land means wildlife has pushed back to private land, a safe haven from hunting.

Wildlife is owned by the people.

Once someone buys a place, maybe puts up a fence or excludes people from hunting that, you end up with lots of issues.

You know, the wildlife, they don't know borders.

They travel back and forth between public land and private land.

Oftentimes, especially given this time of year, you can look behind me and there's snow on the ground.

It's harder for the wildlife to browse and find food.

And so they're gonna find themselves down in pivot fields where there's easy food to get, you know, low pressure.

And so that puts pressure on the private landowners.

It's an interesting problem to kind of bridge the gap between the public land hunter and the people who want to chase elk and kill elk versus the landowner who just wants elk off their property.

You know, the idea that animals belong to everybody is different than the idea of my property belongs to me because many times the animals are on that private ground.

(machinery rumbling) Even though we, Seaman Livestock Company, does block management and where we bring on upwards of 1200 public hunters every year through our properties, there's still people who want to skip the work of going through and getting in through block management and they're actually flying in on helicopters.

And what's happening is they're landing in the middle of these other guys' hunts that have gone through the hurdles of getting in on block management.

Here we've got choppers, we hear them buzzing in overhead and they just touch down and go straight to hunting, which is incredibly disruptive and disrespectful for the precedence that's been set, all the hard work that's been put in for the last three, four decades to get to this point.

And you can't tell me that a helicopter flying over her to Belk isn't gonna disrupt their behavior.

It's access and opportunity, right?

Like in those areas, there's oftentimes a better chance of running into a nice bowl or even a cow or a spike or even elk in general than other places.

And so if there's a pilot that's willing to fly into that stuff and you got the money to do it and you got the tag in your pocket, I don't see why you wouldn't do it.

I've done it.

So these guys that want to come hunt out in these areas, what would you say the motivation is?

I think they've seen the bowls on these ranches and then obviously with the Hawnaks nowadays, they can see islands of BLM in there and they have pictures of huge bowls, I think, and then BLM patches in the private property, you know?

You're in this pristine place.

You're having an amazing experience.

It's very peaceful.

You're in your spot that you think that the elk are gonna come by, you're waiting.

You know, you've been there maybe all day, waiting for them to come and youre sitting there and then all of a sudden you're here.

(Elk call) And you're like, what is that?

Where did that come from?

And then you see coming over the horizon a helicopter and what they're doing is looking for elk.

It just kind of disrupts the whole thing.

And then you see, you know, they're flying low enough that they're scattering the herds.

The elk are trying to vacate the premises because they don't know what it is either.

Just because it's landlocked BLM, they think it's not seeing public hunting.

They think that they're getting it, the big bad landowner.

Little do they know, they're landing in the middle of someone's hunt.

And they think that that's their right to be able to do that.

Frankly, that's why landowners lock their gates.

Well, geez, that's not hunting in my view.

I mean, if you're flying around the helicopter and you can look at where they are and look at the biggest bull you want land somewhere close to it and go chase it around, that is not fair chase hunting.

And that's unethical.

Change can be a threat.

American prairies plans brought big changes.

In response, a small group of ranchers formed the Save the Cowboy Foundation to fight back.

There was several older people that were really disturbed, I guess, that the American prairie was coming into our community and they wondered what we could do.

Eventually, we came up with a document called a negative bison easement.

And basically what that means is that we're saying that we won't run bison on our property for 20 years.

It's just a 20 term easement for the benefit of our neighbor and it's a reciprocal type easement.

So the neighbor says he won't run bison on his property either.

Lee Latre is a Save the Cowboy advocate.

Her family with Metis Indian roots has raised livestock for generations.

Their game plan of caring for the land and their relationship with understanding the science and all that, I mean ranchers understand all that too.

Its a matter of food production and food security for our country.

So when American Prairie Reserve buys a place, I view it as a death in the community.

Every ranch that they buy displaces families and eventually, if they have their way, in North Central Montana, a lot of the small communities will just be dried up and gone.

The Browns turned down an eight digit offer from American Prairie, but hope and a little extra cash came from a prehistoric creature.

We are still here now.

We've taken it back off the market and we're gonna have a decent year.

It's not gonna be a phenomenal year, but we actually sold a dinosaur a year ago and so that was a huge help.

We're hanging in there again.

Traveling through big sky country, I saw young ranchers embracing regenerative ranching and economic diversity, a shift from traditional methods, boosting both their business and wildlife.

One of them, the Wickens Cattle Company.

I think restaurants are really, good restaurants anyways, they're really an expression of the places that they're in.

The restaurants of Bozeman are buying from us because we are offering them a consistent, convenient product at a reasonable price point.

I approached them before the restaurant opened because I thought their beef was really delicious, very consistent and it's a family run operation and that's really what I wanna support as a chef.

It's a really natural thing to want to sell what you're producing.

A unique thing that we do with the direct-to-consumer model is next day delivery to people's homes.

They go on our website, they order whatever they want and then Monday through Friday, it shows up at their door.

But the quality is really why they keep coming back and if we're asking people to support us and buy from us, we have to work as hard as we can to make sure the quality's there but also the convenience is there.

And I met Eric Wiccans and we sat down and talked and he brought me a big sampler of beef and I just started cooking my way through it and it was easily the best beef I've ever had.

You can look at it next to a grocery store steak, it sticks out.

The Wiccans run short, intense rotational grazing instead of traditional corn.

They use a small stockyard and a unique mix of locally grown feed.

Some of the different ingredients that we feed the cattle, we have grass off-alpha hay mix and then we mix in a little bit of straw and that's really just fiber.

Then we have ground barley that is raised locally by neighbors and people around Winterford.

Finally, we have human-grade peas and lentils and the cattle love them.

They're high protein and they're local so that's why we feed them.

With all of the excess feed that we spill or whatever, we end up overwintering hundreds of deer, hundreds of different upland birds from pheasants to sharp tail to huns.

It just creates a different kind of an ecosystem that the animals are really using to get through these tough winters like this winter in particular where the snow was two feet deep and it iced over and they couldn't find feed.

And so they all came here and did very well because of it.

I would just encourage people to purchase local, local products because the people like us who are actually stepping out, it's a challenge and any local product is gonna be a little more expensive.

But if you actually care about agriculture, care about your local community, everybody should be buying as much local products as they can.

They're happy cows and that taste transfers.

Each year, elk, deer and moose shed their antlers on their historic wintering grounds.

Once just a curiosity, shed hunting has turned into a landowners nightmare.

30 years ago, people thought you were nuts for picking them up.

Now housewives are after them.

I don't know, they're just something about being the first one to lay your hands on a set of horns that is beautiful, you know, I just love it.

It makes people crazy or a lot of us anyway, makes people do things they wouldn't normally do.

Let's say there's 300 bulls wintering on there, there's 600 horns, that's a lot of horns.

Maybe they're averaging six pounds a piece, you're looking at 3,600 pounds of horns and they're 15 to $20 a pound.

And so there's a lot of money, but the big ones are one that people go crazy for.

In 2025, two ranch employees in central Montana were held at gunpoint by antler shed hunters.

Their cell phones were stolen.

They were forcibly detained.

That's kidnapping.

That's armed assault.

That's a felony.

And it wasn't just for profit.

It was for bragging rights.

A desperate need to claim a giant set of antlers dropped by a trophy bull.

Shed hunting used to be harmless, but for some it's become an obsession, a contest, a lawless game.

And once again, it's rural families, those who live with wildlife every day, who are left picking up the pieces.

(dramatic music) A rancher sees wildlife one of two ways, a burden that eats grass and cuts into profits a resource that pays.

Many lease their land to outfitters or join state hunter access programs or even become outfitters themselves.

It's one more hat to wear, but the payoff makes it worth it.

I looked out there and saw about 300 head of elk and I knew that I either had to, you know, open up public hunting and probably move them off or figure out a way to make money on them.

That's been the difference in us being here or not, is the outfitting business and learning how to make some money on those wildlife.

Dad needed an income, so he started the outfitting business as an unguided service.

And pretty soon we started bringing in additional clients and we needed to become outfitters.

We've been in the industry about 40 years, started out with unguided hunts, went into guided hunts, went into fly fishing.

We down do hiking tours, UTV tours, high mountain country tours and hikes.

It makes a difference in the whole state of Montana.

It isn't just a single operation taking this in, it's guides, employees, it's business owners benefiting from it.

It's a huge economic boom to the state of Montana, the outfitting industry is.

Biggest thing we do as an outfitter, it's our job to educate.

And it's our job to remember that each person who walks through our door has their own story.

We're just the mediator between the land, the mountains and that person.

(gentle music) Our urbanized world is disconnected from nature.

Nowhere is that clearer than food production.

Everything we eat was once alive.

When Matt Scoglin of North Bridger Bison asked me to film a harvest, something he had never allowed before, I agreed.

But only if we could bring a customer who had never seen an animal die as a part of the cycle of life.

We eat bison for the quality of the meat, the nutrient density, the fact that it's basically grown and harvested in our backyard, there's nothing like it.

It's like you can taste the sunshine in the grass in your meat.

You know, once I open that gate and come in, take a couple of deep breaths, and then I just have this like repeating in my head of like wait for the perfect shot, wait for the perfect shot.

And the perfect shot is a bison standing at about 10 yards with no bison in front of it and no bison behind it.

This may sound weird, but instinctively like looking at them and knowing what's about to happen, I just feel like I'm like sending my heart and heartening out to them.

Oh, I love that.

(gentle music) We all need to eat, and this animal lived an amazing life.

It was born on the ranch, lived its whole life here.

I'm so happy you're here.

I wish more people could see this and just like how simple and beautiful it is.

When it actually happened, it was just so quick.

It was very peaceful.

It felt good to see it, you know?

It's when we eat, we know it has to die somehow, but to actually see the connection with it.

And I wanted to go make contact with it and just sort of honor the life it had.

Ranching is built on a community, and out here, community matters.

But rumor had spread and swept the prairie that American Prairie had pulled off an underhanded land deal.

The APR was just kind of getting at a lot of that stuff north of Winifred, and I said, "I'm not gonna sell it to them."

You know, they're kind of stand for everything I don't.

It was the Five Mountain Cattle Company.

I was actually really suspicious because it was too soon after the APR had contacted Joe, and Joe told him no.

It was just too suspicious.

Anyway, we checked in and I got a lawyer to make sure it was legit.

So we ended up selling it, and it was a separate entity that the APR had set up so it didn't look like APR to buy these places.

Seriously?

And he went on good faith, and it was nothing but a flat-ass lie so they could get what they wanted to.

I think we've done 48 transactions, and we've used a third party once at the request of the seller, so it's not our practice to have a stealth or a shell company that's out purchasing.

American Prairie says that the landowner requested a third-party buyer.

The landowner flatly denies it.

However, the 2021 American Prairie 990 tax return lists the Five Mountain Cattle Company as part of their entity.

So who's lying?

So who's lying?

With over 40 sales, not every rancher has had a bad experience with American Prairie.

You know, the APR has treated me excellent.

The hard part is, I guess, reputation in the community.

There's a lot of local people or ranchers that are anti-APR, which is their right to be.

And I didn't understand, I guess, when I first leased in 2017, how much of a backlash I would get.

So American Prairie is a tax-exempt organization.

As I tell our staff, a tax-exempt for-profit business entity.

We are exempt from taxes on income that we earn, which is probably over the course of the year between $500,000 and $750,000.

APR made $63 million in 2022 tax-free, and then they leased it to the ranchers to make themselves look good to the tune of about $500,000 last year.

It's a facade for a bunch of rich people that do not understand that they are pushing not only ranchers off the land, they're pushing schools.

They're pushing businesses.

They're pushing county workers.

They're pushing mom and dad in town because now the grocery store is closed.

You know, we're hearing all about the rich billionaires that pay no taxes.

What about them?

They set that up as a nonprofit, but they are making a profit.

You can't tell me that $63 million went back into putting yurts up there so somebody can come and be a nature lover for a weekend.

They're pushing us out of the land for a bunch of rich playboys.

If American Prairie is the cause of death, of the death of rural Montana, they're dead.

Well, if you're gonna have bison on your private ranch as long as they're tested and brucellosis free, I don't have a problem with it.

We've thought about getting into the bison hunting business.

It's been interesting to watch the APR, what they're doing.

I don't particularly like buying up ranches, moving off traditional ranch families, but who knows, maybe in 25 years, we're looking at the same thing.

The goal is to get us to a size where we can restore the entire ecosystem.

That's everything from insects to birds to animals to water to the ground to the plant life.

The number to get a fully restoreable ecosystem is around 3.2 million acres.

But it's not to be a zoo, it's not to be a park.

It's to open up all of that to not just Montanans, but anyone who wants to visit.

And at 3.2 million acres, American Prairie will be larger than Yellowstone Park and Glacier National Park combined.

Most of it's actually public land, either Fed Land or State Land in Montana that we're attaching with private land acquisitions.

We're total land now, we're just under 500,000 acres, but that is a connection of all these lands together.

So when people say private-public partnership, you hear that toss around a lot in conservation or in philanthropy, this is a quite literal private land and public land linkage to bring all this stuff together.

It stands to destroy so much that is beautiful and important and valuable.

That actually does matter to us.

And I think a lot of them just don't grasp that any more than they grasp that all of those bison are gonna reproduce, they're gonna have to do something with that extra.

Humans have always been part of an ecosystem, always been part of wildlife, always been part of an intersection with nature.

That's something magical.

Because I believe fundamentally, when people separate humans from conservation, that's when bad things happen.

If the closer you bring those together, the stronger that conservation is and the better it is for the people around it.

When it boils down to it, it's change is something different.

That is what I think it is.

It's a cultural change.

If you could interview Indians from 1870, they would be pretty long faced about what was happening to the bison then as the cowboys moved in.

And now it's kind of reversed.

In the US, four companies control 85% of the meat processing industry.

Some call that a monopoly.

For ranchers to survive, to keep their land and the wildlife on it, they need a better business model.

One solution, the Old Salt Co-op.

My family's Manix Ranch is part of this big effort called Old Salt Co-op.

And we're a vertically integrated meat company trying to create a little kind of micro economy for meat with integrity.

(upbeat music) We have restaurants, two that we own.

We have processing, we have an online brand and we have this festival that's basically trying to say, hey, if people come together around a shared set of values, you can really actually make change.

And so it's just really a shared network of people that kind of believe land is kin, believe that we're really part of this living community that's bigger than humans, see a sense of urgency, like, you know, by and large, the outlook, if we continue with status quo is not good.

And so we've got to remake that food system.

Instead of one big economy where no customers know the producers, a whole bunch of regional micro economies where people have some connection to the landscape where their food comes from, that to me, that it's a much more powerful than a labeling system like organic or whatever.

Well, I don't just want to become what the competition is today.

I want to get to a scale where we can pay our bank note, we can return more value to the producers, but we're not so big that our customers can't actually know where all our stuff is and where that comes from and that we can't have a real relationship with a customer.

And to me, the festival is the ultimate in relationships with each other.

The land is like a lady, treat her right in the face and treat her right and she'll care for you.

Each year, the Aldo Leopold Foundation honors ranchers committed to conservation.

In 2024, Montana's winner was the Wickens Cattle Company.

I'm not huge on awards, to be honest with you.

We won the Aldo Leopold Award because of our conservation practices on the ranch where we incorporate those conservation practices with livestock production and kind of melding the two together in a way that is sustainable for everybody, right?

For financially, for us on the ranch, plus at the same time improving habitat for animals.

I mean, we're increasing diversity of the species and the numbers and the health of those animals as we're increasing the productivity of the land.

It's just finding that kind of sweet spot between all those different things.

I say that it makes no difference to me and it's not about the awards, but once you get them, it's like a little bit of recognition for a decade of a lot of work that does not get seen.

It's fun.

There's literally no such thing as a bloodless diet.

If you eat food, you're gonna be killing things.

You look on the back of a box of vegan burgers and it's 20 something ingredients, most of which you can't even pronounce.

It's made in a factory.

It's not good for you.

And then you contrast that with food from a ranch, meat from a ranch, where you're providing wildlife habitat, providing bird habitat, providing pollinator habitat.

You're sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it in the ground.

And then at the end of the day, you're providing, like I said, thousands and thousands of pounds of very healthy, very nutrient dense food.

People are realizing, eating plant-based for the planet, meatless Monday, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

It actually has some really horrible unintended consequences.

When you eat our bison, you're eating bison.

When you eat your neighbor's beef, you're eating beef.

Well, here we are at inauguration, the place I didn't really ever think I would be.

Members elect of the House of Representatives of the 69th legislature of the state of Montana, please come to order.

I didn't have a party, didn't need one, didn't want one.

I was 250 miles from home in our hunting camp down south of Miles City.

We woke up in the morning and found out I'd been elected and went on with the day, went right back to work, started cooking breakfast and taking care of my hunters.

I will discharge the duties of my office.

I will discharge the duties of my office.

So hopefully I can go make a difference in planning too.

We're a donor state.

We give our kids to the rest of the world.

We sell our cows down the railroad.

We sell our grain elsewhere.

Very little comes back into this community.

That's a very negative way to look at it, but there's a big mindset of that.

And so when American Prairie came in, they were the ultimate outsiders.

You know, they wanted to buy our land, change our traditions and disregard our communities.

Like that's just a recipe for ostracizing an outsider, right?

And they didn't see that early on as just baffling to me.

But the experimentalism of American Prairie, I think it's really exciting.

What they would like to see is actually exactly what the rest of the community wants to see, which is healthy landscapes, resilient landscapes, right?

Like we share that in common.

The reality is in Montana, there's a lot of private land and there's a lot of people who don't provide any access to that private land.

Right now, we're the largest private landowner in Montana, opening up more public land for Montana.

It's larger than anybody, 80,000 acres in the block management program.

I'm really proud of that.

Sometimes we look at it like animals belong in a zoo and humans are living in cities, but we've always been connected.

So you can never take the human out of a conversation about conservation.

If we're serious about long-term solutions to these complicated things, it comes down to rolling up your sleeves and saying, you know what, this is gonna be hard work.

I'm gonna have to take myself to the uncomfortable place of not advocating just for myself, but advocating for the solution.

And that's hard to do, but that's where success comes in.

I think that it's very, very important to the people and sportsmen in Montana to be able to access this land and for Montana to provide incentives to landowners to access this land.

In my opinion, there's nothing better than being raised out in the open prairies and four mountains, wherever it might be, but we take all this for granted.

None of this is ours.

We're just caretakers for a while.

It's very important to have the next generation on the land and that's what we're all here for is, I mean, it's just like anybody's got a business.

Their hope and wish is that they have kids or grandkids that can take it over and make it better.

Their plans may be better than mine, and I hope they are.

I don't think they realize right now how precious this is, but to wake up as a nine-year-old kid in the middle of the wilderness and almost walk nose to nose with a moose first thing in the morning is just an outrageously amazing experience, and he'll have that in his mind forever.

Having that personal connection with animals in the land is a gift.

You know, a lot of people think we're about done.

I don't.

I think we're just getting started.

People gotta eat.

People like the APR and people that come in with money wanting to elk hunt or whatever, they're buying big chunks of land.

We seen that back in the 70s.

You know, it all wound up going back somehow to ranches, and I'm hoping that's what'll happen again.

We don't really see ourselves as owners of the ranch.

We see the ranch owning us as much as we own it.

We're here on this earth as caretakers.

(soft music) Ranching is more than a job.

It's a way of life, a connection to the land, to wildlife, to community, but that way of life is under attack, skyrocketing land prices, out-of-state money waving millions in front of struggling ranchers, government policies, predators, and a food system dominated by a handful of corporations, all pushing multi-generational ranching families to the brink.

For many, the math doesn't work anymore.

Property taxes climb, livestock prices stall, and environmental regulations tighten.

The next generation looks at a future of 20-hour days and eight-day weeks and sees a way out.

Take the money, sell the land, leave the industry.

But when the land changes hands, it changes forever.

No more open gates for hunters.

No more livestock to keep the grass healthy.

No more stewardship from people who have spent generations caring for it.

This is about more than business.

It's about human rights, the right to make a living, the right to stay on the land that your family has worked for generations, the right to manage wildlife in a way that benefits both people and nature.

These ranchers aren't just fighting for their survival.

They're fighting for their way of life, for their community, for their future.

The question is how many will be able to stay here and fight in the years to come.

This ranch was built on blood and sweat Paid for in grazing cows Now the landmen, they all circle round Like poachers on the prowl Out of staters moving in Driving land prices high Feels like this is where old cow towns go to die The land's like a lady She'll care for her, she'll care for you Our fate is tied to every blade of grass But next year could always be our last Will my children see what I've seen Will this dream survive The land is like a lady But lately we just make her cry The neighbors sold a year ago To a lawyer from LA Cows ain't paid for land since 82 And they never will again Wolves are circling the calving lot As my profits fade away But all my family is buried here And this is where I'll stay The land's like a lady She'll care for her, she'll care for you Our fate is tied to every blade of grass But next year could always be our last Will my children see what I've seen Will this dream survive Oh the land is like a lady But lately we just make her cry This ranch is who I am Not just what I do Now my children learn to love the land And they'll teach their children too That the land's like a lady To care for her and she'll care for you Our fate is tied to every blade of grass But next year could always be our last Will my children see what I've seen Will this dream survive The land is like a lady But lately we just make her cry Yeah the land is like a lady But lately we just make her cry.