Greenhouse gas fluxes from livestock make up at least 14% of the global total, but that number is highly uncertain. It’s no wonder that reducing enteric methane emissions and embracing regenerative agriculture has become a big focus. Guests Randy and Bethany discuss what flux science can tell us about the potential benefits of bringing back bison.
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In this episode of Meet the Fluxers, we learn about a collaborative project between the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes' Bison Program and scientists studying the climate benefits and ecological impact of bison in the southern Great Plains of Oklahoma. Randy, who directs the tribal bison program, shares insights about the cultural significance of bison to the tribe as a living connection to their heritage, while Bethany discusses her research using flux towers to measure carbon sequestration and methane emissions in bison-grazed versus rested pastures. The conversation reveals how traditional knowledge and scientific approaches complement each other, exploring topics such as proper stocking rates, parasite management, bison behavior like wallowing, and the challenges of biodiversity and water scarcity. Through their scientific collaboration, the Cheyenne & Arapaho Tribes aim to demonstrate how regenerative bison management can support both land health and cultural revitalization while potentially creating a climate-friendly product with market value.
Transcript
Maoya: It must be quite beautiful out there on the land. Tell us a little bit about what it was like to go there for the first time?
Bethany: I am originally a forest ecologist and an agricultural ecologist. So, rangeland science was a new thing for me. The first time that I visited in December, I felt eco-blind to what was going on, on the landscape. Not only was there a lot more plant diversity than I was used to seeing in an agricultural context, but there's also a whole other trophic level with the bison. I was starting to expand my thinking to the way the plants, and dirt, and the air interact, but also the way that a large ruminant herbivore is going to affect that whole system.
The first time we visited was in December, and I met Randy sort of first thing. We went out on the land with the science team and then also the team from Mad Agriculture, which is a group that helps manage and implement regenerative practices, with the beautiful rolling grasslands, the gullies, the trees, and of course the animals out there living their lives. Every time I return, it's been striking how beautiful and diverse that landscape is.
Maoya: Randy, what was it like to host Bethany?
Randy: Oh, it was pretty neat when the whole team came out. This is our first big grant deal that we got going on out here with the buffalo herd. It's a lot of people on the team and everybody is well-versed in what they do.
Maoya: What was your role when everyone showed up?
Randy: I basically showed them each pasture, drove them around and showed them the different terrains. They wanted to walk around and look at different soils and plants.
Maoya: Tell us a little bit more about the significance of buffalo for you and the tribe.
Randy: It all goes back to our history of our people with buffalo as being Plains Indians. Everyday life depended on it. That got taken away for a while, but now we're building it back up. Now, the buffalo is everyday life for us. It's a living connection to our culture and our heritage, and we're trying to just hang on to what we got. A lot of tribes have lost things over the years. We're very fortunate to have our ceremonies and things that we don't talk to the general public about. We're very fortunate to have it and so we try to hang on to it, and this animal keeps us close.
Maoya: How much land can the buffalo roam on?
Randy: Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes are broken down into about 25,000 acres. Here we got 5,000. We keep them here, let them get born, then we’ll move them, let them grow for a couple of years or a year and a half, then we will finish them off at a different place. We make sure everything is native pasture, like what they grew up on.
As far as the grounds go, we go by the stocking rate. I'll call the NRCS for Canadian County and go off their stocking rates. Add a few more acres for buffalo. They're bigger animals and not everything we have out here is fully grass. There are some hills, dirt. We want to give them plenty so they’re not hurting, not missing anything.
Bethany: One of the limitations thus far has been infrastructure to support the expansion of the herd. While the tribe has a lot of lands, many of those lands are not fenced and don't have the water resources needed to keep a herd. In addition to where the buffalo are now in Concho, the project is looking to develop two other sites, Canton and Colony, by putting up fence and water so that the Buffalo can have more space and that the herd size can grow without overtaxing the land.
Maoya: Tell us a little bit more about what we would expect to see with the interactions between buffalo and new pastures?
Bethany: There’s sort of two directions to go here. One is finding the right grazing intensity for the existing lands at Concho, and the other is that new introduction. At the current stage of the project, scientifically, we are mostly thinking about finding that right grazing intensity for Concho. There's a lot of hype about grazing animals and their effects on soil organic carbon, but there's also a lot of uncertainty. It's difficult to design an experiment in these kinds of rangelands, and experiments that have been done have a wide spread of their results.
We would expect that there would be some optimum level of stocking density for primary production and therefore carbon dioxide storage in the soil. If you have too little grazing, so the theory goes, dead plant material crowds out the new growing plant material and reduces primary productivity. But with too much grazing intensity, then the plants are stunted you lose that belowground root growth and soil carbon storage.
So, we would expect that some degree of bison grazing would increase soil carbon storage, but if we aren't at that right level, then we might see carbon losses. That's sort of what we're trying to identify with part of our flux work here.
Maoya: Tell us a little bit more about how you thought through instrumenting a place like Concho?
Bethany: One of the nice things about Concho is that the pasture is divided by fencing into four different sections which give Randy and Ryan (the site’s non-tribal range manager) a lot of flexibility in controlling where the animals are and what they're grazing. Our current experimental setup has the bison in two of the four sections, then a utility pasture in one of the sections, and then one section that's resting. Just this past August, I set up a flux tower in the area grazed by bison and in the area that's resting. So, there we have a sort of pseudo-controlled experiment where we see, how does the land respond to grazing versus total rest?
The rest of the story the purview of the other postdoc on this project, Julie Tierney. She is also a postdoc at Collaborative Earth and last summer, she spent a lot of hours in the really hot sun doing some pretty extensive soil sampling and vegetation sampling. Not only are we measuring the fluxes, but we're also measuring some of the pools across those different treatments.
Jess: Does the grazing have an impact on the breeding?
Randy: We've seen that over the years, where we've been overstocked. The next batch growing up, they're going to be a lot smaller. Back in the long times, when they grazed, they never stayed in one place and just overgrazed. They just kept moving, eating the best of the best wherever they went. Now, we’re watching our numbers and all that.
Jess: Is climate in Oklahoma challenging for bison?
Randy: Once we get animals in and they get acclimated for a few months, they're pretty much settled in. The buffalo down here, from Kansas on down, they're going to be smaller than the buffalo up north. North Dakota, South Dakota. Montana – they’ve got bigger pastures, better grasses, and stocking rates are a lot higher for them up there. Down here, it’s a lot hotter and there's a lot of parasites down here that we have to deal with that they don't have to worry about. They’ve been surviving for thousands of years. We're just trying to do our best to keep them healthy.
Bethany: This is something we're very interested in scientifically as well. A lot of previous work on bison, whether for production or conservation, has been set in the northern Great Plains where the context is really quite different. Depending on the location, moisture may be more or less limiting. It's colder and shorter growing seasons in the northern Great Plains. So, in the southern Great Plains, we're seeing longer growing seasons but hotter peak summer temperatures and often smaller land holdings. Land is more divided, which lends itself to a different type of management than open range buffalo herds of the north.
So that's something we're thinking about that connects nicely to the later phases of the project, which is the development of those other lands which are not currently suitable for bison use. A major thrust of the project is to reperennialize those lands, in addition to allowing for scaling of the bison herding efforts. There's some scientific support showing that that might also increase carbon storage.
Maoya: How do you both feel about this as a demonstration project?
Randy: This is kind of like, the first bison study that's on the southern part of the U.S. It's going to be a big deal for a lot of these tribes down here in the Southern region. Hopefully, they'll jump on board.
Bethany: This is only the second study that I know of measuring the enteric emissions of bison. The other being work by Paul Stoy, who is my advisor on this project, in, I believe it was, Montana. So, in a northern Great Plains context. What we're comparing here is bison managed regeneratively versus bison managed not-regeneratively. There's good evidence that some of these practices (getting the stocking density right, reseeding, perennialization) can have co-benefits, maybe carbon storage or methane reduction, but also other co-benefits like water quality improvements or biodiversity increase. Those are the things that we are trying to see, whether they are results of these kinds of practices.
We are also experimenting with figuring out where the bison are around the tower. We have started to collaboration with two scientists at UW-Madison, Joao Dorea and Rafael Ferreira, that have developed these AI-enabled cameras that can track animal location and behavior. They have used these previously in cow barns, but they're interested in expanding to pasture systems. They actually have installed one of these cameras on top of one of my flux towers and it's been taking images of the area surrounding the flux tower every 10 minutes for the last several months. We're hoping not only will that be able to track whether animals are in the footprint, which is important for understanding what methane emissions can be attributed to the bison versus background emissions from the land, but also some information about their behavior and possibly their health.
Jess: Have you gotten to any of the data analysis part yet?
Bethany: Not of the camera data, unfortunately. I've just finished processing the first section of flux tower data, but it's not through post-processing yet. We're hoping to link that camera data (that should give us a good idea of how many bison are in the footprint at any given time) with our methane measurements to understand how much methane individual bison are emitting. And then in the broader context, to maybe compare that to how much methane cattle tend to emit.
Maoya: How do your other community members see this project?
Randy: Everybody seems to be pretty excited about it. All this stuff is brand new and a lot of buffalo tours come out here and we take them out to the flux tower, try to tell them what we know. They like things like that being done.
Bethany: I've been on one of these bison tours and they're great fun. Oftentimes, visitors to the tribe will get treated to a trip out to the pasture with a little bit of feed and the herd will come running. You can get real up close and personal with them. It's an interesting contrast that there are these bison, but then there's also this advanced scientific equipment in the field. We’re hoping to add some excitement to that already pretty exciting bison tour.
Maoya: What do you say? How do you introduce the flux tower?
Randy: We’ll just kind of pull up next to it. Everybody will look, and ask what it is. I try to remember what Bethany told me about what each thing measures. Hearing about CO2 and carbon in the air, coming to the ground, kind of always catches everybody's attention because nobody thinks about that. It’s been good, good responses.
Maoya: And you visit the tower regularly, then?
Randy: We’ll go by about once a month, clean everything, check the connections, wipe down the solar panels. We always call Bethany beforehand, make sure we’re on the same page.
Bethany: Well, Randy does a great job and Randy has also bailed me out of several tight spots in the field with some truly remarkably large farm equipment. One of the first things that happened when I set up those towers out there is that we needed to put some fencing around them to keep the bison from damaging the towers. Randy came out with this enormous forklift with four 400-pound chunks of fence and just drove on out there over the grass and set them up around the tower.
I really wouldn't have been able to do this setup without Randy's support. Embarrassingly. I got my truck stuck in the mud last time I visited. Randy came out with a giant tractor and pulled me out of the mud. He's really been essential to keeping that data stream.
Randy: Ah, that’s funny.
Maoya: Tell us a little bit more about how you are collaborating with the tribe when you're not in the field?
Bethany: We meet regularly. Every Wednesday, we have a meeting with the science team, the Mad Ag team, and tribal members associated with the project. So, we're definitely in touch. Everyone is seeing everyone's process of working out what's next, and what we know, and where we go from here.
Randy: I’m probably noticing more it’s about growing the grasses to have healthier buffalo.
Jess: What grasses are you growing for the buffalo?
Randy: Just native grass.
Maoya: What was the main concern on the landscape before? Was it water?
Randy: It's always water. We’ve been in a drought for five or six years. Ponds are at an all-time low. The grass is a big deal.
Bethany: An appreciation for the importance of water is something that I have definitely gained from this collaboration. My background is in northern mesic systems where water is almost never limiting. You know, I put the towers out in the summer and was expecting our systems to behave like what I had seen before, mostly responding to radiation and the time of the season. But after it started getting really dry in August and September, Randy kept sending me, “it's real dry out here!” The drought was getting worse, and worse, and worse. I was like, maybe I should pay a little more attention to water here because clearly Randy thinks that's really important. And in fact, when I'm looking at this brand-new flux data, the ecosystem is more sensitive to water than to, apparently, anything else other than it being a growing season or not. We see clear increases in productivity after rains and clear declines in productivity when it gets dry. That's something I've definitely learned from Randy about how these systems work. And it's going to structure the way I create my hypotheses and analyze the data in the future.
Another thing that this collaboration has helped me see more clearly is animal health. When I first got here, one bison was much like the next when I was out on the landscape. But after talking to Randy for a few hours, I started to see things like the coat quality, the age, the sex, the young calves, the old calves. That's something that I didn't really have eyes to see before.
Jess: Is that something, Randy, that you could elaborate more on?
Randy: Basically, the parasites came with the cattle back in the 1800s. We're dealing with roundworm, brown worm, hookworm, Barbers pole worm. They are intestinal worms. They get in the system and they attack different parts. One of them makes it anemic. One of them jumps on the intestines and, like leeches, they’ll go from spot to spot and leave sores on them. So, you get all these worms working on the animal and over time, it drops them down. By the time you see them and they look bad, they’re hurting and their immune system is already compromised. In previous years, we’ve done that, seen it, went and got some help. Now, we do a lot of fecal sample testing with Texas A&M. Only because we're pastured, we have to stay on top of these worms. They're always working on them, 24/7, they don't take a day off. Fecal samples are a really good tool to have down south because it's so hot and these parasites, it’s a breeding ground for them and they can wipe out a herd pretty quick if you don’t stay on top of it. So, what we do is, we send the samples in every three months and they’ll break it down, give us a coproculture that tells us each worm and how bad we are. We’ll do some calculations and it will tell us if we’re at disease level or not. When we reach the disease level, we’ll go ahead and field treat them. We’ll get safeguard medicated cubes and treat them like that.
Then, I'll send in some resamples and then we'll wait for the results and it'll tell us if we killed the worm or not. All that makes sense at the end of the year because when we work them, we work them one time a year. We them, vaccinate them, all that. We don't like to handle them too much. We don't like to bring them up except once a year because it sets off a lot of things. They can get real sick, real quick if you stress them out real bad. Low stress is how we handle them, as opposed to trying to run them up like a cow, running and screaming, whistling. It all plays a factor in the health of the animals.
Bethany: Randy, would you expect that greater forage availability would reduce parasite load?
Randy: It's hand in hand. It's the stocking rate and the grass, absolutely. When we're running them through the chute, if they’re full of worms and they’re not healthy, the vaccines are not going to work as good because they’re fighting the worms, they’re fighting to stay healthy. The worms are always in the ground. They come out - it’s a big cycle. They eat them, they have larvae, they get in them. When they crap, the worms crawl out of the crap, get onto the next blades of grass. Those guys just come along when they’re grazing, so they’re actually just picking up the larvae. It’s a big cycle. We stay on top of it.
Bethany: Randy, the stocking rate has some impact on the parasite load, right?
Randy: Absolutely. Basically, the less poop you have in a pasture, the less likely you are going to have a lot of worm problems. If you have a lot of stocking, a high number, there’s less grass and more crap. So, there's more of, you know, the larvae. As we drop our stocking rates, I've noticed that our last two fecal sample tests have been pretty good. But these worms are always working. This latest one, I just did a fecal sample test a month ago, and our worms are high. That’s because, through our testing, we know that this time of year certain types of worms ramp up. So, I expected it to be high.
So, say we get buffalo donated to us through ITBC and they come off Yellowstone, Wind Cave National Park, Wichita Mountain, any national parks. We’ll get them and we’ll quarantine them for two weeks and then we’ll send off samples. That'll tell us what worms they are bringing in. And that really helps us control the health of the whole herd. Without that, you don’t know what worm you’re treating. You’re spending a lot of money. Fecal samples tell us exactly what we’ve got, so you know, “we’re going after this certain type of worm”. It really pinpoints things for us and it’s cost savings at the end.
Maoya: I’m curious as to how this might help kind of reconnect the community's relationship with the land?
Randy: Oh, I just try to get the word out through our ITBC through our tribes down here in Oklahoma. I try to push this fecal sample treatment tool on everybody. It doesn't matter where the animal is from. It's a buffalo, and it's our job to take the best care of it. It means so much to us as Native people. I figure if you take care of it, it's going to take care of us in the end. It’s good for our people, good for the tribes, everybody involved. And it's just all coming from this one animal. It all goes back to the history of it with our people. I try to keep all our tribes involved in this. The science part is a big part of our program, I stand behind it, I’ve seen it work.
Jess: Do you foresee the youth getting involved with the coming-of-age bison hunting rituals and ceremonies?
Randy: We actually probably schedule four different buffalo butchers for different communities because we're spread out through 5 counties. So, we try to get a buffalo out to each Community and have a butcher. It seems to be a big hit. It brings a lot of people out. You hear a lot of old stories, see the young kids getting involved. My goal is to get an apprenticeship program started out here. We've got to train the younger guys coming up. We’re going to be long gone and the buffalo are still going to be here, our people are still going to be here.
Bethany: We’re also sort of hoping in doing this demonstration program to show that this kind of management can support the health of the land while also resulting in a viable product. The idea is to create an entire integrated bison production system and to create a product where the consumer can know that the animals had a good life, that animal welfare was prioritized throughout that animal's life, and also, if the science supports it, that the management was supportive of a more climate-safe future.
Jess: Is there some certification or something that you guys get for doing free range?
Randy: That might be part of the grant later on.
Bethany: Part of the project is to create a set of standards for a renewably-produced label that would add value to the product on the market.
Maoya: Currently, bison, or the buffalo, is just staying within the tribe?
Randy: We'll donate some to tribes for different butchers. Probably at three or four different tribes in Oklahoma come to us, so we'll take them some bulls or whatever.
Bethany: In the process of the herd reduction, some of the animals were sold to processors for revenue. There is not currently a tribal processing facility, but that's maybe something that is in the far future vision.
Jess: How would you go about measuring the impact of the manure fertilization on plant growth?
Bethany: The camera does tell us when there are bison in the flux tower area. The area that the buffalo are confined to is small enough that they fertilize pretty much wherever they are. And I can tell you from being out in the field that they're fertilizing near the flux tower. We've actually in our science group, just started thinking more deeply about nutrient cycling and the effect that bison might have on nutrient cycling. So, that's something that's going to be entering into our thinking. The flux footprint is going to be roughly a circle with a kilometer radius, maybe a little smaller given the height limitations of our tower. That's the area in which we're doing the measurements. In my capacity as a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin, we're doing some exciting development of flux spatialization approaches that fuse remote sensing data with measured flux data to not only see what's going on in the entire footprint when the sub-footprint is in one area as determined by the wind direction, but also to generalize the measurements that the flux tower is taking to the wider ecosystem. That's something I'm very excited to apply to this project.
The other tool that we have is remote sensing data and this is something that can help us a lot with understanding how the ecosystem has changed from its previously intensively heavily-grazed state to the more moderately-grazed state that it's in now. Even just looking at something as simple as satellite EVI or NDVI is something that will help us generalize what we're measuring onsite to the wider temporal and spatial context. There are some really high-resolution data products that are available in small quantities for researchers. One of these is planet data that has a <5m resolution and definitely would show us some variability within single flux footprint.
Maoya: Tell us a little bit more about the patterns of bison grazing?
Randy: Buffalo have got a slower metabolism. So, they're going to get more out of a pasture than a cow would. The cow's going to grow faster and put on more weight than a buffalo would, but once a buffalo is at his size, then he’s solid.
Bethany: You also need to use different methods to move bison around, which makes something like intensive rotational grazing somewhat challenging with bison.
Randy: We’ll cake them with some cubes three times a week just to supplement them with the hay. They come to that. It’s like a big treat to them. If we need them to move somewhere, we’ll hold off a day or two of caking so they're hungry enough to follow us. Then, we'll just take the truck out there and they’ll see us and they’ll follow us, they’ll run. Then, when we get to a certain point where we want them, we'll start feeding and we'll close the gate and we'll have them, you know, locked in where we need them, 99% of them. We'll have a couple knuckleheads out there who don’t want to run in.
Buffalo, you have to show them. You have to actually take them to the gate. They are constantly moving, constantly grazing. They’ll break out into different groups. We got a bunch from different places. I'll notice that those guys with be grouped up for a while.
Maoya: How do buffalo interact with the pasture with how they sleep?
Randy: When we feed them pretty good, feed them pretty heavy, after we cube them or a tour, they’ll get good and full. They’ll just kind of, mosey around and lay around and go find a big dirt pile and roll around in it. They’re pretty relaxed animals most of the time, until rut season, then they’re dangerous.
Bethany: The tower that I have in the grazed area is in an area that the herd uses heavily and most days, there will be a bison within 30 meters of me at some point. They’re just living their lives. They're eating grass, hanging with their parents and children. They can be kind of fun to watch.
Randy: It’s therapeutic being out there with the herd.
Jess: Are there any other species interactions?
Randy: We’ve got pictures of birds on their backs. We think that’s pretty neat. We’ll see them grabbing the fur, or flies, or whatever. We used to have a bunch of prairie dogs, but we got rid of them. Here in Concho, we only have 5,000 acres. We had over 1200 acres of prairie dogs, and they demolish pasture. They were starting to get into our buffalo pastures pretty heavy. We could plant nothing, we could grow nothing, because there were so many. We had the state of Oklahoma come out and thin them out for us.
Bethany: It is really striking on the landscape. The prairie dogs just mow the grass down to stubble. The pile of mud that I got stuck in last month that Randy had to come pull me out of with tractor was because the prairie dogs had overgrazed the grass there and had reduced the belowground root mass and everything turned into a mire. The prairie dogs were a real challenge there for a while, and we’re hoping that their populations are back under control so that we don't have a bison-and-prairie dog experiment.
Maoya: I want to hear more about the wallowing that the bison do.
Randy: It’s when a buffalo will lay down on the ground and start rolling around. Over time, it starts making an indention in the ground. It’ll get deeper and deeper, bigger and bigger. We've run into them all time out in the pastures when we're feeding, we're going across the pasture we’ll hit a big old wallow. You can hardly see them sometimes, but some of them are real big. It's just something they naturally do to get flies off of them, scratch.
On the side of the horn there'll be a flat spot. It looks like they rubbed something flat and that's from them just rubbing the horn into the dirt and it'll make it smooth. We've got hundreds of wallows out here, hundreds. They're always wallowing, and that in turn, turns into little water holes for them I've noticed. Buffalo will drink anything that's close to them. If there's a water source close, they're going to drink out of it. That's just how they are.
Bethany: There's also fairly strong evidence that those wallows increase biodiversity, in that they create sort of localized disturbance that then creates a niche different species can exploit. In that way, bison can kind of be ecosystem engineers and improve the biodiversity of the prairie.
Jess: Randy, favorite recipe for buffalo?
Randy: Favorite recipe for buffalo… Tenderloin is pretty good. We eat it all. Burgers are pretty good, It's healthy. I like the tenderloin myself. But then again, there's stew, jerky, so many options.
Jess: What are the uses for the bison coat?
Randy: We make rawhide. We’ll stretch them and scrape them down, we'll cut them into squares, and we'll make rattles for sweats. You can make moccasin soles from the neck because the neck is really thick. So, you would use from the neck up for soles for moccasins, then towards the back the hide thins out some so you would use that for other things. We do a lot of old things with them. I know a lot of people that make a living off that, using old buffalo hide, making forks and spoons out of the horns, cups. I’ve seen cozies, buffalo cozies. There are several things you can make.
We used to use it all back in the day. We try to hang on to that. It just goes back to the old days and what we did, what we used them for. We are just trying to hang on to our old ways and hopefully every other tribe is trying to do the same. Honor our ancestors, the ones who went before us. Culture aside, everything for us revolves around our tribe, our youth, and our elders. It’s a pretty special thing to be a part of.