Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land

by Dan O'Brien

Jill and I were starved for cash, but we knew that simply selling our buffalo production would have made us undistinguishable from generations of livestock producers who had exploited the plains. I had seen the wild fear in the eyes of buffalo as they smell a slaughter plant for the first time. I had watched them standing in their own manure, being forced to eat subsidized grain products. Neither Jill nor I wanted anything to do with forcing buffalo through the cattle production model. Because most buffalo producers come from cattle traditions, they instinctually do what they have done for generations. But buffalo are not cattle. They are evolutionary marvels that have existed for tens of thousands of years with no aid from humans. It is inhumane and wrongheaded to treat them as if they have been selected to endure the stresses of confinement. But it is not the death of buffalo that bothers me. Death is an unalterable fact for all of us. The only choice we have is how it comes.

I had never been inside a food co-op and I was curious to know what drove the people who worked there. The vegetable guy had been one of the founding members and he knew a lot about food, the food industry, and how tough it was to compete with factory farms. He was an older hippy-type that barely raised his head to look at me as he stocked the lettuce, green beans, squash, and rutabagas. He wore his graying hair in a ponytail with a hairnet. “The big food companies just do everything as cheaply as they can,” he said. “That’s kind of the idea, isn’t it?” I’d been thinking a lot about business lately and I was sincere in what I said, but he looked up at me with deep exasperation in his gray eyes. “Your view of business is the standard party line: markets will work everything out.” My comment had touched a nerve. “That idea only works if you add in all the costs.” He had a rutabaga in his hand and tossed it up and down like a pitcher contemplating a fastball. “At the top of Monsanto’s list of crimes, misdemeanors, sins, and oversights is the accounting error of grabbing profits while pushing the costs down the line.” “Like to the next generation.” “Like to the next generation. Bull’s-eye.” He was still tossing the rutabaga up and down. “Now take this humble vegetable. It was grown about six miles from here. No pesticides, herbicides to worry about cleaning up. No water stolen from some imperiled fish.” He stopped tossing the rutabaga, held it in front of his eyes like Hamlet ...