I think the greed from the meatpackers and dairy companies are doing the most to kill off the meat and dairy industries. The meatpackers are posting record profits while the ranchers and dairy farms are paid next to nothing. The ranches are being abandoned as their owners die or retire, and future generations refuse to work for almost no profit.
Non profits are moving in to these areas and rewilding the land. Many of these areas are close to federal lands that were leased for cattle grazing. As these ranches are removed, the overgrazing stops, and the land starts to heal.
Building an American Serengeti in Montana
The destruction, however, was not total. Harsh winters and scant rainfall drove out many of the homesteaders, and the hardy few who remained primarily inhabited small towns and big ranches that left native prairie grasses—the ecosystem's foundation—largely intact. The Nature Conservancy identified the area in 1999 as the "Northern Great Plains Steppe ecoregion." In 2010, the International Union for Conservation of Nature chose it as one of four remaining temperate grassland ecosystems on Earth with the potential for large-scale conservation.
Curt Freese, a former World Wildlife Fund biologist, envisioned an alliance of conservation groups to create a reserve in eastern Montana. Two crucial building blocks were already in place: the million-acre Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge and the 375,000-acre Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument. Surrounding them are the Fort Belknap Reservation, the more distant Fort Peck Reservation, and seemingly unending private ranchland interlocked with Bureau of Land Management parcels through long-term grazing leases.
In 2001, the two men launched an audacious plan. Their nonprofit organization would raise funds to buy area ranches as they came on the market. Using the refuge and the monument as anchors, they would gradually assemble a 3.2-million-acre wildlife reserve, half again as large as Yellowstone National Park. They would call it the American Prairie Reserve.
Biologists on the reserve's staff of 40, headquartered in Bozeman, are working to do just that: They're removing or modifying wildlife-blocking fences on former ranchlands and meticulously restoring habitat to attract species like swift foxes and prairie dogs. And they're reintroducing bison, with a vision of eventually hosting every species that once roamed those plains. Numerous ecological studies are being conducted across the landscape, aided by partnerships with field scientists from the Smithsonian Institution and the National Geographic Society, creating one of the world's most dynamic biological laboratories.
By most measures, the ongoing project has been a brilliant success. As of this writing, the reserve had purchased 28 ranch properties encompassing more than 400,000 acres in eight noncontiguous parcels. It had reintroduced 800 genetically pure bison. Now one of the largest conservation projects in North America, the reserve is well on its way to restoring the biggest grassland ecosystem on the planet.
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