Browse our Growing Library of Success Stories
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Working Lands for Wildlife
Prescribed burns and strategic grazing practices have made the Nichols Ranch more profitable, as well as more productive for livestock and wildlife.
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Working Lands for Wildlife
Landowners Tim and Sarah Bailey work with a conservation-minded ranch manager to keep South Dakota’s prairies intact and profitable for livestock grazing.
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Working Lands for Wildlife
Chris and Cole Mushrush are keeping grasslands tree-free on their ranch in Strong City, Kansas, and using virtual fencing to repair eroding soils.
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Working Lands for Wildlife
This ranch in the Sandhills relies on healthy prairies to support two businesses: a tourist-based outfitting company and for feeding cattle.
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Working Lands for Wildlife
GREAT PLAINS ‘GUARDIANS OF THE GRASSLANDS SERIES | Scott Westrup was one of the first landowners in Oklahoma to sign up for the NRCS Great Plains Grassland Initiative to get rid of trees infesting his pastures.
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Working Lands for Wildlife
“Little Miss Clearcut” is restoring the prairie with loppers and a handsaw to keep woody invaders from taking over her grassland pastures.
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Ted WilliamsFish are cold, slimy, unfeathered, unfurred, unheard, and usually unseen by non-anglers. So for the general public, including much of the environmental community, fish don’t count as wildlife.
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Family Farm AllianceThis multi-generation family takes care of their livestock and ranch in a way that prioritizes the health of the land. They actively participate in conservation efforts and land stewardship programs, including conservation easements and river bank restoration projects in partnership with Fish and Wildlife. Preserving the integrity of their ranch and managing it responsibly is of utmost importance to them, and they have put considerable effort into estate planning to ensure its continued success.
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Leopold Conservation Award Program
For Colby and McKenzie Pace, raising beef cattle includes keeping a sharp eye on preventing overgrazing and noxious weeds and seeking out ways to improve their land for nesting and migrating shorebirds. This forward-thinking approach to livestock and wildlife management earned the Coalville couple — and their Half Circle Cross Ranch — the 2020 Utah Leopold Conservation Award.
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K. Gregg Elliott
The nonprofit Soil Health Academy (SHA) is just one of many initiatives spawned by regenerative agriculture guru Gabe Brown in collaboration with additional expert partners. SHA holds regenerative agriculture workshops around the country that are open to anyone who’s interested, and they are routinely sold out.
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Gregg Elliott
When Heather Dutton, fresh out of undergraduate school at the Warner College of Natural Resources and graduate school in the College of Agriculture at Colorado State University, began her first job working for a non-profit river restoration organization in the San Luis Valley, she was thrilled. She also felt confident that her technical training in restoration ecology had prepared her for the challenges she’d soon be facing.
Heather was in for a surprise.
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Natural Resources Conservation Service
This video is the story of a young scientist, Hugh Hammond Bennett, who recognized 80 years ago that the United States was at risk of losing it’s most important resource – its soil. He made it his mission to change the trajectory of agriculture at a time of great crisis and to provide farmers and ranchers with the information and tools they needed to be sustainable.
This 21 minute video is the story of the conservation movement that Hugh Hammond Bennett began and includes interesting insights into the policies and structures that he set up that we continue to rely on today. His work revealed so much of what we’re rediscovering and renaming as “regenerative agriculture.”
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Washington Policy Center
This video from Washington Policy Center with cooperation from the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, sheds light on how the tribes manage forests to be more healthy using commercial harvests, thinnings, and controlled burns to deal with the pressures of insect infestation, climate change, and decades of fire suppression.
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Steve Stuebner
Before knowing much about land trusts, Ashton farmer John Nedrow thought they were some kind of sinister force seeking to take over his farm and force landowners off their property.
“Back then, I thought they were the enemy,” Nedrow said in an interview on his alfalfa and malt-barley farm, which straddles the banks of the famed Henrys Fork River, a blue-ribbon trout stream. “I thought they wanted to turn this whole area into national park.”
Their introduction to holistic ranch management techniques called into question long-held, traditional ways of thinking. The drastic changes that followed required a leap of faith for the fourth-generation ranchers. They traded harvesting hay for grazing methods that let their cattle harvest the forage themselves. Such changes didn’t happen overnight, and each came with its own risk and learning curve.
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Jonathan Baxter, Partners for Fish and Wildlife Biologist
Many partners yield many benefits for Arkansas ranch and the butterflies that live there. Diamond TR Ranch is an example of what can be accomplished when partnerships, programs and professionals work together to accomplish the landowners goals.
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K. Gregg Elliott
Like almost everyone else in his rural community, Gabe had been farming and ranching using conventional methods since purchasing his Brown’s Ranch from the parents of his wife Shelly in 1991. Possibly because he had not grown up on a farm, Gabe found that he was constantly asking the question, “why do we do things this way?”
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Northwest Florida Water Management District
On March 2, 2018, a large prescribed burn occurred at the Yellow River Water Management Area in Santa Rosa County, Florida, which is managed by the Northwest Florida Water Management District. Weather and atmospheric conditions were ideal and resources were available for the Florida Forest Service to approve the burn permit. Aerial ignition via helicopter started the fire systematically across the landscape. Ground firing and monitoring crews, consisting of 15 personnel were stationed at the tract perimeter as ground support during the burn.
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Georgia Department of Natural Resources
Tallulah Gorge State Park and the town of Tallulah Falls, Georgia are surrounded by a unique, fire-adapted forest community that, without low-intensity fire management, would gradually disappear. Restoration efforts are currently underway tore-establish this forest community with prescribed fire and mechanical treatments.
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Shelia Doughty, Arkansas Firewise
The Firewise program is a nationwide initiative that recognizes communities for taking action to protect people and properties from the risk of fire in the wildland/urban interface. Communities tailor education and clean-up to fit their needs with cooperative assistance from state forestry agencies and local fire staff. State forestry agencies support the Firewise Communities/USA recognition effort which works through the National Association of State Foresters (NASF). Arkansas leads the nation with the most recognized Firewise communities in the state.
