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.

Read the full article about The Nature Conservancy and Fox Ranch's conservation partnership by Nhatt Nichols at The Daily Yonder.