PHILLIPS COUNTY, Mont.—The American buffalo—those ornery, hairy prairie beasts that reign as the official mammal of the United States—have joined wind turbines, electric cars and climate researchers in the cross hairs of the Trump administration.

Acceding to anti-bison grumbling from cattle ranchers and Republican politicians in Montana, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in January proposed canceling leases for buffalo grazing on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

The BLM is part of the Department of the Interior, which, for more than a century, has celebrated its role in heading off the extinction of buffalo, which were killed by the tens of millions during white settlement in the West. The Interior Department still sports a buffalo on its official seal.

But the BLM, long nicknamed the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining,” has traditionally prioritized leasing the rangelands it oversees for cattle grazing.

Now, in the MAGA era, with Interior reversing the Biden administration’s determination that conservation is a use of BLM land on par with grazing and resource extraction, Burgum has ruled that since bison here in north-central Montana are not being raised for “production-oriented purposes,” they have no legal right to roam, wallow or munch grass on land leased from the bureau.

If the ruling becomes final, which may occur this spring, more than 950 buffalo will be evicted from tens of thousands of acres of federal land, some of which they have been grazing on, behind stout electric fences and without major incident, for 20 years.

Cows will then mosey on in, and their owners will benefit from the hugely discounted grazing leases available from the BLM. It charges a per-animal fee that is about 90 percent cheaper than fees charged for grazing livestock on privately owned land in this state.

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, a friend of Secretary Burgum and a fellow Trump-supporting tech multimillionaire, gave voice to the joy that the prospect of buffalo banishment has generated among cattle ranchers who drive Montana’s agricultural economy and Republicans who dominate politics in the state.

“For years, we have raised serious concerns about the federal government’s failure to listen to the folks who live and work the land,” Gianforte said in a statement. “By proposing to cancel these [bison lease] permits, BLM is finally acknowledging that federal overreach cannot come at the expense of our local communities and the production agriculture that feeds our nation.”

Bristling at Bison Ban

Interior aimed its proposed decision at seven federal lease allotments held by American Prairie, a well-heeled nonprofit foundation that has long been a bête noire of local cattle ranchers and Montana Republicans. American Prairie—often with large donations from wealthy coastal environmentalists—has been buying ranches here in the depopulated outback of eastern Montana for nearly a quarter century. The foundation wants to revive the grassland ecosystem to create an “American Serengeti,” chock full of sage grouse, prairie dogs and charismatic megafauna like bison, pronghorn, elk, wolves and grizzly bears.

The anti-buffalo wording of Bergum’s proposed decision, however, is resounding far beyond this lonesome precinct of Montana. It is raising alarm and outrage from the Great Plains to California, where there are about half a million bison, many of which are raised for conservation and human consumption. Buffalo are grazing behind fences on scores of Indian reservations and on BLM allotments in Colorado, New Mexico, the Dakotas and elsewhere in Montana—and have been doing so without legal objection from Interior for more than four decades, until this year’s order overturning BLM’s 2022 decision to allow American Prairie to graze bison on seven allotments in Phillips County.

Particularly alarmed is the Coalition of Large Tribes (COLT), which manages 25,000 buffalo and represents more than 50 tribes, accounting for about 95 percent of Indian Country and half the Native American population in the U.S.

“Interior’s proposed ruling would put a chokehold on us being able to increase our buffalo herds,” said OJ Semans Sr., executive director of the tribal coalition and a member of the Rosebud Sioux in South Dakota. “We should not have the federal government saying only cattle get affordable BLM leases. It is just so stupid the way they are doing this. It is DEI for cows.”

Coalition tribes run bison on reservation land but plan to shift some of their growing herds to BLM grazing lands, which total about 155 million acres. Much of this land is threaded through and around large reservations. Tribes raise buffalo for spiritual, ecological and nutritional purposes—and sell buffalo meat (about 25 percent leaner than beef) for profit. Two tribes in California, the Pit River Tribe and the Fort Bidwell Indian Community, are actively seeking BLM grazing leases for their bison.

In a blistering notice of protest to Interior, the coalition’s lawyers said that “as the proposed decision is currently written, it is unlikely that any tribal government or tribal citizen buffalo herd would ever be eligible for BLM grazing leases.”

“We should not have the federal government saying only cattle get affordable BLM leases. It is just so stupid the way they are doing this. It is DEI for cows.”

— OJ Semans Sr., Coalition of Large Tribes

Non-tribal buffalo ranchers with federal land leases are also up in arms. Colton Jones, an owner of the Wild Idea Buffalo Company in Hermosa, South Dakota, said he fears that his lease for bison grazing on 26,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land, which is part of the Department of Agriculture rather than Interior, will be the next target of “politics and pressure from the current administration.”

“This action is not only unnecessary and politically motivated, but it also sets a deeply troubling precedent that threatens the livelihoods of family-owned bison operations like ours and the many ranchers with whom we maintain longstanding business relationships,” Jones said in a letter to the BLM state office in Montana.

Protest letters from American Prairie, the Coalition of Large Tribes and private buffalo operations accuse Burgum’s Interior Department of concocting anti-bison language that distorts the meaning and purpose of the Taylor Grazing Act, a Dust Bowl-era law that governs livestock grazing on BLM land.

That 1934 law, written by members of Congress at a desperate time when wind-born topsoil from the Great Plains was raining down on Washington, D.C., was intended to halt catastrophic damage to public lands from overgrazing, restore the health of the prairie ecosystem and stabilize the livestock industry.

Interior’s primary rationale for booting buffalo off BLM land, according to its proposed decision, is that leases under the Taylor Grazing Act are “limited to cases where the animals to be grazed are domestic and will be used for production-oriented purposes.”

Pro-bison lawyers point out that the words “production-oriented purposes” do not appear in the grazing act and that Congress has never defined the words “domestic” or “livestock” to exclude buffalo. State law in Montana explicitly defines bison as livestock.

A novel argument made by Interior in its proposed buffalo ban hinges on “intent.” Burgum’s decision argues that American Prairie’s buffalo “are intended to be released into the wild or integrated into a wild herd in the future”—and therefore should not be “properly considered ‘domestic livestock.’”

Lawyers for buffalo interests mock this interpretation, arguing that nowhere in federal grazing law, agency regulations or case law is there an “intent standard” as regards the raising of buffalo. They also said that buffalo run wild nowhere in the U.S. outside of Yellowstone National Park and a handful of other national parks and reserves.

Like cows, bison live and die behind fences, and many are slaughtered for human consumption. As the Coalition of Large Tribes explains, buffalo are “actively managed, marketed, sold, and traded like other livestock, and offered for commercial hunting.”

A Home Where Buffalo Roam

Nineteen years ago, when I first wrote in the Washington Post about American Prairie and its frosty relations with some of its ranching neighbors, the foundation’s leaders rhapsodized about vast open spaces where buffalo would run free—and where fences and cows would go away. American Prairie told the Department of the Interior that its mission was to develop the largest, most genetically diverse conservation bison herd in North America.

“This thing is huge,” Sean Gerrity, then-president of American Prairie, told me in 2006, “it will affect a tremendous number of people, and it will last a long time.”

Since then, American Prairie has indeed expanded. Its bison herd is up from 19 to 952; its land holdings have grown from about 60,000 acres to more than 600,000 acres, including property purchased outright and land leased from the state of Montana and the BLM. The foundation says it wants to buy more land and envisions eventually having about 1.7 million acres that, combined with the Charles M. Russel National Wildlife Refuge and the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument, would provide the amount of land researchers believe is required for a fully functioning prairie ecosystem. It would continue to expand its buffalo herd as a keystone of that habitat.

But the sobering realities of life in Montana have also set in, especially as the state’s politics have shifted in recent years from purple to hard-right red. Dozens of local ranchers have placed “negative bison easements” on future sales of their property that would prevent buffalo from grazing on them. The foundation has sued the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, claiming it has slow-walked the processing of American Prairie’s applications for leases that allow buffalo grazing on state land.

American Prairie has had to adapt.

It now has more than eight times as many cattle as buffalo on its land. And the buffalo herd is managed much like bison operations across the West, with $350,000 worth of BLM-approved fences, disease inoculations, ear tags and regular harvests for human consumption. Of the 2,000 bison that have grazed on American Prairie land in the past two decades, about half have been slaughtered for meat or shipped away to tribal buffalo herds, breeding programs or zoos. There is a building on the property for slaughtering buffalo.

“We are largely an operation like a ranch,” said Scott Heidebrink, director of landscape stewardship for American Prairie, as he drove me among bison herds on the foundation’s land and offered me snacks of buffalo jerky.

“Cows are not going away,” said Heidebrink, a South Dakota native who has worked on this land for a decade and has a degree in wildlife and fisheries science from South Dakota State University. “We have fences and roads and buildings, and of our 606,000 deeded and leased acres, only 46,000 acres do not have cattle on them.”

Big Hopes for Bison, Big Worries for Ranchers

Phillips County, home to American Prairie and the focus of BLM’s proposed buffalo ban, is one of the more inhospitable places in the continental United States for making a living from agriculture. Rain is scarce, winters long, summers scorching and the soil is poor. Prairie grasses and sagebrush do well; row crops often do not.

Numerical proof of how hard it is to scratch out a living in Phillips County—a Connecticut-sized expanse of prairie lying between the Canadian border and the Missouri River—is the relentless decline in its number of human inhabitants. The high point was 1920, when the Census counted 9,311 residents lured in during the first two decades of the twentieth century by a series of increasingly generous homestead acts and by railroad advertisements promising that rain would follow the plow.

Census records show that since 1920, the population of Phillips County has declined every ten years for an entire century. The 2020 census counted 4,217 residents; three people have died or otherwise departed the county since then.

What can and do thrive in Phillips County are cows—and bison. Before they were killed off, researchers believe that millions of buffalo roamed what became Phillips County.

Now, cattle ranching is the county’s dominant economic engine, usually producing about two-thirds of its total agricultural income. Cows outnumber humans by about 11 to one in what is one of Montana’s top cattle-producing counties.

But to raise cattle profitably, ranchers here—as across the Great Plains—have had to get bigger. They do so by buying out their neighbors. Purchase of more land usually comes with below-market grazing privileges on thousands of acres of adjacent BLM land. About half of the land in the county is federal- or state-owned.

As a result, fewer ranchers are raising more cattle per ranch—part of a nationwide trend. For the most part, management of these cattle has been sustainable, avoiding the destructive grazing practices that created the Dust Bowl.

Still, there is a growing body of scientific evidence showing that bison would be far better for the prairie ecosystem of Phillips County than cattle.

A Kansas State University study found that sustainably managed buffalo are twice as effective as cattle at increasing the diversity of native plants. Bison, which tend to move farther and faster while grazing, do less concentrated trampling of the land and spread seeds more widely, thus increasing the resiliency of grasslands to droughts, which have increased in severity with climate change.

Bison are less stressed by hot weather than cattle and spend less time lingering at ponds and wetlands, decreasing soil erosion and giving other animals access to water. In winter, buffalo slow their metabolism to conserve energy and eat less; while cattle increase their metabolism and eat more. And bison can survive on lower-quality forage than cattle.

Buffalo herds also increase the diversity of birds, amphibians, elk, deer, coyotes, wolves and bears on the prairie.

Deanna Robbins, a third-generation cattle rancher and activist critic of American Prairie, is not persuaded by research that shows the benefits of buffalo over cattle.

“They romanticize the bison,” she said. “Their claim that bison are some kind of magical animal that grazes different is just ridiculous.”

She said research funded by stockgrowers shows that properly managed cattle are just as eco-friendly as bison.

Robbins, though, said that buffalo themselves are not at the top of her list of worries.

“My biggest concern is American Prairie’s planned takeover of federal grazing with their bison, and then the growth of the American Serengeti, which would bring in more apex predators,” she said. “If they surround me with those things [wolves and grizzly bears], it doesn’t matter what land I own. I am not going to have an economically successful ranch.”

To stop American Prairie, Robbins and other local ranch women created Save The Cowboy, which has placed anti-buffalo billboards and banners across Phillips County and neighboring Fergus County, where Robbins has her ranch. The organization, created nine years ago, objects to America Prairie’s non-profit status and to its moneyed coastal donors who “have no idea of what life is like here in Montana.”

While Save The Cowboy has drawn support from Montana’s governor and congressional delegation, its concerns were largely dismissed by the Biden administration, which, in 2022, granted American Prairie’s request to graze buffalo on land leased from the BLM. Bison would be good for the land, water quality and wildlife, the administration stated.

All that’s changed during President Donald Trump’s second term. To the delight of Robbins and other supporters of Save The Cowboy, Interior’s proposed decision would void Biden’s bison leases and put cattle first.

“What the Trump administration did was understand what the rules really are for managing this land,” said Robbins. “We definitely feel like we are being heard. These are different times.”

Finding Middle Ground on the Range

Dusty Emond is a fourth-generation cattle rancher whose family has owned land in Phillips County for 107 years. For the past 15 of those, his herds have grazed across a fence—within easy snorting distance—of growing herds of bison managed by American Prairie.

Emond, 53, was opposed to American Prairie when its land agents first began sniffing around the county, searching for ranches to buy. He supports the Trump administration’s proposed cancellation of grazing leases for American Prairie bison on BLM land.

“The biggest problem I have with them is their money,” Emond said. “We can’t compete with it. When a ranch comes up for sale, they have unlimited money. They buy at the top of the market. The more land they buy, the less there is for farm families around here.”

Emond worried, when buffalo first moved in as close neighbors, that they would infect his cattle with brucellosis, an infectious bacterial disease that induces abortion in pregnant cattle, elk and bison—and can infect humans. Billions of dollars have been spent in the United States to eradicate the disease, yet it persists in some buffalo and elk in Yellowstone National Park. Montana ranchers and politicians often issue ominous warnings about the heightened risk of brucellosis to the state’s cattle whenever they complain about buffalo on BLM land. American Prairie says that’s just a scare tactic.

Emond said that when it comes to the buffalo next door, he worried too much, and brucellosis has turned out to be a non-issue.

American Prairie has “done a better job than I thought they would” in tending to the health of buffalo, Emond said. There have been no cases of buffalo transmitting the disease to his cattle, nor from any managed buffalo herd to cattle anywhere in the country, according to the National Park Service.

American Prairie, for all his initial trepidation, has turned out to be a good neighbor, he said. So much so that he’s gone into business with the foundation, leasing about 20,000 acres of its deeded and allotted BLM land for his cattle.

“It hasn’t been a problem for me,” he said, referring to the day-to-day proximity of his cows and their buffalo. “I can think of about four times in the past 15 years that their bison have gone across the fence into my herds. It has been very minor—no worse than any other neighbors. And when I call them, they are right there to come get the buffalo.”

Emond said he’s learned that cattle and buffalo separated by strong fences can get along just fine. He would prefer that the buffalo herds not grow larger, but he believes they will over time and that his ranch will survive.

“I’m a realist,” he said. “I have accepted the fact that they are here, and I know they are not going anywhere. I’m willing to work with them.”

Scott Heidebrink, the American Prairie land manager, acknowledged that the Trump administration may soon force a major cutback in herd size.

If Interior’s proposed ban on leasing BLM land becomes final, he said, several hundred buffalo could be culled or shipped elsewhere. In the process, he said, cattle and the remaining bison will be shuffled around on American Prairie’s holdings.

“If we lose, we have deeded land where buffalo can go,” he said, while cattle now grazing on that private land would move to land leased from the BLM. The bison and their keepers will bide their time—and wait for a new president to reopen federal land.

“It is very evident that this administration is anti-bison,” Heidebrink said. “But we are here and we are not going away.”