YELLOW JACKET — On rolling pink-dirt hills surrounded by fields of wheat and bright-green alfalfa, a herd of bison ambles to a water trough.
They number in the 80s, these 2,000-pound beasts and their much smaller calves that will eventually become steaks and ground meat — either by way of a slaughter or hunters who pay for the opportunity to shoot an American buffalo on land as scenic as a movie set.
More bison are coming to this ranch, and the new ones will help feed families in southwestern Colorado who visit the food pantry in Cortez and, if plans work out as intended, tribal members who get food boxes from the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.
The plan put together by Montezuma County locals targets food insecurity and “food sovereignty,” which advocates describe as the right for people to have access to locally sourced, culturally appropriate food instead of cheaper, processed food. In this case, it’s about raising bison — animals that roamed the landscape long before the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute reservations existed — as a sustainable source of healthy protein.
The Community Bison Program will work like this:
A $48,950 one-time grant from the LOR Foundation funds the purchase of five to seven bison, which are owned by the newly formed nonprofit, Farming Hands Initiative. The point is to “think beyond a single season,” not a one-time food distribution. In the first year, the program might process just one bison, about 300 pounds of meat, but that will increase each year as the herd grows, said Janna Neely, founder of Farming Hands Initiative.
At the same time, the program supports local ranchers to keep producing food.
If the nonprofit used the $48,950 investment to buy several bison and have them processed in the first year, the community could have a “couple thousand pounds of high-quality protein to families who need it,” Neely said. “That would make a real difference. But in a matter of months, that food would be gone.”
Instead, the plan is to build something for the long haul. Every new calf that joins the herd is “another opportunity to feed a family, support a local producer, educate the next generation, and strengthen the community’s long-term food security,” she said.
Neely hopes the initiative will expand beyond her father-in-law’s ranch to other local producers, including those who raise cattle and hogs. The new nonprofit board, composed of volunteers who care about agriculture and feeding community members in need, dreams of someday funding a local grower and a giant greenhouse that could supply vegetables to local food programs.
“Do year-round growing. Root vegetables, potatoes,” said Becky Forsythe, a board member who owns cows and whose father recently retired as the long-time local butcher.
The need has become more obvious in the past six years, she said, starting with the COVID pandemic and then government shutdowns that cut off funding for federal programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.
“You’re talking about a lot of people that don’t have a sustainable food source, and that’s a travesty,” Forsythe said. “I want there to be something out there for people that they know that they can have healthy options. At least they have stuff at the house that doesn’t resemble Totino’s pizza and a 2-liter bottle of soda.”
Ground bison costs $12 or more per pound at the grocery store, which means it’s too expensive for many people to buy.
Food security is an even greater concern this year, as Montezuma County is in a drought. On farm land in Yellow Jacket, population 80, the irrigation ditches from the Dolores River have so far supplied just 4.1 inches of water.
“We normally get 22.5. Last year, I think we ended up with 14 inches,” Neely said, driving past a dust devil swirling across dried-up fields.
People’s gardens yielded less than usual, too.
At the same time, federal budget cuts are taking a projected $9 billion out of the SNAP program nationally this year. Plus, new federal regulations increased the work requirements for SNAP eligibility and prohibited noncitizens from receiving food assistance. About 30,000 Coloradans already have lost food assistance benefits and some estimates show the number could reach nearly 300,000, out of about 610,000 enrolled in the program.
The first bison harvest is planned for this winter or spring. The bison will be processed at USDA-inspected facilities and will be distributed to local food banks. Those arrangements are still in the works, and while leaders of the initiative hope to work with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, they don’t yet have an arrangement.
By year five, the herd is expected to reach steady-state production: “a consistent, annual supply of locally raised protein that doesn’t depend on distant supply chains or fluctuating commodity prices,” the nonprofit said.
The idea to raise a bison herd for the food pantry came after Neely, who at the time was operations manager of the Good Sam’s Food Pantry in Cortez, heard about an application for a much larger government grant. That one was millions of dollars and would have required her to run a sub-grant process for several other livestock producers.
She mentioned the smaller-scale idea to one of the food bank volunteers, who happened to work for the LOR Foundation, which funds community projects in rural towns in the West, including in Wyoming, Montana, New Mexico and Colorado.
Neely was the perfect person to spearhead the project. She grew up outside of Cortez, married into a bison-ranching family and was trained by the long-time local butcher to take over the meat shop, which sits at the intersection of two rural roads just a minute or two from the grazing bison herd.
In her vision, the initiative will expand, and in the future will entice young wannabe ranchers to step into the industry, backed by the support of local philanthropy. “The barrier to starting out in agriculture is pretty high,” Neely said. “The price of land and water and the animals is so high. What if we could start new producers, help them get a foot in the door if we bought that initial breeding herd, and then they contributed back into the community through a project like this?”
Neely also would love to add an educational component to the initiative, such as inviting tribal members to demonstrate an Indigenous harvest, which would entail taking down a bison in the field with a firearm. The ranch already offers bison hunts for its current herd, often hosting hunters from Arizona, Texas and Florida who want to shoot a bison that is “living their best life out here right up until we come and harvest them and take them back to the skinning shed,” Neely said.
Besides hunting, bison from the ranch have gone to school lunch programs and farmers markets.
The LOR Foundation’s Nicci Crowley called the program a “bison-based protein pipeline” sparked by a community member who “recognized a gap, developed a thoughtful and unique way to address it, and just needed a little help to launch the idea.”
“The project creates a renewable, locally controlled source of nourishment that grows over time,” she said.