This story by Nhatt Nichols appeared in The Daily Yonder on August 12, 2026. We are sharing it in two parts.
If you spend any time at all on the prairie, someone is going to hurl that quote by Willa Cather at you, about how anyone can love a mountain, but it takes a soul to love a prairie. It’s normally offered with both apology and pride: “Look, we know the prairie is subtle, but we’re the kind of people who can appreciate subtle things.”
The thing about being subtle is that it’s easy to be undervalued, and for a great deal of the grassland, that means converting prairie to commodity farming and losing thousands of acres of quietly crucial prairie ecosystem.
The prairie needs preservation, which is how The Nature Conservancy ended up partnering with a rancher to run a historic ranch in eastern Colorado.
Going Way Back
Fox Ranch sits on Colorado’s eastern border next to Kansas and Nebraska, on a corner of the prairie that looks nothing like the flat expanse that you may have seen out your car window as you pass through middle America’s miles of grassland.
Here you’ll find canyons, dunes, sagebrush, cottonwood trees that sound like a river when the wind rushes through them, pronghorns, box turtles, rattlesnakes, burrowing owls, and entire prairie dog cities.
The Fox has been a ranch in one form or another since settlers first arrived in Yuma County in the late 19th century, but in 2000, the ranch was acquired by a different kind of owner: The Nature Conservancy.
Before visiting Fox Ranch, my understanding of the role of cattle in conservation was tied to my first job, working for the Forest Service. At 15, I joined the Job Corps with the hopes of getting to work for the Okanogan Gazette as a photojournalist. Instead, I was brought to the ranger station and assigned to trail after a couple of young ornithologists studying goshawk habitat.
We would hike for hours to the most remote parts of the national forest, only to find a cow standing in the middle of a stream, defecating. The ecologists I was assisting complained about the relationship that ranchers had with the National Forests, lamenting the fact that a domestic animal would be allowed to damage the environment they were so deeply invested in.
My two take-aways from time with the Goshawk crew were that I needed my work to involve being outside in the world, and that cattle are an ecological disaster whose presence needs active conservation efforts to mitigate.
And I’m not alone in feeling uneasy about animal agriculture. When we’re talking about farming animals as a large commercial industry, we’re talking about one of our world’s biggest ecological issues. Animal agriculture uses 83% of the world’s farmland and contributes over 50% of all agricultural emissions. Cattle are a driving factor in climate change, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to include them in conservation, or ways to bring the carbon hoofprint down to a more reasonable size.
Cattle are a large part of the conservation plan at Fox Ranch. Forty minutes on a sandy road from anywhere, we find a place singing to balance, to abundance, and to the idea that the undomesticated can exist, even thrive, alongside a cultivated human and bovine existence. Perhaps that’s where Cather’s prairie soul truly dwells – in the possibility of those working to balance the land.
Underappreciation
Tyler Smith, the conservationist at Fox Ranch, is a true lover of the prairie and an advocate for the role cattle can play in conservation. A native of Colorado, Smith came back from the East Coast for the big skies and the grass.
“I think our grasslands are so underappreciated,” Smith said as we stared over the edge of a canyon, “and one of the most endangered terrestrial ecosystems on the planet, because they’re flat, they’re easy to convert into agriculture.”
At that moment we were looking at a grassland that was decidedly not flat; beyond the canyon, an immense sea of grasses lapped at the Arickaree River’s cottonwood tree border. Below us, burrowing owls and prairie dogs peeked out from their holes, using rock features as protection.
The Fox’s geography is an outlier in the region, and part of the reason it’s stayed prairie is that it would be almost impossible to convert it to farmland.
However, Smith is generally right about the ease of conversion to commodity farming. If you’ve ever flown over plains country and seen circular patterns in fields, then you’ve seen what the conversion of grassland to center-pivot ag looks like.
Monocrop farming impacts soil health through tilling and fertilizer practices, and pollinators through pesticides and loss of diverse habitat. We pay a hefty environmental price to separate ourselves so deeply from our food chain, to create whole food systems that don’t contribute positively to our ecosystem and instead compromise the survival of its elements.
Fox Ranch is an experiment in braiding conservation and cattle together, balancing what’s best for the land with what’s best for ranchers and their community.
And it’s working. The ranch hosts eight species of fish on the Arickaree River, and conservation work has helped to keep what Smith calls “woody encroachment” at bay through efforts to remove eastern red cedar before it establishes itself on grassland.
They have also seen sand bluestem, a native grass that signifies soil health, bounce back through careful grazing practices. The 350 calf/cow pairs that live at the Fox are constantly being shifted over its 14,700 acres; in fact, Smith tells me, they never graze in the same place twice in the same year.
The Historic Role of a Ruminant
The Great Plains, which the Fox is a part of, are in a deep relationship with ruminant grazing animals, first with the bison, and for the last few hundred years with cattle.
If you want to preserve grassland, you need grazing animals. Ruminants convert grass into fertilizer, providing the nutrients plants need in order to grow. They also create habitat and food for the insects who feed animals like wild turkeys and prairie chickens.
On my trip out to Colorado, I stopped at the Wind River Reservation to meet Jason and Patti Baldes, who the poet Chris La Tray introduced as the “Indian power couple” bringing buffalo back to native lands for their respective tribes. Their experiences with rematriarching buffalo are moving on emotional and ecological levels, stories of tribal members reconnecting with who they are along with the ways plants and insects flourish in buffalo wallows.
In his book In the Country of the Kaw, James Locklear explained the relationship between bison and the shortgrass prairie: “Elegant is not a word that springs to mind when contemplating a bison, but there was a profound ecological elegance in the relationship between bison and shortgrass prairie. I wonder if there is another place on Earth where the grazer and the grazed were so well fitted to one another.”
Patti took me through her own experiences of the elegant symbiotic nature of a buffalo and their habitat, the way their sharp hooves aerate the soil, the way their beards spread seeds. I, a vegan since my days with the Forest Service nearly thirty years ago, may seem to have very different feelings about the role animals and humans play in the food system than the Baldeses, but we overlap in our beliefs that creating a sustainable food and ecosystem is paramount to combating the polycrisis.
Though cattle are not as beneficial to the prairie ecosystem as bison, they help preserve the prairie by providing an economic benefit to the ranching community in Yuma County, Colorado, in ways that bison wouldn’t be able to. Because cattle are incompatible land users with center-pivot agriculture, their presence as an economic driver keeps prairie from going under the plow to become a monoculture farming entity.
In my brief stint with the Forest Service, I learned about the plants and small animals that make up a successful goshawk ecosystem. Most of my time was spent looking for habitat, trailing the grad students and professional ecologists that made up the goshawk team through the Okanogan wilderness. I learned to love the art of observation, of understanding the ways a wildflower could indicate the food source for a foodsource of a hawk.
Green Energy Isn’t Always for the Birds
With birds and their habitat being at the pivotal to of my environmental awakening, it was hard not to fall in love with the greater prairie chicken. They’re elaborately costumed in stripes and bright colors, and their mating ritual includes making booming noises with their wings. So, when their numbers started to fall, the Nature Conservancy stepped in to figure out why, and what to do about it.
Fox Ranch is prime prairie chicken land, so naturally, they became a priority.
Smith explained that most of the issue is a loss of their habitats; prairie chickens are ground nesters, so habitat conversion to monocrop farming has been a major contributor to their downfall. But another surprising problem has been Colorado’s push for green energy.
Wind and solar farms are constructed out on the eastern plains, and they need utility lines to connect the power they generate to the people who use it.
“Utility lines are really great places for raptors to perch, and raptors are probably the number one predator of prairie chickens,” Smith said. “Prairie chickens didn’t have high things that they lived around, and now they have all these utility lines and these really high posts for raptors to find them and prey on them.”
Here is where cattle become prairie chicken heroes. Nathan Andrews, who runs the ranching side of Fox Ranch, has found a way to feed his herd without exposing the prairie chicken. When cattle bring a patch of grass down to around 14 inches, Andrews moves the cattle on to the next plot, leaving the perfect amount of cover to protect prairie chickens from hawks and other predators. This system has worked incredibly well for restoring the prairie chicken population to the ranch.
“It’s not necessarily uncommon to be out there, especially in the winter, and flush out 20 to 50 prairie chickens at once, which is basically unheard of,” Smith said. “One of our staff entered it into one of those nature apps. And it rejected it because it didn’t believe that she counted 48 birds.”
Read Part Two… tomorrow…