Furry Tanks
“The way we’ve managed these properties, the wildlife numbers are as good as they’ve ever been, perhaps rivaling what Lewis and Clark saw -- other than bison,” says Leo Barthelmess Jr., who keeps 610 cattle and 700 sheep on 24,700 acres 32 miles southeast of Malta, the main town in Phillips County, where much of the Prairie Reserve’s land is located.
Bison, as far as Barthelmess is concerned, are furry, fence-busting, brucellosis-spreading tanks. (Brucellosis being a bacterial infection that causes abortion or premature calving in infected cattle.) “In order to build their 3-to-4-million-acre vision, I can’t live here,” he says.
Poole helped start the Ranchers Stewardship Alliance, which promotes wildlife-friendly fences, the preservation of sage grouse habitat and other conservation efforts.
“This landscape was broken in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s,” Poole says. “Ranchers and the Soil Conservation Service worked and brought this prairie back. It’s not pristine; it’s restored. It doesn’t need to be saved from ranchers; it was already saved by ranchers.”
Tempting Cash
Poole says she suspects the Prairie Reserve’s cash will prove too tempting for other ranchers to turn down.
“It’s really hard for some people to resist that much money,” she says. “Most of these people are land rich and cash poor.”
The organization doesn’t disclose how much it pays for property, but rancher Vicki Olson says it’s paid as much as $2,000 an acre, whereas the going rate is typically a quarter of that.
“They want it big, and we have to be gone if they want thousands of buffalo running free,” says Olson, who keeps 500 head of Black Angus cattle on 20,000 acres of private and government-leased land 30 miles south of Malta. “There ain’t room for the both of us.”