Ep. 874: How To Start A Bison Ranch

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Matt Skoglund https://www.instagram.com/northbridgerbison?igsh=eDh3bGd0bzQ1YTZt of North Bridger Bison https://www.northbridgerbison.com/. Topics discussed: How you get from being a lawyer in Chicago to being a bison rancher in Montana; conservation herds vs. wild herds, and how there are very few wild bison; why do people actually think cattle ranching is more favorable?; the importance of private land bison herds; the grasslands crisis; connecting our food to conservation; and more. Order bison meat from North Bridger here https://www.northbridgerbison.com/. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 1:30Steven Rinella?

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• 2:13Speaker 02

  This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug bitten, and in my case underwearless.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  We hunt the Meat Eater Podcast.

• 2:22Steven Rinella?

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• 2:47Steven Rinella?

  All right, man. Joined today by Matt Scoglin from North Bridger Bison, a private, like a buffalo rancher.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 2:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I'll tell you, the first thing I want to tell you about is, um, dude, the, the, the hanger steaks.

• 3:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:05Steven Rinella?

  That you gave me.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:06Steven Rinella?

  You give me off those animals.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07Steven Rinella?

  Is like, is, I hate to say it, because, uh, I should be saying this about like deer meat or something, but dude, that is some of the best stuff in the world, man.

• 3:17Speaker 04

  I know. It's so good. It, uh, we, we eat a bunch of them and it's like the flavor, texture. Um, yeah, they're just so good.

• 3:28Steven Rinella?

  Hey, tell people, because that's not, like, if you're cutting up a deer.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 3:33Steven Rinella?

  Hanger steak isn't on the menu. You know what I mean? Like, like, tell people what, like, it's, it's an off cut.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's, it's funny. So it's this, it's this steak that hangs suspended right in front of the tenderloins. And so early on, I would, you know, I'd kill a buffalo, got it, take it to Amsterdam Meat Shop, our butcher, and they'd be like, where's the hanger? I'd be like, guys, like, what are you talking about? And they're like, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, right here. And I'd be out there by myself. I'd like, I'm, I'm like, are they messing with me? Like, I cannot find this thing. And I had to YouTube it, but so it's, it's hanging in its suspend, in its, um, it's covered in like. Fasha skin, it doesn't look like anything.

• 4:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  And if you didn't know, it just comes out with the gut pile. Um, and it's kind of like attached to like the liver and the lungs, but once you, once you know, you take it out and there's one per animal and it's called a hanger, hanging tender.

• 4:33Steven Rinella?

  But what is that thing's purpose, man?

• 4:34Speaker 04

  I don't know. I, I've wondered the same thing.

• 4:36Steven Rinella?

  It'd be easy to find out.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  I know.

• 4:38Steven Rinella?

  What it does for the animal.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Right.

• 4:39Steven Rinella?

  Like if he was born with no hanger, would he know it?

• 4:44Speaker 04

  That's a great question.

• 4:45Steven Rinella?

  Would he walk funny or something?

• 4:46Speaker 04

  I know. Yeah. It's just, just this weird muscle, just literally hanging. And they used to call it.

• 4:52Steven Rinella?

  Balm it. Hey Phil, if you get a minute. Like when you're over there, do whatever you do over there.

• 4:58Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 4:59Steven Rinella?

  What like purpose does it serve?

• 5:03Speaker 04

  The hanger.

• 5:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Like what is it doing for the animal?

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Sure. I'll do some quick research here.

• 5:07Steven Rinella?

  We should all know this.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. A hundred percent.

• 5:09Steven Rinella?

  It does. It just hang. I think it's just meant to be a good thing to eat. It's like a gift from God to humans.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  Exactly. Literally. Cause it just hangs there and you cut it out, cut that tendon out and you got two beautiful sticks.

• 5:19Steven Rinella?

  Dude, we, so when, when you, the ones, what? Let me, let me explain why I'm talking about this. We do, uh, we did a dinner recently.

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Right.

• 5:29Steven Rinella?

  Here at our office and, and, um, and I called Matt and I was, I was looking for some of the like added value product or some of the not standard products that would come about.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 5:41Steven Rinella?

  You know what I didn't hit you up for is it some tails, man?

• 5:44Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  We, yep.

• 5:46Steven Rinella?

  So he get, he gave me some marrow bones.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 5:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Um, some hanger steak, heart. Trying to think what else we had in there.

• 5:58Speaker 04

  I think.

• 5:58Steven Rinella?

  Well, some shank pieces.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yep.

• 6:00Steven Rinella?

  Some shank pieces.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:02Steven Rinella?

  And we cooked all this stuff up. So we did this big meal of all like sort of the non, like non-typical, non-standard things from, from one of your animals and the hangers, we just marinated them.

• 6:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:14Steven Rinella?

  And grilled them and then kind of cut them against the grain. Dude, it's the.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  Like it, it is a, it is a perfect food.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. A hundred percent.

• 6:22Steven Rinella?

  That's amazing.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  And the thing that's cool, I mean, you can, I've done it multiple times where I'll kill a buffalo, gut it and just. Grab the hanger for us and we'll eat it for dinner, you know, six hours later. Perfect. Like so good.

• 6:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Tell, tell people, tell, tell people specifically what you do, like, like what your business is.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:42Steven Rinella?

  Like how you make your living.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  Totally. So, pretty straightforward. So, um, my wife Sarah and I and our kids, Otto and Greta, we started our bison ranch. North Bridger Bison. We started it from scratch eight years ago and we're located.

• 6:56Steven Rinella?

  Is that all it's been?

• 6:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:58Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you're kicking, you're kicking ass for eight years, man.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 7:00Steven Rinella?

  You've just been doing it eight years?

• 7:01Speaker 04

  Eight years.

• 7:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Um, and, uh, so yeah, we're up in the Shield Valley, thirty miles northeast of Bozeman. And we, it's pretty simple. We, we raise bison as well and in sync with nature as possible. We're all about biodiversity and then we sell, we raise them for meat, sell a hundred percent direct to consumer. And then everybody, and we sell by the quarter, half, whole bison. And then everyone we sell, uh, I, I, I personally field harvest each bison. So no live bison leaves the ranch. Field harvested two yesterday and, um, yeah, so I kill them on the ranch. Bleed them, got them, and then ultimately take them to our butcher, Amsterdam Meat Shop. And then we either deliver it to the customer and then we ship all over the country.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  And, um, that's it. We keep it super simple.

• 7:49Steven Rinella?

  How, how do people go like, like, how do people come find you?

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, our website. So literally just northbridgerbison.com and then like shop meat and shows what options are there. And so there's quarter, half, whole, and then an all ground bison option. And then a primal blend, which is ground bison with some heart and some liver.

• 8:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, okay.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Which, yeah. Um, and that's it. So, yeah, we keep it like, we, we were obsessed with details. Strive for excellence. So we don't want to get spread thin chasing shiny little objects. Um, so it's raising buffalo as well and in sync with nature as possible. And then really trying to provide our customers with the best red meat they'll ever taste in their life.

• 8:32Steven Rinella?

  Well, like, walk me through, like, how, how did you, how did you get interested in? Do you mean like, like, why that animal and not sheep or cattle or?

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 8:44Steven Rinella?

  Goats, you know, or giraffes or something like, like, why that, right?

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I guess to like, to back up. So, um, so I'm born and raised in Chicago. Zero background in agriculture whatsoever. And then we moved to Bozeman, uh, 18 years ago, 2008. And I spent 10 years doing environmental policy work for a conservation organization. And the, the main issue I worked on was bison. Focus on wild bison.

• 9:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  Mainly the bison population around Yellowstone National Park. Um, and just, you know, fed, fell head over heels in love with the species.

• 9:22Steven Rinella?

  So you were doing that as an attorney?

• 9:24Speaker 04

  So, no. So, yeah. So went, went to law school, had a short stint as a lawyer. Realized very quickly that being a lawyer was just not for me.

• 9:33Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 9:34Speaker 04

  And, but had this, you know.

• 9:35Steven Rinella?

  Like you were doing like normal corporate law dogging.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. So.

• 9:39Steven Rinella?

  Did you have a billboard on the side of the highway? Skoglund gets tough for you, you know?

• 9:45Speaker 04

  I love it. No, we, uh, no. So I graduated in oh five.

• 9:49Steven Rinella?

  Hurt. Call Skoglund. He'll kick their ass.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Graduated oh five, clerked for a federal magistrate judge in Chicago for a year.

• 10:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  Incredible. Amazing guy. We're still very close. He married Sarah and me. And then I went. Yeah. And then I went to a big firm for two years, which I knew wasn't for me long-term, but it's a good place to start. And then we were just.

• 10:14Steven Rinella?

  And what kind of law was that?

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Just, yeah, corporate litigation. Big firm, just a grind, like.

• 10:21Steven Rinella?

  Suit and tie in it.

• 10:23Steven Rinella?

  Probably not suit and tie.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Not, but you had it. You, you kept a suit and tie behind your, uh, the door to your office.

• 10:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  In case a partner called you at like two o'clock and was like, hey, go to court. And you're like, shit, I gotta throw a tie on.

• 10:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 04

  And then we were just, we were dying. I'd fallen in love with Montana Northern Rockies a long time ago and we were dying to move out here. So we, we, in oh eight, we were just like, we were getting married and we just felt it's now or never. Like if we don't do this right now, life's just gonna get more complicated. You have a kid and so.

• 10:53Steven Rinella?

  You'll get all dug in.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 10:55Steven Rinella?

  Everything will be a pain in the ass and.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  Hundred percent. So we, so we, we quit our jobs, got married, moved to Bozeman. Friends and family thought we were batshit crazy. We were like, no, we're just, we're, we're doing it. We'll figure it out. And, uh, and at that point I knew I was, I did not want to be a lawyer. And so I, this was a dream job for me. It was, uh, non litigation policy.

• 11:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 04

  So it's like the perfect job for a former lawyer and the main issue I worked on was bison. So, you know.

• 11:22Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, let's talk about that. Let's, let's talk about that issue.

• 11:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:26Steven Rinella?

  Cause you talk about like around the park, right?

• 11:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:29Steven Rinella?

  So.

• 11:31Steven Rinella?

  I, I just want, I want to, we've talked about this a hundred, we, we talk about this all the time on the show.

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 11:35Steven Rinella?

  It's like, uh.

• 11:38Steven Rinella?

  It, it's a subject I'm deeply interested in. You're, you're going to know. More about it than me as much or as much about it as me is more and you're going to know different aspects of it. But when, when you're talking about that.

• 11:50Steven Rinella?

  I'll just tee it up and you can comment on where you want is, is there's this just never ending conversation.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 11:55Steven Rinella?

  Right. It would like, uh. I moved, I, I moved to Montana in 1996. I think it was nice. Yeah. Ninety six.

• 12:06Steven Rinella?

  It was being talked about then.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:08Steven Rinella?

  It's being talked about now.

• 12:09Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:09Steven Rinella?

  It's basically what is the relationship? What are the relationships between the states of Montana? And Wyoming with the bison herd that resides in Yellowstone National Park.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:25Steven Rinella?

  Um, you, you can't separate all these things.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 12:28Steven Rinella?

  Out, right? There's this, there's this great quote about the park. It's like, it's like, whatever. It's two million acres. Of paradise surrounded by reality or something like that. Right? So it's like, there's these thousands, thousands of animals that live within the park.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:41Steven Rinella?

  But. Wild animals aren't good at recognizing like jurisdictional boundaries.

• 12:47Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 12:47Steven Rinella?

  Right? And so they're routinely spilling out of the park. Into surrounding private lands, national forest lands. And there was just a constant debate about what should the state's tolerance for these animals be?

• 13:04Steven Rinella?

  Uh, what should be their designation?

• 13:06Speaker 04

  Yep. Oh, yeah.

• 13:07Steven Rinella?

  Currently, and, and, you know, pardon me, listeners, we talk about this all the time on the show currently, and it blows my mind if a buffalo walks out of the park onto into Montana, it crosses the park border.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 13:22Steven Rinella?

  It becomes livestock.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:25Steven Rinella?

  Uh,

• 13:28Steven Rinella?

  because the state doesn't recognize any real difference between the owned livestock animals and the wild free roaming animals. An interesting hook here to say that there is a way that this can work out. We've talked about this too. Colorado recently, I don't know if you just saw this.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  I did, yeah.

• 13:45Steven Rinella?

  Colorado recently passed legislation.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:48Steven Rinella?

  That says if a, a bison walks into the state on its own four legs.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:57Steven Rinella?

  It is wildlife.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:59Steven Rinella?

  Right?

• 14:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:00Steven Rinella?

  Drawing a distinction.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:02Steven Rinella?

  And, and not to like discredit private producers.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 14:05Steven Rinella?

  Or not to take private producers' property from them, but drawing a distinction between some of these are wildlife.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 14:13Steven Rinella?

  Some of these are livestock and recognizing that there's, there's two versions.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 14:18Steven Rinella?

  Which is a pretty like, I don't know, I was, I was quite pleased with that.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 14:23Steven Rinella?

  Distinction over there.

• 14:24Speaker 04

  For sure, for sure.

• 14:25Steven Rinella?

  So with that little bit of setup, what, what aspects of this did you work on?

• 14:28Speaker 04

  So, well, one, I think, so my understanding, and I, I don't follow it as closely, but in Montana, the dichotomy, if you will, is that, so when, when they're in the park, they're wildlife.

• 14:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  And then they, they literally, they step over this boundary that, like you said, they can't see.

• 14:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  They enter Montana and, and

• 14:51Speaker 04

  at that point, they're jointly managed between Fish Wildlife and Parks, the managed wildlife, and then the Department of Livestock.

• 14:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  That manages livestock.

• 15:00Steven Rinella?

  But like old, yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  So they're, they're, I mean, I'm splitting hairs, but they, you know, cause they have.

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  You're, you're correct.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:05Steven Rinella?

  Yes.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  So, so, so it's, they're like Fish Wildlife and Parks would say that's a wildlife species, but we have joint management with Department of Livestock and that's the. The only species in the state that has that. And so what, what, what, what I worked on very succinctly was expanding the tolerance for Yellowstone bison outside the park in Montana.

• 15:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  Cause we've got, you know, millions of acres of public land where bison are not welcome. And, and, and the, the thing that was cool was we actually made progress. Like it's this issue, like you just laid out.

• 15:40Steven Rinella?

  Tolerant zones.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they weren't, so when I started on it, there were, um, it was, there was much less tolerance for bison outside the park. And, uh, there was this group of us and it was, you'll appreciate this. So that, so, you know, the Yellowstone bison are managed under the inter-agency bison management plan, the IBNP that all stems from a lawsuit between the state of Montana and the feds and a negotiated settlement in 2000. And so it's Montana, what's Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, Department of Livestock, the Forest Service, the Park Service, USDA AFIS, which is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

• 16:23Speaker 04

  And then, uh, I, the inter-tribal Buffalo Council, Nez Perce, CSKT. Um, and they, um, they, they wanted to see more tolerance outside the park. And they, and, and, oh, there, there was a, a congressional review report that came out in like 2006 or something. And one of the criticisms was that the IBNP partners weren't getting enough citizen feedback and acting on it. And, and so they would talk about it. They had three meetings a year, a winter meeting. Yeah, I think it was three meetings a year and they would, and it was like three years they spent talking about finding a way to get more citizen input.

• 17:07Speaker 04

  And, and they were struggling with it because you've got state, tribal, federal entities. And, and I could see it didn't, it was, they were, they were acting in good faith. They were just struggling. With a mechanism to do this. And there was this one meeting where the former state veterinarian, Marty Zaluzki, who's a really good guy and a good friend of mine. And, and, and he was frustrated. And he's like, look, you know, we're, we've been trying this for three years and we're stuck. And he's like, there's nothing to stop the citizens, the people that are concerned about this from starting something. And he said, he goes, you know, if, if Matt Skoglund, a bison advocate,

• 17:47Speaker 04

  and Ariel Overstreet from the Montana Stockruers came to me and said, we think you should do this. He's like, that'd be powerful. If you had wildlife advocates and stock growers. And so after that meeting, Ariel and I and a few others, this great local sheep rancher, Becky Weed, we formed this citizens working group that the agencies all supported. The former Region Three Fish, Wildlife and Parks Director, Pat Flowers, was a huge help. Mary Erickson from the Forest Service. And we got this just very diverse group of people. It was a couple ranchers, wildlife advocates, hunters, local business owners and gardener

• 18:28Speaker 04

  in West Yellowstone, landowners. And we basically, and we spent, it was a facilitated process for over a year. And we came up with consensus recommendations, delivered them to the agency partners, and they actually acted on it. And so some of them were like, they were pretty simple. Like, the best example I can give was that the Horse Butte Peninsula, north of West Yellowstone, is this peninsula that goes out into Hebbid Lake, and on the east side is bordered by Yellowstone Park. Twenty-five years ago, there was a public grazing lease and a private cattle ranch on Horse Butte. The, the federal grazing leases had been permanently retired, and that private ranch was bought, and the cattle are gone. But, so you have

• 19:12Speaker 04

  this peninsula that never has a cow, a cow on it, ever. And we're still using tax, we were still using taxpayer dollars to haze bison back into the park to protect cattle that literally don't exist. And everyone agreed, we're like, this is crazy. And so stuff like that, that we were able to agree on, present to the partners, and they expanded the tolerance. And that, that was like really satisfying work. And I would say, but now, I feel like You know, I feel like we accomplished all the low hanging fruit.

• 19:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  And, and now it's just, it's tough. It's a tough issue.

• 19:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:48Steven Rinella?

  Well, when you mentioned that, that, and I don't want to spend too much time on this subject, but you mentioned that like joint management, there has been for sure. Like the, um, bringing in public hunts.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  Right? So, so there are, they're like, there are of the animals coming out of the park in the winter. There are tribal hunts.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:05Steven Rinella?

  There are public draw hunts.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:07Steven Rinella?

  I put in for, um, one of the, I, I put in for, there, there's three, there's three different hunt codes or hunt availabilities.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:18Steven Rinella?

  I put in for the one that you're never going to draw.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:20Steven Rinella?

  Every year I put in for that one.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, nice.

• 20:22Steven Rinella?

  So there are, and like, and guys here in the office have drawn, have, have drawn the tags. And so there is a, there is an increased management perspective.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:30Steven Rinella?

  But it is not as clean as, um, it's not as clean as what say elk enjoy.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. No, not even close.

• 20:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, it's a, it's a, it's a complicated issue with unfortunately no, no clear end in sight.

• 20:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:47Steven Rinella?

  So when you were doing that and you were involved in, in, in trying to restore the animals as wildlife.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:52Steven Rinella?

  Um, and I think I want to add one interesting point about that is, uh, when I first got into the subject all these years ago.

• 21:02Steven Rinella?

  Someone had mentioned like, uh, we had solved the problem of genetic extinction.

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Uh huh. Yep.

• 21:12Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like if you go back to 1900.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:15Steven Rinella?

  There was a real risk of the species going genetically extinct or, or going through like really terror, you know, it did go through terrible bottlenecks.

• 21:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:23Steven Rinella?

  But there was like, there was a time when, uh, uh, like I, I've made this point before, there was a time when a, a lightning bolt.

• 21:33Steven Rinella?

  Could have feasibly killed a significant percentage of all the animals that existed.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:39Steven Rinella?

  I mean, they they were bottlenecked down.

• 21:41Speaker 04

  Big time.

• 21:42Steven Rinella?

  Um, and so people like we solve the problem of genetic extinction.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:46Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, we got different source herds and conservation herds scattered around like there's no thing that's gonna happen.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:52Steven Rinella?

  They're separated. There's not like some like strain of anthrax is gonna all of a sudden infect a herd and and kill off half the animals known to exist.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 22:01Steven Rinella?

  So like genetic extinction, but they pointed out that ecological extinction, that they are like effectively ecologically extinct.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 22:10Steven Rinella?

  They're not a participating member of the natural biome.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:15Steven Rinella?

  Across most of their range.

• 22:17Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 22:17Steven Rinella?

  Right? And you would and your work was sort of addressing.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:23Steven Rinella?

  That like ecological extinction.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 22:27Steven Rinella?

  And then you eventually got into a line of work that's sort of like addresses it from a whole other angle.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:33Steven Rinella?

  Right? What was the connection between the two things? Like, you're working on behalf of wild animals and then you decided to get into in into ranching them on deeded land that you own.

• 22:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, very, very well said. And so for me, it was, you know, I I spent 10 years at this organization and just over time, the nonprofit environmental policy work, it's it's frustrating.

• 23:00Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  Because you you lack control. And so like the example I always give, um, you know, there's been this push to restore buffalo in central Montana, in and around the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the Missouri Breaks and blah, blah. And the state did all this work to tee it up with a very, very, you know, start with a very small population. And, um, you know, and I'd meet with like a state agency scientist and a federal agency scientist. And I'd be like, you know, you guys need to do this. And they'd say, Matt, we couldn't agree more with you. But politically, that's a nonstarter.

• 23:37Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:37Speaker 04

  And you go back to your office and you're like, what are we doing? Like, they have these public meetings. People write letters. They have this whole thing and it's a dog and pony show.

• 23:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Because it's a political decision that whoever the The power that be is at that time is not going to make. And so I just, you feel like you're spinning your wheels.

• 23:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 23:57Speaker 04

  And so I just started to get frustrated with that process. And at the same time, I, you know, and I, and, you know, conservation groups are super important. I respect the hell out of that work. I just found it wasn't for me. And I also found like big picture. I didn't think, I don't think that it, that that work really moves the needle the way people think it does. And I say that because I, you know.

• 24:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, explain that to me.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  You see these groups that, um, you know, you get these fundraising emails, you know, donate $50 to save the whales. Donate $50 to save the, the elephants. And so someone, someone writes a check for $50 and they feel like, all right, I did, I did my, I did my public duty for wildlife, biodiversity, conservation for the year. And then the rest of their, and the rest of their life, they don't really think about it.

• 24:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  And so that $50, you know, it's like, it's like a giant wildfire. And, you know, putting an ounce of water on it, it doesn't do anything.

• 25:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  And so if we're really gonna protect biodiversity, which, you know, we're in the middle of an extinction crisis. It has to come from how we produce things and how we consume things like through the business world. And I, I just, that, that just became very clear to me. And so I wanted to leave the nonprofit world, go into the for-profit world. And, and I was really attracted but to food. Because, you know, when you think about it, we have billions of people on the planet. And if you're lucky, you get to eat three meals a day. You fact that out across the billions of people on the planet. And you realize very quickly that the production of food has enormous environmental and social consequences.

• 25:45Speaker 04

  And then very simply, I also, I just like, I love Aldo Leopold. I love land. And so to be able to like, work on a piece of, a piece of ground that you can touch, smell, feel, watch it through the seasons, hopefully improve it, increase the biodiversity, and then provide food for people that is, you know. Amazing for the environment, amazing for them, great for biodiversity. Like that just really appealed to me.

• 26:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 04

  And then, and, and, and so I had fallen in love with bison. And, and so that's why we, you know, there's, I always joke, like, there's some parallel universe where we're doing the same thing with grass fed beef. I just, I love bison and we wanted to do it with bison. And then also, you know, we still, uh, you know, we've only got 400 or 500,000 bison in North America. And so our herd, you know, it adds ultimately, it helps with the, the long-term conservation of the species.

• 26:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, so that, that's why we did it.

• 26:43Steven Rinella?

  That's one of the things that I've always admired about the producers and when I, and I've always defended producers like you, cause it helped it like it, it, you know, it, it, it puts the animals on the landscape and puts the animals where people can see them.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 26:59Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? And it's like, but it puts them on native range.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  Oh dude.

• 27:02Steven Rinella?

  You know what I mean?

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more with that. Like there's so much fear around bison, cause they've been gone for so long.

• 27:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  And so people, people are just scared of them, right? Like I joked like early on, I'm like, people think that bison are gonna like, go down and rob the bank, like with a, with a, with, you know, like they're just evil. And then they're out there, like for, on our ranch, they're out there, people see them and they're like, huh? They're just doing their thing.

• 27:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, that, that's a big, I think about that a lot, like a big thing that, that we, I feel like a big service we provide is just comfort familiarity with the species that most people either never see, or they're like, it's only in Yellowstone. And so, yeah, it's, it's, it's making people more comfortable with bison back on the landscape.

• 27:48Steven Rinella?

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• 29:46Steven Rinella?

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• 30:40Speaker 04

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• 30:50Steven Rinella?

  It was funny because I have a deep suspicion of, um, suspicion in some cases dislike of the captive cervid.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 31:02Steven Rinella?

  Industry.

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay, like, because raising deer, raising elk, those aren't absent from the landscape.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 31:10Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like, those are like ecologically viable.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:13Steven Rinella?

  Creatures that are, that are sort of like culturally ingrained and have people that are willing to stand for them. There's organizations that defend their habitat, right? Biologists that work on their behalf. There's this whole like infrastructure of deer and wild deer and elk support. I've always viewed the bison thing different because they're otherwise absent. I, I think it's, you know, I know it fluctuate, fluctuate maybe by like a part of a percent over recent years, but 94 or 95% of the animals in existence of the bison in existence are privately owned.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 31:51Steven Rinella?

  If you scratch those off,

• 31:54Steven Rinella?

  you, you have, you know, there's what you like, said like half million of the animals. You, you like scratch away the privately owned ones? And you're looking at a 95% reduction.

• 32:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, I.

• 32:08Steven Rinella?

  It's just like you, you've reduced it to next to nothing.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll, I'll take it a step further. I mean, one, I couldn't agree more. I hate game farms. And I, it's funny, I quote you all the time because when we met years ago, when you spoke at the Montana Bison Association Conference, you, you laid it out perfectly. You were like, I hate game farms. Exactly what you just said, but bison is this weird, this, it's this unique thing where it makes sense. And we're not a game farm, we're a ranch, but where, uh, you know, the importance of private ranches for buffalo. And, and so, yeah, it's like 90, something like 95% of, of the population of bison in North America are on ranches like, are on ranches like ours. And then even the conservation herds that, that are out there,

• 32:55Speaker 04

  the majority of those, almost all of them, aren't wildlife. Like to me, a wildlife species, I know you would agree, is it goes wherever the hell it wants to go.

• 33:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 04

  And, and so like whether it's Custer, Wind Cave.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Teddy Roosevelt, these various parks, they're ultimately fenced, they're managed, they, you know, they round the bison up. And even Yellowstone, right? Like, they're not allowed to freely roam. And so if you really, like, if you really want to split hairs and say, how many wild bison are out there? I mean, it's a fraction, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage.

• 33:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you have, I recently did sort of a roundup of, of, well, I tried to define wild.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:41Steven Rinella?

  And it'd be like, something that can cross political boundaries.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 33:46Steven Rinella?

  Right? When you get down to hers that are allowed to cross political boundaries.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:51Steven Rinella?

  Without, without management status changing as they cross political boundaries. I mean, you get into like, small handfuls.

• 33:57Speaker 04

  Oh, it's tiny.

• 33:58Steven Rinella?

  There's a handful in Alaska that can cross political boundaries.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 34:01Steven Rinella?

  The Henry Mountains.

• 34:02Speaker 04

  Utah.

• 34:02Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you know, yeah, the, the north rim of the Grand Canyon.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 34:06Steven Rinella?

  There's something can cross political boundaries. But, um, and you could go on and name a few, but I mean, we're, we're talking about handfuls of animals.

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, tiny, tiny number of animals.

• 34:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:17Steven Rinella?

  And they're, you know, they're doing some super cool work. We had a guest on talking about they, they're doing some really cool work in Alaska.

• 34:23Speaker 04

  I listened to that one.

• 34:24Steven Rinella?

  You know, to, to, to bring in, uh, like a sort of phenotype, eco-type of the animal called a woods bison, wood bison into Alaska.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:34Steven Rinella?

  Um, which is cool work. But how, like, when you decided to go down this path, like, how, how'd you even start getting into it? Do you know what I mean?

• 34:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:45Steven Rinella?

  And then what is the, what was the sort of capital investment required?

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, so it's, it's, it's a funny story. So, um, literally, I, I'm not exaggerating. Because I worked on bison, Yellowstone bison, I have a, I had a Google alert for Yellowstone bison. One day I get a Google alert. That there's a Bozeman Daily Chronicle article on the National Bison, the National Bison Association had just had their summer conference in Big Sky and they did something at Ted Turner's Flying D Ranch.

• 35:18Steven Rinella?

  And that's the producers, that's like the producer association, because there's national, I don't know if it's even, is National Bison Society active?

• 35:25Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 35:28Steven Rinella?

  But either way.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:29Steven Rinella?

  National Bison Association's producers.

• 35:31Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 35:31Steven Rinella?

  Organization.

• 35:32Speaker 04

  Exactly. And so the article just said that they, they had their summer conference in Big Sky and that demand for bison meat was growing. They were looking for more producers and I, I literally read the article and I was like, man, I'm like, that sounds so cool. Clearly not for me as a kid from Chicago, but for somebody, that's going to be awesome. And I just wonder, I wonder, I went about my day and, and then a couple of months later, it was still like kicking around my brain and I was like, God, I feel like there might be something there. But I was like, you know, to like, give buffalo this great life on a ranch and because they haven't been domesticated, shipping them to slaughter is like super high stress. So there's like an ethical humane component to that. And then all that stress

• 36:17Speaker 04

  negatively impacts the quality of the meat.

• 36:19Steven Rinella?

  Can I, can I, I want to tell you a story about that. You, Bill, share your own, but when I, I lived in Miles City for a couple of years.

• 36:26Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 36:27Steven Rinella?

  And I lived next to a guy that had a slaughter plant.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:29Steven Rinella?

  Some days he was inspected. He had like some days on his schedule when he was federally inspected and some days on his schedule and he did custom slaughter. And I remember telling me, man, he, he used to try and had quit bringing in, bringing in bison for custom slaughter. He said they're just too crazy.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. They're, yeah, I mean.

• 36:51Steven Rinella?

  Like to try to bring them into his facility, he would have had to change a bunch of stuff. It was like too chaotic.

• 36:57Speaker 04

  Oh, 100%.

• 36:57Steven Rinella?

  Bring them into his facility and then, and then shipping them was very tough.

• 37:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's just, exactly. It's super high stress. Also lots of bruising. You know, you throw a bunch of bison on a truck and they're, whether it's intentional or unintentional, they're goring each other, a lot of bruising.

• 37:13Steven Rinella?

  He mentioned that to me and he eventually just got done with it.

• 37:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. A lot of guys do that. And so, so I was like, yeah, I just, I don't want, that's Each to his or own, that's not for me.

• 37:23Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  And then I read this, this amazing book, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, this memoir by Dan O'Brien.

• 37:29Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Who, uh, who you know.

• 37:31Steven Rinella?

  Lot of people bring that book up.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  It's, it's amazing book. He started Wild Idea Buffalo in South Dakota, huge hero of mine. And in that book, you know, I'm avid hunter and in that book, he, he talks about, so he pioneered the modern day field harvesting of bison.

• 37:48Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Which, you know, you've seen it because you were up on the ranch with your kids that one day when I field harvested one. Oh, and then obviously the Clovis experiment.

• 37:55Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  Uh, but it's basically just instead of, you just reverse the process. So instead of shipping them to slaughter, like yesterday, I just drive out to wherever they are that day. And it's a headshot with a copper bullet from like 12 yards and it's instant.

• 38:09Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 38:09Speaker 04

  Like as ethical and humane as it gets, the meat's amazing. And so when I read, literally, when I read about field harvest in that book, it was an instant light bulb moment. I was like, I didn't know this existed. This is the way to do it. And I know there are people that are going to resonate with this because I just kept meeting people that were like, I've seen food, Inc. I've read Michael Pollan. I'm done with meat.

• 38:32Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  And I don't hunt, but if my neighbor kills an elk and gives me 30 pounds of elk, I'm like, oh my God, it's like the greatest thing ever. I'm like, oh, so you're not done with meat. You're done with like the factory farming hell that you see in documentaries, which I totally get. Um, so, so Dan O'Brien's book is what sent us on this path.

• 38:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  And then my next step was like, okay, I know absolutely nothing. So I literally went to Google and typed in bison ranching consultant. And then there's amazing guy Roland Cruz who lives in Bozeman and is, is just a general, um, like regenerative ranching consultant.

• 39:11Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  Works a bunch with cattle ranchers, a bunch with bison people. And we met for lunch in Bozeman. And I was telling him my story and he kind of cut me off and he's like, you should, I, I teach this holistic management workshop on a bison ranch. You should come to it. And I took it in two ways. One, like this would be very beneficial for you. And then two is like a test. Like, are you a dreamer? Or, or are you wasting my time? Or are you serious?

• 39:37Steven Rinella?

  Good.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  So I went to his, I went to his workshop and then I came back like. All excited like to Sarah, I was like, we, we gotta do this. But I, and I still had this like, uh, you know, insecurity or just kind of, you know, uh, anxiety around it of like, I just thought if you didn't grow up ranching, you couldn't be a rancher. But I'm like, we'll just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

• 40:00Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a rea- yeah.

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Which is pretty reasonable.

• 40:03Steven Rinella?

  It is, man. And you know, you brought something up that I wish I had. I can't believe I didn't mention it. If, if, if, if you, you folks listening have, have ever seen our YouTube video where we worked with some anthropologists and archaeologists to do an experiment with using stone tools to butcher. That, that was Matt's place.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 40:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So I should have made that connection because, because people, people love that video.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  I know.

• 40:27Steven Rinella?

  That was one of your animals on your place.

• 40:29Speaker 04

  Yep. That was, yeah.

• 40:30Steven Rinella?

  Um, and then we got to eat all that meat. That was good.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was, that was, that was, that, that was such an amazing day. I, I'll never forget like that morning I said to Sarah, I'm like, look, like, I don't know what time I'm gonna be home, but like 11 midnight, like these, the boys are gonna be working with headlights. Just that, I'm just like, that, that's the deal. And like four o'clock, you guys were like, we're good.

• 40:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  Bones were crystal clean. Like it was, it was so impressive.

• 40:57Steven Rinella?

  It worked out good. The, the other point you made that I wanted to comment on is like, not growing up around it.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:04Steven Rinella?

  Cause that's a thing. When I hang out with buddies of mine that grew up around livestock, be like, like cattle guys, horse guys, whatever. When they look at something, they see a thing that I don't see.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 41:18Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Like buddies of mine that grew up on, you know, they, they grew up horseback, right?

• 41:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:24Steven Rinella?

  I look at a horse, I just see a hor- you know what I mean? I'm like a horse. Maybe I'll get like, then it's got an old vibe to it. Or I might get that it's got like a somewhat unpredictable vibe to it.

• 41:33Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:34Steven Rinella?

  They look at it and they see like its whole history.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 41:38Steven Rinella?

  They see the history of its parents. You know what I mean? They like, they just, they just see things.

• 41:43Speaker 04

  Not to mention.

• 41:44Steven Rinella?

  And like with cattle, like, okay, you know, some cows standing there. I'm like, oh, there's a cow standing over there. They're like, something's wrong with that cow.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:50Steven Rinella?

  That cow's got whatever.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  No.

• 41:52Steven Rinella?

  The cow is this, the cow, it, it like, you can't, I, I've always felt. You you'll never catch them.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 42:00Steven Rinella?

  You'll never catch up to them.

• 42:01Speaker 04

  No chance. Not to mention, like, you know, they could be standing there and, um, you know, the truck breaks down. And they're like, I've got baling twine, a toothbrush, a can of WD-40 and a tin of tobacco.

• 42:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  And they'll they'll fix the truck.

• 42:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Like, like, mind our neighbors, they're amazing humans. And like, and yeah, I'll never, you know, I will never have their level of knowledge.

• 42:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you you'll never catch them.

• 42:32Speaker 04

  No chance. And I and I I respect the hell out of them like so much. I've learned a ton from them. Um, but but the interesting thing, so when we were, when we were going down, you know, I I literally, I I would say to Sarah, I'm like, I'm like, I think we can do this. But but I feel like there's something someone's not telling us.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Cause like, if you don't grow up ranching, you can't be a rancher. And I kind of feel like we can. And, uh, and then I met a couple of guys who were like me, no, no background whatsoever. And they were like, you're gonna make mistakes, like 100%.

• 43:08Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 43:09Speaker 04

  But not having any background in agriculture, there's actually, there's a huge advantage to that. Because you have no, no bad habits to unlearn.

• 43:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Speaker 04

  And, um, you know, there's no, uh, like, my last name is Skoglund. There's no like, this is the Skoglund way of ranching.

• 43:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  This is how we do it. We just say like, what's best for the animal, the land and the business, we'll do that.

• 43:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  And so, um, so yeah, so we, and and I, I mean, we could have a four hour podcast about, I mean, I burned a truck to the ground, I broke my ankle, the bison got out, been stuck in the mud, rolled a four, I mean, I could just go on and on.

• 43:50Steven Rinella?

  All the things you screwed up.

• 43:51Speaker 04

  All the things, like, I remember early on laughing with with with one of my neighbors, I was like, After one of my, you know, epic, you know, screw ups, I was like, I'm like, I think you guys have a bet down at the bar of when the Skoglands are going to go bankrupt. I was like, and now I think there's a second bet of when, when's Matt gonna die?

• 44:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  And there was another time where a neighbor, I did something and I was telling my neighbor about it. And he looks at me dead serious and he goes, Matt, I'm concerned that you lack agricultural caution. And he goes, what's your wife's cell phone number? I think we need to have her number.

• 44:31Steven Rinella?

  That's good.

• 44:31Speaker 04

  And I look back.

• 44:32Steven Rinella?

  These are cattle producers?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  The one was a cattle producer, the other one is he rebuilds cars and trucks.

• 44:39Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 44:39Speaker 04

  And, but I look back those first couple of years and I'm like, it's, I feel like it's a miracle I'm alive.

• 44:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  But, but again, on the flip side, in this, this is talked a lot about, this is talked a lot about currently in ranching. Cause a lot of ranches are being passed from, you know, the older generation to people our age.

• 44:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 04

  And there's, there could be some tension where it's like, well, I'm going to mix things up. And the parents or the in-laws or whoever like, no, no, we've done it this way for a hundred years. You're not changing it. So, so there's definitely some advantages to having no background in agriculture. But, but yeah, I was, I felt like, yeah, I just felt like we were missing something. That someone wasn't telling us something that that summer of 2018, we were getting started. But yeah, we've, we've learned.

• 45:25Steven Rinella?

  One thing you were probably missing was land.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that's, so, so, so, so we, so yeah, so I came back from the holistic management workshop. All fired up, you know, I write a business plan and Sarah's all in, but she's like, she's like, no offense to the rest of America. It's gotta be within an hour of Bozeman because our community's here. And at that point, we have, we have two kids. And at that point, our, our daughter had just turned one. Our son was like four and, and she was like, I'm just not starting over in Colorado or Eastern Montana.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 04

  Wherever.

• 46:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  And so I looked for land and like the dream died very quickly. But I'm a stubborn person.

• 46:11Steven Rinella?

  Because you couldn't find anything.

• 46:12Speaker 04

  Couldn't find anything.

• 46:13Steven Rinella?

  Oh, just so like.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  It's impossible.

• 46:15Steven Rinella?

  And it's just like so expensive.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  So expensive.

• 46:17Steven Rinella?

  I just came back from a state, I'm not even going to name the state. And like, that's where you need to go.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:25Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:26Steven Rinella?

  It's like, I was like, I finally like, it's like awesome area. And then looking at land prices, I'm like, it hasn't gotten crazy.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. So we were lucky. This is, so this is like March of 2018. And I'm stubborn, so I just kept looking online, looking online. And then I came across this, uh, Ranch Broker's website. And there were these three parcels up in the Shield Valley, which was our, that was our ideal area. Because we love it up there. It's beautiful. And as you know, I mean, it's hardcore ranching country.

• 46:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  And we, you know, so, so there's no threat. Not, not a big threat of like subdivision, that sort of thing. And, um, but when I came across this website, I, the, the prices were so low. And the website was a little, you know, kind of low tech. I was like, I was like, this, this has got to be like, uh, this has got to be from like 2004. And the guy just never took it down. And but, and so I called him, the name was Don Vanaman. So I, I called him expecting to like, you know, this number's been disconnected. And he was like, Don Vanaman. And I was like, holy shit. I was like, hey, I'm like.

• 47:33Steven Rinella?

  The Don?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I was like, Don, I'm like, uh, I'm like, these, I'm on your website. And there's these three parcels up in the Shield Valley. I'm like, are those for sale? And he's like, you betcha. I'm like, can I go look at them? He's like, whenever the hell you want. I was like, that Saturday, took the kids up. Expecting to find like a toxic landfill in the middle. And we got there and I was like.

• 47:55Steven Rinella?

  Gravel quarries, played out gravel quarry.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  And I was like, holy shit. Like, this is spectacular. So we came back and I was like, Sarah, I'm like, you, we, next weekend, we gotta go look at this. And, and we, you know, we did our due diligence, so we kept looking online to see if something else made more sense. That was, that, that, the, our land, it's the only land we looked at in person. Nothing ever, nothing else even came close to make us go look at it. And by late May, we were like. You know, and this was pre COVID, pre Kevin Costner Yellowstone TV show. But even then we were like, the way Bozeman's going, if we don't get this under contract, all this work goes up on a shelf and the way Bozeman's going, it's never coming off that shelf.

• 48:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:40Speaker 04

  And so we got it under contract and got as long a closing date as possible. We're able to pull it together and get across the finish line. But if we didn't get that, like if we had, if we'd waited a year, two years, there's we, I wouldn't, wouldn't be sitting here. Like it was, it was, we found a needle in the haystack in 2018 and we're damn grateful for it.

• 49:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know what I wanted to tell you about is, uh,

• 49:08Steven Rinella?

  Randall and I,

• 49:11Steven Rinella?

  month or two ago, we went down to Cody, Wyoming.

• 49:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 49:14Steven Rinella?

  And we gave a talk about, we, we gave, it was in, we were in coordination with the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum.

• 49:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:23Steven Rinella?

  And we went down the road, dude, because they needed, we had, needed a little bit of bigger space, went down the road to like, uh, there's a hotel, the big convention area, just like a community thing.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:31Steven Rinella?

  We gave a talk about our Buffalo Hyde Hunters audio work called The Hyde Hunters.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 49:39Steven Rinella?

  There was some dude, like, there was some dudes there that were real anxious through the whole thing. Like they were there for the comment section.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, you know, like, oh, yeah. You know, when you get, uh, you, you ever address an audience?

• 49:51Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So you'll sometimes, if you, you know, you kind of like doing your talk or whatever, you become aware of certain figures, you know?

• 50:00Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 50:00Steven Rinella?

  That are on fire.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:02Steven Rinella?

  And it was like a guy that's, there's three of them that were there to, to, to challenge me as an outspoken advocate, as an outspoken Buffalo advocate.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:18Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like I just, I routinely bring up my conviction that we should be doing more and more places to welcome the animals back as wildlife.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 50:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay, like I bring this up. He wanted to challenge that. What was surprising to me is they were producers.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 50:37Steven Rinella?

  And I always felt that there was like.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  Producers, but bison producers.

• 50:41Steven Rinella?

  Bison ranchers.

• 50:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 50:42Steven Rinella?

  And I always felt that like, that, that bison ranchers were first and foremost like enthusiasts for the species.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:51Steven Rinella?

  And they got into it for love of the animal, but, but they don't, he didn't, they don't like that talk.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:57Steven Rinella?

  Which I thought was so weird. And he kept saying, if my animals got out and telling me all the damage, that like schoolchildren wouldn't be safe.

• 51:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:10Steven Rinella?

  If his animals got out, I'm like, and you know, the kind of, I engaged with him for a while, then I said, I, I'm just gonna.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:16Steven Rinella?

  Like, we're gonna have to have other people ask questions.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:18Steven Rinella?

  I engaged them for a minute on it and it was sort of like, I'm like, I'm not aware of anybody suggesting that your animals be let go.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:28Steven Rinella?

  This, you're making, you're, you're setting up a straw man argument about your animals getting out and attacking schoolchildren on the road. Like, that's not what we're discussing. But was surprised by that perspective among the producer community, which I think is an exception rather than the rule.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:46Steven Rinella?

  But one of the biggest things, the, I'm bringing up this whole convoluted story to ask this question of like, you have, once you get land, you're not keeping them in with like three strand barbed wire.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:02Steven Rinella?

  Right? So, so you, like, when you got property, you, you have to be thinking about how to, like, really confine them.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's a, I mean.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  That's a thing, yeah.

• 52:15Steven Rinella?

  That was, that was part of this guy's deal is if they're out.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Right.

• 52:21Steven Rinella?

  How you're not gonna stop them from going anywhere.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 52:24Steven Rinella?

  You know, was kind of his argument, right?

• 52:25Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah, no, so we, um, when, when we got the land under contract at the end of May. With the closing date in September, I went into what I called sponge mode, just trying to absorb and learn as much as possible. And I got to visit different ranches, got to visit one of Ted Turner's ranches. And there this, this great rancher, um, he actually has bison and cattle.

• 52:49Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 52:49Speaker 04

  On different pastures up in Malt, Montana, north of Laurel. And, um, he connected me with a fencing guy that he had trained on his fencing. And that's what we put on our place. And it's awesome. Our, so our fencing, people look at it and they're like, this keeps buffalo in like, are you like, cause it's, it, it just looks super weak.

• 53:11Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 53:11Speaker 04

  It's, uh, our perimeter fence, five wire, high tinsel, prong, all wildlife friendly. So pronghorn can go under, deer elk and moose can go over and the middle wire is hot.

• 53:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I got you.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  And it's ultimately a psychological barrier. Like they touch that.

• 53:29Steven Rinella?

  Explain some of that terminology for people like, like.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Sure. Oh, yeah, yeah. So.

• 53:33Steven Rinella?

  Pronghorn go under, deer go over, like, like, talk about that for me.

• 53:36Speaker 04

  So, okay, so, um, so, you know, pronghorn, iconic species in the West that, uh, uh, you know, second, second fastest animal on earth behind the cheetah. They live, you know, their defense mechanism is their speed. So they like to hang out in flat, open country and see what's coming and they'll outrun it. And for whatever reason, they, they, they could, they can jump fences, but like a lot of them don't know that.

• 54:02Steven Rinella?

  You see it now and then.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 54:04Steven Rinella?

  You see it now and then.

• 54:05Speaker 04

  And so they crawl under fences and there's a lot of work being done to remove the bottom wire on ranches. Because in, in big winters, they'll find dozens of pronghorn, dead pronghorn piled up in the corner of a, of a ranch or public round, whatever, because the snow drifted there and they can't crawl under the fence and they don't know they can go over. Um, so our fence, so high tinsel, it's just a smooth wire. Um, and it's got a, a flex to it. So, uh, deer elk and moose can jump over, pronghorn can crawl under. I see mule deer do both, like they sometimes crawl under and sometimes jump over.

• 54:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because they'll get little dug out areas and they'll keep using it and using it and it'll eventually get like a little trough under there.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yep. And, um, and then when I say the middle wire is hot, so it's, it means it's, it's electrified. So we, our whole fence runs off solar and that middle wire is hot and it, and, and when a, if a bison touches it, they get shocked. And they're super smart, so they learn to avoid it. And then that behavior is passed on down through the herd. So they all avoid the fence, but I say it's a psychological barrier because if, if they wanted to run through it, they, they could run through it like, like we put our arm through a, through a spider web. You know, it would take nothing. So I always say like, if you, if you really want a buffalo proof fence, you need like a 14 foot brick wall.

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Because any, even if it's barbed wire, woven wire, like they could bust through it. But the great thing you have going for you with bison is their herd instinct is so, is still so strong. You know, it's tens of thousands of year, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have programmed into them. Safeties with the herd. They always want to be together. And so it ultimately comes down to your management. As long as they've got plenty of grass and water, they're not looking over the fence line and they want to be together. And, and it's funny because this time of year is when we have issues because the grass is starting to grow. They're excited about that. And the youngsters, like yearlings, they'll periodically get on the wrong side of the fence.

• 56:19Speaker 04

  And I would think that they're like, when I was 16, it's like, woo hoo, I'm, I'm going to raise hell and, you know, go explore. And it's the opposite. You can, you can feel their stress. They're, they're walking the fence like.

• 56:31Steven Rinella?

  Want back in.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  How do I get back to the herd? Cause I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm vulnerable by myself. Um, so yeah. So, so again, and that's like another example of like, people were skeptical of our fencing and now they, they see the bison on the right side of the fence. They're grazing. They see me field harvesting them and they're like, yeah, we're, we're cool with this.

• 56:50Steven Rinella?

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• 59:02Steven Rinella?

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• 59:47Steven Rinella?

  If you've got something weighing on your mind, taking a toll on you, don't be afraid to reach out. Betterhelp.com/meateater. How big is a bull?

• 59:58Speaker 04

  So, you know, a big mature bull is, is well over 2,000 pounds. They're, they're, they're massive and their heads. I had to, I had to, I had to, I had to field harvest a big bull last memorial, last year memorial day weekend by myself. And it's, their heads must weigh like 200 pounds, like just, they're massive animals.

• 1:00:25Steven Rinella?

  And no separate fencing for those?

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  No, we just, we, we run it as one herd year round. Yeah, just, you know, cause and the thought process there is from a, from a land health standpoint, if you zoom out, you know, a thousand years ago, you know, we had tens of millions of buffalo, tens of millions of elk, pronghorn. So the entire West evolved with grazing animals, removing animals from the landscape. Totally unnatural. Yeah. Like the West evolved with animals, full stop, can't argue that.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  But the way that they, the way that they grazed, like the Gallatin Valley, they, you know, thousands of animals would have come in here and they would have grazed, pooped, peed, wallowed. You just, just made a mess of the place and then, and then left for a long time. So the West evolved with-

• 1:01:15Steven Rinella?

  To, to the point where mythologies- Like native mythologies grew were formed.

• 1:01:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:01:23Steven Rinella?

  Around where do they go?

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Where do they go?

• 1:01:25Steven Rinella?

  And in many cases, if you look at like, like Plains tribes.

• 1:01:29Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:01:29Steven Rinella?

  In many cases, you see, there are literal interpretations of these, but then there's also these stories as parable, but it's that they went into a hole in the ground.

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:01:42Steven Rinella?

  Right? They went into a mountain.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:01:44Steven Rinella?

  Because they would be so gone.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah.

• 1:01:47Steven Rinella?

  And then all of a sudden they're back.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Steven Rinella?

  And yeah. And it would, it would inspire like mythologies to explain like, where do they go?

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, I, I, I'm endlessly fascinated by that stuff. Like your buddy, Dan Flores, been on here, has his own media podcast. Like his book, Wild New World was like, that just blew my mind.

• 1:02:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Speaker 04

  Like just over and over. And it's interesting, I was just reading, I mean, I'm a little late to the game. I'm finally reading Braiding Sweetgrass, amazing book. And she just, the chapter I just finished, because the other thing with, with, with you're talking about was, it was like, where did they go? And it was like, how do we get them back?

• 1:02:22Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  Like, what do we do? And I was just reading that, um, some tribes in the Pacific Northwest had the same thing around salmon, where they would light, uh, light, light the grass on fire on a cliff along the ocean, basically sending a signal out to the salmon, time to come back.

• 1:02:41Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Which I thought was super cool. And I didn't know that.

• 1:02:43Steven Rinella?

  Um, man, I gotta tell you, this is such an old, this is like from way back in the earliest, earliest days of this show, of this podcast. It's probably one of my favorite segments we ever did is we were interviewing a, uh, uh, Makushi. He was from the Makushi tribe in South America, in Guyana.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:03:05Steven Rinella?

  And it was the second time I'd gone down there and hung out with them.

• 1:03:12Steven Rinella?

  The first time I went and spent time with the Makushi, they hunted a lot of tapir. They had a white lipped tapir. So there's three, sorry, not tapir. Um, a peccary. So we have like a javelina is a collared peccary.

• 1:03:28Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:03:28Steven Rinella?

  There's a chacoan peccary and then there's a white lippeccary.

• 1:03:32Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:03:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The, the white lippeccary lives in is huge herds. So like, you know, like collared peccaries or javelinas, you know, you'd like a big group of those, a dozen, 20, whatever. White lippeccary would be hundreds.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Got it.

• 1:03:46Steven Rinella?

  And they would periodically have white lippeccary move through their village areas and they would harvest a whole bunch of these white lippeccaries. They hadn't seen you in a long time. He was telling me and he's telling me this on the podcast. He's explaining that there's another village that, that's very jealous of our village. And they trained a shaman. And that shaman has apparently locked our white lippeccaries into a mountain.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  Huh.

• 1:04:17Steven Rinella?

  We are training up a new shaman.

• 1:04:22Steven Rinella?

  Um, who's developing the skillset necessary to unlock them from the mountain to bring them back. And he's just like telling us all about this on the show.

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  So cool.

• 1:04:33Steven Rinella?

  To have it be that it was like that, you know, what you imagine to be an ancient wisdom.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:04:41Steven Rinella?

  On a thing like a podcast.

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:44Steven Rinella?

  Always just struck me as.

• 1:04:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:45Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? I want to go like refine that bit and talk about it. But that was the same thing. I was like, where did they go?

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  Where did, where did they go?

• 1:04:51Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 1:04:52Speaker 04

  How do we get them back? And yeah, and like the creation stories, I just find all that stuff like so interesting, fascinating.

• 1:05:01Steven Rinella?

  I got y'all messed up. You talked about how you.

• 1:05:03Speaker 04

  Gallatin Valley.

• 1:05:04Steven Rinella?

  That, that grazing practice.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:05:05Steven Rinella?

  There and then not there.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. So they'd come in, make a mess of the place and then leave for a long time. So the West evolved with high intensity, short duration impact, followed by a long recovery. So we have our rant. So we're trying to, they call it biomimicry, just mimicking nature. And that's what we're doing on a vastly smaller scale on our ranch, but we have it cross fenced into a whole bunch of different pastures. And then the herd just moves around. And so whatever pasture they're in, every other pasture is being rested.

• 1:05:35Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

  And this time of year, it's particularly important because we've got all sorts of nesting grassland birds, waterfowl, sandhill cranes. And what happens is you create this mosaic, which is what would have happened a thousand years ago, where you've got stuff they haven't hit yet. And by, you know, late June, that grass gets pretty tall. Stuff they grazed, you know, maybe a month ago, and that's like medium. And then stuff they just hammered, that's like a Walmart parking lot. And because the entire West evolved with this, for birds, depending on whether they're, you know, nesting, raising chicks, feeding, like they use all those different habitats differently.

• 1:06:16Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:06:16Speaker 04

  And so, um, so, yeah, so, so, so that's what we do on our place. So we run it as one herd year round. So wherever the herd is, the rest of the ranch is being rested.

• 1:06:24Steven Rinella?

  So the bulls always stay with them?

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah. And, and, and.

• 1:06:28Steven Rinella?

  And do they, are they like, even though in captivity, are they still following that, like they're rutting in June and July? Or do you want them having calves dropping year round?

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  Um, or when we, when we started, we, we had, we had some calves dropping in the fall. But now, um, we, they've, they've, now that, uh, we've gotten to a point just naturally where, uh, yes, that our, our herd acts the exact same as Yellowstone. So they, they, the rut, they breed from mid-July through the end of August.

• 1:07:03Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  And then they calve mid-April through the end of May. Um, they shed their winter coats in the spring, grow their winter coats back in the fall.

• 1:07:12Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  And then the, um, and then, uh, You know, uh, so a bison herd, it's a matriarchal society. So you've got a lead cow that calls the shots. And there's a whole pecking order there and the bulls fall in line. But once they're like three, four, five, they leave the herd and the kind of like, I'm my own man now.

• 1:07:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  And, and so, um, we saw that on our place where, uh, you know, the, the herd would be here. And then like the breeding bulls would be like 400 yards over here.

• 1:07:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  And then you'll, I think you'll find this interesting. So when we started, we had breeding bulls because that's how you do it. And the breeding, the breeding bulls are the ones that cause problems, not from a safety standpoint, like they're, they're like, I mean, I've never had an issue with one of our bulls, but because they, they have this, you know, I'm my own man mentality. Everything's going great. And then one morning you wake up and they're like, I'm, I'm walking to the crazy mountains today. And nothing's going to stop me.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  He's striking out, looking for.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  Just what, and it.

• 1:08:16Steven Rinella?

  Whatever you can find.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  And then for us, it becomes extremely stressful. The big thing for me, it's not like losing a bull or like the economic consequence of that. It's that we have great relationships with our neighbors and we take that very seriously. And we've earned their trust. And so if bulls start leaving and walking all over, the neighbors rightfully so would be like, what's going on, Matt? Like, have you lost control of your animals? And so, um, and so while I was kind of struggling with this a year ago, I'm always reading, listening to podcasts, trying to stay on top of the best available science around modern day ranching. And I listened to a podcast with one of Ted Turner's ranch managers.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  And he was saying the way on a couple of Turner's ranches, they've moved away from breeding bulls. And the, the theory is. With breeding bulls, it's unnatural because it's humans selecting the animal for what humans like. And so bison, they're sexually mature, they're sexually mature too.

• 1:09:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:09:20Speaker 04

  So they got rid of all the breeding bulls and they leave, they let all the two year olds in there and just let nature work it out. And the theory is the biggest, strongest, highest sex drive bulls are the ones that are going to breed. And that's who you want to breed. So when we had, so when our last breeding bull.

• 1:09:38Steven Rinella?

  How is that not, if he's a breeding bull, why is he not a breeding bull?

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  I should, so because, so before, I guess, I guess, so the, the.

• 1:09:46Steven Rinella?

  Or is it an age, it's an age thing?

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Exactly. The other system, you'd have like a six year old bull and an eight year old bull.

• 1:09:53Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  Which are literally more than twice the size of that two year old.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  And that's who's most likely to strike out.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  And exactly.

• 1:09:59Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:09:59Speaker 04

  And so when I heard that, and then this had this bull that left, uh, last Memorial Day weekend, I was like, we're done with breeding bulls. And I just, I'm all about having our ranch and our herd be as natural as possible. And so that really appealed to me. And so last summer was our first experiment with it. And it was so cool because in June, you've got all these two year old bulls running around and it's like, kind of whatever. And then by late July, there was one guy who I was like, oh, you're the man. Like he was fighting off other bulls, like he clearly was the guy.

• 1:10:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  And then, uh, and then we work our animals once a year in the winter where we move them into corral. And, you know, ear tag the calves and we preg check the females. So I was kind of curious to see what this experiment would do. And last year was our, our highest breed up rate ever. So of all of our cows that were supposed to be bred, only one wasn't. And, and so now this, you know, letting, letting a bunch of two year olds take care of it is our path going forward. Yeah, it's kind of cool.

• 1:11:05Steven Rinella?

  Huh. Hey, did you find like, when you've had them break out and go, do they want to go a certain direction or is it random?

• 1:11:12Speaker 04

  It's random.

• 1:11:12Steven Rinella?

  It is.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  It's totally random. Um, and, and fortunately, you know, it's, it's only happened a handful of times. And I, I remember the, the, the, the first, the, the big one, that we had three breeding bulls, they all left. And I was like freaking out and I called a mentor and he's like, look, he's like, I know you're freaking out and you want to go chase them. He's like, that's the worst thing you could do. He's like, there's just nothing you can do. And he's like, I'm convinced they have a homing instinct and like, they're gonna come back. And this was on a Friday, went out Friday night, couldn't find him or didn't see him. Saturday morning, not there. Saturday night, not there. Sunday morning, I'm like on the edge of like, you know, panic attack, not there.

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  Sunday afternoon, there they are, like they never left. And I was like, you sons of bitches.

• 1:12:02Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:12:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, uh, but yeah, no, they have like a homing instinct where they, they come back.

• 1:12:07Steven Rinella?

  Do you, uh, do you get scared around those big bulls?

• 1:12:10Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  So you don't, you don't, you don't do anything like you just wa, you'd walk right up to them?

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Well, I, I should say no with an asterisk, which is, I, I, you know, I, I wouldn't, like, I would never walk up and try to scratch one by the ear.

• 1:12:24Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 1:12:24Speaker 04

  It would kill me.

• 1:12:25Steven Rinella?

  But you'd be out doing your work and?

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I kind of, I, I always, um, I've, I've been charged a couple of times by our lead cow. Um, I mean, like, like, like, like she was coming, she was coming.

• 1:12:39Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:40Speaker 04

  This was not a game where I had to dive over a fence, dive into the truck. So now I always make sure that the truck or side by side is relatively nearby. But you can, you can read their body language. And yeah, the big bulls, non-event, never had an issue, like zero. It's the, it's the old cows that you gotta watch out for.

• 1:13:00Steven Rinella?

  That's who's coming.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 1:13:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. The first one, it's just a funny story. It was our first summer and I was doing a pasture move. And when I move them, I, I pull them, I don't push them. So like, I get their attention and they, they're so smart, they, they know what I'm doing. So they, they follow me to the next pasture where there's a whole bunch of fresh grass waiting. But this day, there was this wetland and I had to get on the other side of the wetland to move them across. And I did it on foot and I had zero issues up to this point. And it's this beautiful spring day, the whole herd's walking in front of me. And I'm like, you know, and every day that I'm out there, it's never lost on me that I'm a kid from Chicago. I'm like, I will never get used to it.

• 1:13:47Speaker 04

  Like, hopefully I live to be like 90. When I'm 89, I'll wake up and be like, this is crazy. I can't believe I do this. Like, I just, you know? And so I'm like walking and like the mountains are covered in snow. And I'm like, man, I'm like, I'm the bison whisperer. Like, look at this, you know? And they're all, I'm just looking at all these butts. And then all of a sudden, it like took a second to register. And this number 440 is coming like full tilt. And I was like, holy shit. And I ran, I mean, I must have run like a 3940 to the fence. And I did this awkward, crazy Superman dive over the fence. And she stopped and was like pawing at the ground. And the first thing I did was look up and down the road to make sure no neighbors saw.

• 1:14:33Speaker 04

  Cause it would be like just more humiliation from that. But ever since that, I'm like, wow, that was a close call. But yeah, it's really the old cows, the only ones that, that, that you have to worry about.

• 1:14:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Steven Rinella?

  So, uh, tell me how the

• 1:14:53Steven Rinella?

  like the, the sale process.

• 1:14:56Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:14:56Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, what is a, what is a animal that, you know? How are you making your determination? Like, who's going to stay around as breeding stock or replacement heifers?

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:15:08Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, how many, how many calves you get out of a cow?

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:15:12Steven Rinella?

  How do you determine, well, I'm going to sell this many? You know what I mean? Like, like, what's all that dynamic? Like, I guess herd dynamics or demographics, what's that look like?

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, so, so we, so we, we, we, we had a significant expansion last summer, which is exciting.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  So our, you know, our, we're, we're, we're now trying to figure out what those numbers look like.

• 1:15:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:37Speaker 04

  But for the last several years, the easiest way to explain it is like June 1 to June 1. So June 1 last year, we had, let's say, Fifty-five cows with a calf by their side.

• 1:15:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  So fifty-five pairs, fifty-five yearlings and fifty-five two-year-olds. Over the course of the year, I field harvest basically all of the two-year-olds. Keep a few replacement heifers because we know all the few, a few open cows. And then June 1 this year, we should have fifty-five cows with a calf by their side. And then last year's calves become yearlings, the yearlings become two-year-olds, we just do it again.

• 1:16:18Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:18Speaker 04

  Um, and then, and so basically, and then when we, when we work the animals in the winter, any open, non-bred cow immediately becomes a meat animal.

• 1:16:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  And for, for two reasons, or for three reasons. One, we're, we're not Ted Turner. We don't have 110,000 acre ranch.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Two, we're working to build just a super healthy, self-sufficient herd where they thrive on our landscape. The cows have a calf in April, May, they're bred back in July and August, and they just do it year after year. And if any year they don't get bred, they're out of here.

• 1:17:00Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:17:01Speaker 04

  And, um,

• 1:17:02Steven Rinella?

  I mean, you gotta have something to sell to support the whole thing.

• 1:17:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then the third one is our demand. Like we have, we, our demand exceeds supply.

• 1:17:09Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it does?

• 1:17:09Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we, so we,

• 1:17:11Steven Rinella?

  You have to turn away business.

• 1:17:13Speaker 04

  Not necessarily,

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  not turn away business. We just, we always have a long waitlist.

• 1:17:21Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  Um, and, um,

• 1:17:25Speaker 04

  and I, I do very little traditional sales and marketing. Because we've just, we've got these amazing customers. We've got this amazing customer base. It's very loyal. I mean, at the end of the day, I always say it's like,

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  We could have, you know, the prettiest bison, the most beautiful mountains, cute kids, great storytelling, but if the meat tastes like shit, no one's, no one's gonna buy from us.

• 1:17:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:50Speaker 04

  Right? Like you buy a quarter bison, 85 pounds of bison meat and you eat your way through it. At the end of that, when you reorder, like to me, that's a great sign that they're like, that was worth them to do it again.

• 1:18:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  And so, so basically our meat animals are essentially all of our two-year-olds and then open cows and, and that, that, that, that, that's it. Yeah.

• 1:18:14Steven Rinella?

  Got it. How, how many, how many calves will the cow, is a cow good for? Or you haven't hit, you haven't hit it yet?

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, we haven't.

• 1:18:21Steven Rinella?

  You haven't hit the max yet?

• 1:18:22Speaker 04

  Right. But I mean, when we, so when we started it, so our bison arrived January 2019, we bought all of them from these two awesome ranches just west of Shoto, along the Rocky Mountain Front.

• 1:18:34Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:34Speaker 04

  And, you know, and, and so some of those cows are now, uh, like 15, 16 years old, still having a calf every spring.

• 1:18:46Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:18:46Speaker 04

  Bred back July and August and doing, it's, it's unbelievable.

• 1:18:49Steven Rinella?

  What about twins?

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  We've had a few case, we've had a few sets of twins. It's rare.

• 1:18:56Steven Rinella?

  Do they thrive?

• 1:18:57Speaker 04

  In our case, yes. I've always been nervous because you hear these stories, the way mom picks one.

• 1:19:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Speaker 04

  And I've watched with a close eye and to my knowledge, all of our twins have made it. Like the way it, like when the, when the, when they first start calving, like right now, like I was out there last night and we've got, you know, there were a couple calves born yesterday. It's very obvious to tell who's calf is with which mom. Like the, the moms are amazing. Like those calves are like under their chin.

• 1:19:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  But through the summer, once you've got, you know, 50, 60 calves running around and they're feeling a little bolder and they're running, you can't keep track of who's who.

• 1:19:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  But to my knowledge, like I watched those twins very closely early on and then at some point just never noticed and never found a dead calf. So.

• 1:19:42Steven Rinella?

  Do you, do you let them self-wean?

• 1:19:45Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. Yeah. So that's a great example.

• 1:19:47Steven Rinella?

  You never have to, you never have to pull them off.

• 1:19:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's like, so like.

• 1:19:50Steven Rinella?

  Cause you're only selling two-year-olds.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  Well, the main thing is we're just, we're not, we run it as one herd year round. And so there's lots of things we do that are like not traditional. But I look at it, I'm like weaning, weaning stressful. The science is clear that the longer that calf, whether it's an elk calf, a black Angus or a pronghorn, like the longer that that calf or a fawn and a pronghorn, the longer that animal's on mom, the healthier that animal's going to be for the rest of its life.

• 1:20:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  And so I was like, and then weaning is stressful. It's time intensive, labor intensive.

• 1:20:27Steven Rinella?

  For you.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  And so I was like, why would we wean? So we don't wean at all. We just, we let mom take care of that. Um, and we're not selling live animals. We run it as one herd. So yeah, so we don't, we don't wean at all. We just let mom do it.

• 1:20:40Steven Rinella?

  When, when you go out to field harvest one, do you know who like, cause you got numbers and you're watching the whole thing?

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Occasionally, but, but very rare. So typically it's like if I'm driving out there in August, like in August, I know I'm going to field harvest a two-year-old bull. And it's the first two-year-old bull that provides me with the perfect shot.

• 1:21:07Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  And the perfect shot is, um, uh,

• 1:21:11Steven Rinella?

  Cause you don't know who's like, you know, like you're not genetically testing them. You don't know what bull is doing what.

• 1:21:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've, yeah, no, just totally. Uh, so I just drive out and, and so the perfect shot is a bull that's like standing kind of on an angle, like broadside, looking at me 10 to 15 yards away. Uh, head up and then I aim an inch above the eyes and it's just, I mean, when I pull the trigger, it's lights out. Like people always say, they're like, oh, man, you know, I love your ranch. Cause you know, the bison only have one bad day. And I'm like, oh, no, no. I'm like, no bad day. I'm like, they're literally standing there. Like yesterday, this bull, he's standing there, grass in his mouth, next to his buddy, looking at me. They know me, they know the truck, just kind of like, you know, chewing his, chewing his grass.

• 1:21:58Speaker 04

  And then it's just instant outer space. Um, and, uh, so yeah, so, but, and then if I have a group of two-year-old bulls, I'll look them over and see like who's the most developed.

• 1:22:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  And pick him out. But it's funny. I mean, I've had multiple times where. Let's just say, you know, number 426, I'm like about to shoot him and then he moves. And then 322 walks in, I'm like, oh, I guess I'll take you and then boom. And then I'll be out a couple of days later and 426 will walk by. I was like, man, you have no idea. Like you came that close. So, yeah.

• 1:22:37Steven Rinella?

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• 1:24:49Steven Rinella?

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• 1:25:01Steven Rinella?

  And then you're, you gut them yourself?

• 1:25:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, so my process is, um, so if I'm just doing one, drive out, boom, drop it. And well, I said, back up. So part of our thing, um, is connecting people to where their food comes from. And, and demystifying the death process involved in food production and consumption. Cause most places, you know, the death part, it's locked in the basement, padlocked, poured over with concrete. And in our case, I always, I talk about how like in our case, the death is beautiful. You know, it's like death is essential to life and we're all killing shit.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  Whether it's for what we eat, what we drive, what we wear, the phones in our pockets, like we're all killing stuff. It's just whether you're aware of it or not. And in our, in our case, that bison, like yesterday, conceived on the ranch, born on the ranch, lived his whole life on the ranch. Standing there with his buddy, grass in his mouth, lights out. I mean, it's as good as it gets.

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  And, um, I lost my train of thought, what was?

• 1:26:10Steven Rinella?

  Well, what was I asking about?

• 1:26:11Speaker 04

  You were asking about, um,

• 1:26:13Steven Rinella?

  You gutting them yourself?

• 1:26:14Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, I got myself, yeah. So bison draw, oh, so part of it's connecting people to where their food comes from. So when I drive out yesterday, I take a picture of the herd and then boom, drop the bison. And then I take a picture of a dead bison on the ground. Never anything bloody or gory and make very, like I, you know, but, but very clear, like that's a dead bison. And then I lift it up with the, uh, the bail bed, which is a, a flat bed on the back of a pickup that has two arms that can go out. It's, it's built for feeding round bales.

• 1:26:46Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:26:46Speaker 04

  Um, but it's, and then I take two six foot toe straps and put one around the front legs, one around the hind legs. I lift it up and slit its throat to bleed it. And then I dry, and then drive it to a different pasture, cut the head off and save the tongue and the cheeks. And then I gut.

• 1:27:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, you gave me some of those cheeks one time too. Yeah. Yeah. Or you gave me a tongue the other day.

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Steven Rinella?

  You know what I do with that? That one, I just boiled down.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:12Steven Rinella?

  I put it in a slow cooker.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:27:14Steven Rinella?

  Till I can slip the skin on it. Sometimes I'll smoke and whatever, but I just did that. So I could slip the skin and then cut it and fried it like, um, like spam.

• 1:27:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:27:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh my God. It's good, man.

• 1:27:24Speaker 04

  I was.

• 1:27:24Steven Rinella?

  Crisp in it on both. So it's crispy.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:27:27Steven Rinella?

  But soft in the middle.

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  I'm embarrassed. I've never cooked it. The, the, the only tongue of ours that I've had, you, I gave you a few extra tongues and as, and as a, just kindness of your heart, you, you cooked a couple for us and you smoked them and cured them.

• 1:27:45Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  And, uh, and you were like, just slice it thin in a oil with some pan. And our kids, like they've grown up eating heart. Like when I could, like our dog had an injury a couple of years ago and I was cooking him some bison heart to like boost morale. And my kids were like, uh, came in the kitchen. They're like, are you cooking bison heart? And they just start grabbing at it. I'm like, you assholes? Like that's for Ed. So they're like very adventurous eaters, but I was like tongue, maybe that'll weird them out. And so I just, hey guys, we're having bison steak and I sliced it. And I'll never, one of them said, they took like two bites and they go, dad, this is meat candy. And then the other one said, can we eat this every night? It was like, anyways, um, so yeah, save the tongue and the cheeks.

• 1:28:30Speaker 04

  And then I gut it and I save heart, liver, kidneys, hanging tender. Get it back on the truck, drive to Amsterdam, they skin it and they cut the tail off. So the, it's the tongue, cheeks, heart, liver, kidneys, hanging tender.

• 1:28:47Steven Rinella?

  And you hand that over?

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  Hand that over. That goes on like an organ tree.

• 1:28:51Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:28:51Speaker 04

  And then they, and then they, they skin it, dry age it, cut it, wrap it, et cetera.

• 1:28:56Steven Rinella?

  And they, and then the hide goes to, you, you sell the hide?

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, um, we have a guy that we work with, um, in between Three Forks and Butte. And he's like, he's a hide guy. Like he builds boats, teepees, lodges, all sorts of things. Um, and so he'll, he'll either meet me at Amsterdam and buy the hide like fresh when it's skinned. Or I'll throw it in a bag, put it in the freezer and he'll pick it up later. And then occasionally we get a tanned one back and we'll sell that as a blanket, but they're kind of far and few between that we get back.

• 1:29:31Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Steven Rinella?

  Um, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but at, at the Folsom kill site.

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:38Steven Rinella?

  The Ice Age.

• 1:29:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:39Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's a Ice Age buffalo kill site.

• 1:29:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:29:43Steven Rinella?

  In that bone bed, there's no, um, I always thought it was interesting. In that bone bed, there are no tail bones.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  Huh. Cause they did, yeah.

• 1:29:51Steven Rinella?

  Hauled them away with the hides.

• 1:29:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. No, that, the tails, you know, it's, it's like a shank. You gotta slow cook it in liquid for a long time. But it's, the flavors like insane.

• 1:30:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And it's a good handle for dragging the hide around.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:30:05Steven Rinella?

  So they do that. They cut the thing off. The hide goes to get tanned.

• 1:30:08Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:30:10Steven Rinella?

  And then, and then you have, but then you have dudes that have ordered the stuff.

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Steven Rinella?

  So who ships that out? You got, you ship it out?

• 1:30:17Speaker 04

  We do it. Yeah. So, so, so, so we sell by the quarter, half, whole buffalo. We sell a hundred percent direct to consumer. I'd say half our customers are in Montana, half all over the country. So yesterday, so we have one employee, Ethan Davidson, amazing person, huge meat eater fan. Um, he works two days a week for us and he's in charge of like the whole fulfillment process. So the way it works is somebody goes on our website, they put a deposit down for a quarter or a half or a whole. And then, oh yeah, to go full circle, when it's at Amsterdam, skinned and they cut it down the backbone, I take a picture of that. And then the day after the field harvest, I'll send

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  those pictures to our customers and say, you know, hey, Steve, I field harvested your bison yesterday morning on the ranch, beautiful spring morning, blah, blah, blah, few photos attached. And then there's the herd on the ground. And so it's just like, they, you know, sometimes people don't reply, but most people love it.

• 1:31:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so they can see it coming.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  They can see it. It's like connecting them, you know, it's like, this is the animal you'll be eating. And, you know, we're just all about transparency and connecting people to the process. And so, so yeah, they skin it, dry age it. Amsterdam's amazing, just great butchers. And then they ultimately, you know, it's beautifully packaged, wrapped, frozen, labeled, boxed. Ethan goes and picks it up. And if it's local person, he delivers it. And then for people around the country, we ship on Monday for Wednesday arrival. And he takes care of all of it. And he does a really great job with it. Yeah. So it's, yeah, so like yesterday, he shipped, where did he ship yesterday?

• 1:32:07Speaker 04

  Oh, a guy shipped one to San Francisco, and then one to Minneapolis. So yeah, we've got it. And that was a whole, I mean, yeah, a whole nother learning curve was like learning how to, you know, boxes, insulation, dry ice, UPS. And you'll, you know, you have three kids, you'll appreciate, you know, I mean, one, as a first generation rancher, like, the only way this works is keeping our costs down. So people often think we're much bigger than we are. Like, it's like, I do almost everything. And then Ethan helps out. And then we work with Amsterdam. So early on, we shipped, I shipped, we didn't have any

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  employees, I shipped everything out of our house. And I'd like, I'd go get the meat and dry ice from Safeway in the boxes and get everything ready. And I remember this one time. And we charge like on a quarter, we charge by the amount of meat you get back.

• 1:33:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:09Speaker 04

  And so I was like packaging the meat and I turned, grabbed something and then I turn around and my daughter is sitting in the box. Like I joked the way I wasn't concerned about shipping Greta to like, you know, Chicago. But my concern was like the next morning, having coffee and being like, what's that under the couch? And there's like four ribeyes that she stashed. And so we were like, we need office space. But anyway, so we just, we've, we've learned, um, and now we've got it, you know, dialed with great boxes, insulation made out of recycled paper, dry ice. And, and then the only thing is like in the heart of winter, if we've got a blizzard coming, we'll just, we won't ship. We just, we won't run the risk of having.

• 1:33:52Steven Rinella?

  Having something spoil.

• 1:33:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:54Steven Rinella?

  So how like, how confident are you now that you've got it? Like, do you mean, do you still worry that the whole thing's going to collapse? Or do you feel like you got it, you, you gotta like figure it out where you're comfortable? Or, or is, or is, or is, is anxiety high?

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  That's a great question. It's, I'd say a lot of both. Like when we started it, I mean, I, I vividly remember that first year. I, I, I would literally be like, I'd get an email, I'd be like, hey, Sarah, we got an email. Like, like literally. Or I get a voicemail, but man, that's pretty cool. Somebody called me. Now just keeping up with the emails and voicemails is almost impossible. So we're in a different place, but I still like, we are not dancing in the end zone. Like you're still, you gotta, you know, both from a, like, I guess to answer your question, it's like, there's two parts, right?

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  There's the customer business sales side and I'll never relax on that. Like, you know, you just, I mean, you, what, you know, businesses fail. Like you, you lose your customer. So I'm just like, we, I preach it all the time. Like we just, we really strive for excellence. Like from the moment someone places an order. To when that meat shows up on their doorstep, like we just, we really provide like an amazing customer experience all the way through. And then we try to provide them with the best red meat they'll ever taste. So I feel good about it. Like we've got, we've amazing momentum, great customers, more people

• 1:35:37Speaker 04

  finding us, but I never take that for granted. And then on the ranching side, we've, I've made plenty of mistakes, learned a lot from it. And it's, it's, it's, it's, it's way more dialed, but you're still dealing with bison. So there's, you know, there's still some low grade anxiety, particularly this time of year, just like they get grass crazy, where they're like, green grass, green grass. Where do I find green grass? And, but I'd say from where I was eight years ago, it's, you know, more like a two out of 10. We're like, you know, early on, it was, it was, I was nervous.

• 1:36:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that anxiety takes a long, it takes a long time to dissipate, even when the risk goes away.

• 1:36:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:26Steven Rinella?

  Like I remember when, when I was trying to, when I was like, set my mind to be in a writer, you know?

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:31Steven Rinella?

  An intense, crippling, intense anxiety about how to make it work.

• 1:36:36Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:37Steven Rinella?

  And then it works.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Steven Rinella?

  But you still sleep with one eye open.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Oh, man. No, I mean, I

• 1:36:46Steven Rinella?

  Like for years, you sleep with one eye open. You're so like, oh, yeah.

• 1:36:51Speaker 04

  No, it's

• 1:36:51Steven Rinella?

  It grips you, man.

• 1:36:52Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. I mean, early on.

• 1:36:54Steven Rinella?

  Like, am I gonna fail?

• 1:36:56Speaker 04

  Oh, big time. And that was, yeah, that was like, that summer of 2018, what really did it? Cause again, people thought we were totally nuts. But it was like, we could see it. And I'd put so much work into it. And it was just one of those things where I was like, Uh, if we don't like, we might, we might horrifically crash and burn.

• 1:37:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Speaker 04

  But we got it. We got to try it. Cause if we don't, I'll regret it forever. And I, and what really did it for me is I was like, I'd like, I'd rather go for it and fail than never have tried.

• 1:37:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:31Speaker 04

  And that's what got us over the hump to jump off the cliff. But yeah, man, that, that anxiety, I, I've, I've had it so bad where like, it was a few, it was four years ago. And when it was that, when those bulls took off, one of the other, when they came back, one of them, he, he got a taste for the North Bridgers and he just started going. And there was, there was a time where he, he took off for eight days. Nobody saw him. I didn't get a single phone call.

• 1:38:03Steven Rinella?

  Not even the neighbors saw.

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  I know. And I laughed like, at one point I was like, you can only have an acute stress response for so long. So like, like by day five, I was like, I don't know how this is going to end. Like somebody's going to call me from White Sulfur. Or like Manhattan, Montana, but like, at this point I have no idea. And then eight days later he came back. But I, but like, when that was going on, I remember saying to Sarah, I'm like, I, I think I'm, I think, I think I'm losing control of this whole thing. I think this whole thing's about to blow up. Cause I was, I was just convinced that like, he's going, he's going to teach others to start going.

• 1:38:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  The neighbor, we're going to lose the neighbors. Rightfully so. They're going to be like, what that, you know, this is, you can't do this.

• 1:38:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Speaker 04

  Um, so yeah, that anxiety, and I think you just, you know, it's like a muscle. You, you, you train it and get used to it. And it's just kinda, the volume turns down. And, and then each time you go through an event like that and come out the other side of it, you're like, okay. Like, that worked out. Okay.

• 1:39:06Steven Rinella?

  But do you, do you ever, um, when that, when that's happened to you, do you call your neighbors?

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  Um, y- y- yes. Um, uh, it, it depends. If it's like a, if it's quick and I think he's going to come back, I don't, but on that one, that one, I let the neighbors know. Um, and our neighbors are just, they're just great. Like they, they just, the thing that, one of the many things I love about ranchers, they have like, Some of the best senses of humor.

• 1:39:36Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  Like, I just think you have to, because you're dealing with animals and weather.

• 1:39:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Speaker 04

  And all this shit that's outside of your control. And if you don't find humor in it, you'll just go, you'll go nuts. And I remember this, this one neighbor, my one neighbor, Rick, who's a great rancher, great guy. This like mud season out there, as you know, it's just, it's real. And it's like the mud, the mud is the hardest part of the job. Like, it's demoralizing, it just beats you up, you get stuck. And this one day I was just in like, I was struggling with the mud. I was just pissed off and Rick drove by, rolls his window down, deadpan looks at me and is like, "Find any mud?"

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  And it turned my whole day around.

• 1:40:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:20Speaker 04

  I laughed my ass off. Um, and so, and so, no, our neighbors, and so that one bull, it was a neighbor that texted me and said, "Your bull's back."

• 1:40:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 1:40:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I was like, I'm like, I'm on it. Uh, and so.

• 1:40:35Steven Rinella?

  So, do you, do you have any, like, if, if that happens, do you just, do you have to just go shoot him? Or can you get him back in?

• 1:40:41Speaker 04

  So, early on, um, so the, those ones fortunately came back. And then that guy, that guy, he became like a legend. Like, at Amsterdam, they, they, I would, you know, they knew my, I, I told them my sob story many times. And they're, they're the best. Like, so normally, you know, I have, I have dates and times on the calendar. So, like, yesterday, it's like, all right, Monday, April 20th, Matt's bringing us two bison at 2 o'clock.

• 1:41:11Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 1:41:11Speaker 04

  And they're very rigid, they're, they're, they're fairly rigid about that. I mean, they work with us, like, they give us a lot of flexibility. But you can't just call them on a Tuesday morning and be like, "Yeah, I'm bringing one in." They're, they have their schedule. And with that one, they said, "Matt, whenever you can kill him, you kill him." And you just bring him here? 7 o'clock at night, doesn't matter, we'll take care of you.

• 1:41:34Steven Rinella?

  Get it figured out.

• 1:41:34Speaker 04

  And, um, and I remember, we were all, the whole herd was on one side of the dirt road. And one night, we're eating dinner.

• 1:41:44Speaker 04

  And I look out the window and there's this one buffalo walking on the other side of the road and I was like, son of a bitch. I was like, Otto, get in the truck. And we drove over and we just watched him. And he just, he literally like walked to the ranch and took off for three more days. And then, and then last year, Memorial Day, that bull took off. And he was in, when I got there, he was in with a neighbor's cows.

• 1:42:13Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  And the neighbor was not happy and nor, nor, nor would I have been if I was in his shoes.

• 1:42:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  And that, that, talk about anxiety, I was that my, there was two, two neighboring ranchers looking at me on a Sunday morning and they were like, what are you gonna do?

• 1:42:29Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  And my, like my stress, I was, I could barely think. And I was like, um, I'm gonna kill it. Stay, I'll be back. And I sprinted home, grabbed my rifle, sprinted back, hopped in my neighbor's side by side. And we drove out and fortunately, he walked right towards us, dropped them, and then everything shifted. Like, next thing you know, they're taking pictures, smiling, laughing, and I felt like.

• 1:42:57Steven Rinella?

  You got the problem taken care of.

• 1:42:59Speaker 04

  Problem taken care of. And I feel like that bought, you know, again, just more kind of street cred in the community of like, one of Matt's bulls got out, but he was here in six minutes and that thing was on the ground. So.

• 1:43:11Steven Rinella?

  On the flip side, have you ever looked out your window and saw that there's a domestic cow?

• 1:43:14Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then same thing, I'll, I'll text him and then our neighbors are like, so apologize. Oh yeah, we'll come get it. Um, so, uh, and yeah, I've, uh, and yeah, so it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, it took a little while to get there, but we're in a good, good spot, you know, with the neighbors. Yeah.

• 1:43:31Steven Rinella?

  Good, man.

• 1:43:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, appreciate you coming on to talk about it all.

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  Oh, man, this is awesome.

• 1:43:36Steven Rinella?

  So if dude, but if dudes want to order some from you, like, there's a line.

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not, yeah, we, so I field harvest year round. Like, I mean, right now, you know, every Monday or every other Monday. So I always, you know, I just get, I'm sensitive to like, if someone placed an order today and, you know, I wasn't field harvesting regularly and they didn't get their meat for three months, they'd be like, dude, what's the deal?

• 1:44:01Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:44:01Speaker 04

  But whenever-

• 1:44:02Steven Rinella?

  Does your, do you, does your site tell people when to expect it?

• 1:44:06Speaker 04

  No, but when they place an order, I get the deposit, I see the email come through and I email them the next day and I say, based on our waitlist and my field harvest schedule, I expect to field harvest your bison this week. And that way they're like, oh, okay, good. I've heard from Matt. He's going to field harvest it in three weeks. So the waitlist is never, you know, like if someone placed an order today, I would definitely be able to field harvest in the next month.

• 1:44:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  So I'm always trying-

• 1:44:32Steven Rinella?

  So by waitlist mean it's not like, like you're shipping 24 hours later or something like that?

• 1:44:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, they place an order and then they wait a few weeks for me to kill it and then a couple of weeks for it to be dry aged and cut and wrapped and then they get it. So yeah, you just basically, we try, super simple. We ultimately consider ourselves an e-commerce company. You come to our website, northbridgerbison.com and our options are there. Place your deposit. I email you and what, and I guess lastly, what's been super cool, again, because we try to really provide that customer experience is I have multiple customers who I would consider good friends at this point, never met them in person. But like they email me articles, I email them stuff, they send me cooking photos. So it's been, it's been, it's been fun getting to know our customers.

• 1:45:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:21Steven Rinella?

  If you want to see, if you guys want to see Matt's place, go, I can't remember what the name of that video. Oh, Phil, what, what'd you find out about hanger steaks?

• 1:45:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was gonna hop in here really quick. It helps, uh, it facilitates the contraction of the diaphragm during breathing and other throat stuff.

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  Good to know.

• 1:45:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:45:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He'd be fine. He'd be fine without it.

• 1:45:44Steven Rinella?

  He'd just be breathing. He'd have a labored breathing.

• 1:45:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Facilitate. Hit me with it again. Facilitates the breath.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  It's a part of the, it's depending on the animal, but it that that it's called the, the legs of the diaphragm or the crura, I guess is the Latin, the Latin term, but it's, it has to do with like the spinal cord and the, the diaphragm and some esophagus function.

• 1:46:05Steven Rinella?

  Hmm. Huh. They're going straight from film.

• 1:46:07Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:46:08Steven Rinella?

  Um, why did I even want, why did I bring that up?

• 1:46:11Speaker 04

  I have no idea.

• 1:46:12Steven Rinella?

  We just knew that we had to cover off on it.

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. We, cause we didn't, neither one of us knew what the hanging tender actually did.

• 1:46:17Steven Rinella?

  And then there, Phil, can you find out the name? Do you mind looking up the name of that video we filmed? Matt's when we cut the, when we cut the bison up with the stone tools, the clovis tools.

• 1:46:26Speaker 04

  It's called butchering a bison with clovis points and tools.

• 1:46:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And that, that was filmed, that's kind of when we main, we knew each other, but that's kind of when we mainly.

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  Connected.

• 1:46:34Steven Rinella?

  Connected and met.

• 1:46:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Steven Rinella?

  So if you go watch, go to YouTube and watch that video, type in like meat eater, bison, clovis points or something. You'll find it. And that's kind of a little bit of a glimpse at your place.

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:46:47Steven Rinella?

  And that was a cool day.

• 1:46:48Speaker 04

  That was, that was such an awesome day.

• 1:46:50Steven Rinella?

  When I was eating my, uh, some parts that some of the steaks and stuff we had on that, and we had a lot of ground too. But I remember a couple of times I hit little stone flakes.

• 1:46:58Speaker 04

  Oh, did you?

• 1:46:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:59Speaker 04

  Oh, cool.

• 1:46:59Steven Rinella?

  Just a little bit, little stone flake.

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  That's awesome. That's awesome.

• 1:47:02Steven Rinella?

  Part of the experience.

• 1:47:03Speaker 04

  I love it. Oh, that's great.

• 1:47:05Steven Rinella?

  That's great. All right, man. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:47:06Speaker 04

  Oh, Steve, thank you.

• 1:47:07Steven Rinella?

  And good luck. Keep doing your business, man. It's been cool to, it's been fun to know you and, and eat some of your stuff and, and go out there and see it all.

• 1:47:15Speaker 04

  No, I appreciate it. I, you know, I so appreciate what you all do here at Meat Eater and I love partnering with you guys. So it's been a lot of fun for me too.

• 1:47:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I like that. Like you got like that good American elbow grease, man. Let's just in there doing it, you know?

• 1:47:27Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 1:47:28Steven Rinella?

  Figuring stuff out. So I appreciate it.

• 1:47:30Speaker 04

  Thank you. It means a lot.

• 1:47:30Steven Rinella?

  Coming up.

• 1:47:31Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 1:47:59Steven Rinella?

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• 1:48:28Speaker 06

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