As a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, rancher Brandon Small grew up in the rolling hills of the tribe’s Montana land.
“This part of southeast Montana, for me, it’s home,” Small says.
But, while Small says that he could have lived full-time roaming wild out in the hills when he was young, as he grew, he followed many of his fellow Northern Cheyenne tribesmen into town, where he got a job working in Colstrip for the coal mine. For 11 years, Small toiled in the mine working swing shift as a dragline operator.
“It was a great job, great pay, but I was missing something,” he says. “I got tired of robbing from the land.”
Seeking a Legacy Future
Small went looking for an opportunity where he could feel good about what he was doing and a connection back to the land that he loved.
“I wanted a job where I could make enough money to take care of my family, but also do something that I loved that was going to leave a lasting impact for generations to come,” he says.
He didn’t have to look very far. The Northern Cheyenne Tribe owned a herd of 250-head buffalo for half a century, but for the past two decades, the herd had gone unmanaged. Roaming 20 sq. mi. over both Northern Cheyenne territory and neighboring acres can take a toll, both on natural resources and on relationships with fellow landowners.
“They were tearing up fence lines and water tanks from Highway 212 all the way 20 miles south of here,” he says. “Wild buffalo — if they want to go somewhere, they’ll go.”
So, Small went to the Tribal Council with a plea, and a plan.
“If we want to treat these animals good, honor them, respect them, be a good steward, be a good human being, be a good Cheyenne, we have to take care of them better,” he says.
Culturally, Small says that his tribe has a deep connection to buffalo, using them as a food source but also in their ceremonies, ensuring the animal is respected by utilizing every piece.
Hailing from a family of cattle ranchers gave Small the know-how to develop a range management plan to fence the herd and provide the resources they’d need to stay put in a smaller area.
“This is a beautiful piece of land we’re on, and it’s, to me, it’s like being wasted,” he says.
Managing the Land to Manage the Herd
The 15,244 acres Small had to work with for the buffalo range was not an easy one to tame. There are rocky ridgetops, lower flat lands and a landscape that sometimes differs like day and night.
“On the far eastern portion of the buffalo ranch, it’s desert area, but on the other side it’s green, and that’s only 11 miles difference,” Small says.
With the full backing of the Tribal Council, Small resurrected a management plan that had previously been drawn by his local USDA-NRCS tribal conservationist.
USDA-NRCS Tribal Conservationist Kathy Knoblock, herself a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, was ready to put the plan into place. And for her, it sprang from a pretty basic premise.
“Phase one of the buffalo pasture project that NRCS has been helping the tribe and Brandon with is development of the basic infrastructure needed to manage a large herd of bison,” Knoblock says. “That’s a good fence and a good water supply.”
The fence in place was not just any fence, though.
“The first project of the buffalo ranch was 22 miles of fence, 7' tall, seven strand fence,” Knoblock says.
With the fence installed, Small and NRCS have been busy installing pipelines to ensure the herd has water throughout the fenced pasture area.
It looks like expanding the ranch’s two previous pipelines with two additional ones that gravity flow from a well and a live spring. This year, the team has extended one pipeline, adding 7,000' of 2" pipe, capturing water into a 10,000-gal. storage tank and also is adding an 18,000-gal. tank and four 800-gal. winter tanks that will flow water year round for the herd.
The Benefits in Action
Even with the tremendous amount of work that has been done to establish the Ranch, Small knows the task is far from complete.
“I can work 20 hours a day for the next 365 days and still have five year’s worth of work out there,” he says.
But, by letting his buffalo herd do what they have been doing for centuries, Small is seeing significant changes already in the landscape.
Small says buffalo move about their ecosystem in much different ways than cattle.
“They will have plenty of water, plenty of feed, and they will just decide they want to be 10 miles away and then they’ll be 10 miles away just for the fun of it,” he says, noting that sometimes the herd will travel 20 miles in one day across the pasture.
Because the buffalo are on the near-constant move, they are not overgrazing. And because Small is embracing the natural grazing of his herd, limiting their handling and letting them inhabit their environment, he’s seeing the impacts firsthand as he works daily in the ranch.
“I’ve been in this position for 16 months, and the difference from last year to this year is night and day,” Small says. “We have so much more grass out there for them now, so much more water for them, and we’re seeing different species of animals come back now.”
“It’s just truly amazing to actually see in one year what a buffalo can do to his environment, just by leaving him alone and making sure he has good water, making sure he has good forage, and just making sure that there aren’t other natural threats out there,” Small adds.
The Future = The Past
For Knoblock and NRCS, completion of the first phase of the Northern Cheyenne’s ranch was a project nearly a decade in the making, but Knoblock is hoping that it is not the last.
“Success really does breed success,” she says. “For the tribe to be able to come together and implement this project is a huge success, and I think it can inspire other producers and other tribes that they can do the same thing.”
But for Small, the first victory is setting the stage for his overall goals which are deeply personal.
“My hope is that, within five years, that the Northern Cheyenne buffalo ranch will be a self-sustaining ranch,” he says. “That’s what I’m what I’m proud of — being able to take care and steward a herd of animals, and being able to do it efficiently in a way that’s going to benefit everybody, the community and the animals.”
“And to me, that’s what being a good Cheyenne man is — being able to take care of my family first and then take care of as many people as I can, reach out and touch as many people and help as many people as I can.”
America’s Conservation Ag Movement is a public/private collaborative that meets growers across the country where they are on their conservation journey and empowers their next step with technical assistance from USDA-NRCS and innovation solutions and resources from agriculture’s leading providers. Learn more at www.americasconservationagmovement.com.
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