HESPERUS – Sarah Gleason, 37, shakes a bucket of alfalfa cubes from the flatbed of her Dodge Ram pickup truck as the setting sun turns the Southwest Colorado sky a golden orange.

“Come bows!” she yells, trying to entice her head of 50 bison to leave the comfort of their hillside and venture to the truck for the treats.

After a few minutes and a short trip into the field, a bison walks through a split in the bushes and trees that line the gully between the hillside and the truck. Its head is hulking and a deep brown.

Others appear behind it, and soon about a dozen bison surround the truck using their deep purple tongues to pick up the alfalfa. The animals jostle for the cubes, emptying a 50-pound bag before quickly disappearing back into the hillside where they dissolve into brown lumps.

Gleason started Gleason Bison two years ago after a career shift from public relations and marketing and a return to the Durango area. Her operation has grown from a few pregnant bison to about 100 animals during its annual peak for meat production.

Through her work, Gleason aims to highlight the environmental benefits of grass-fed bison ranching and the role that holistic management can play in tackling environmental issues such as climate change, all while helping the Durango community and inspiring a new crowd of young people to pursue ranching.

“This landscape evolved with a relationship with ruminant animals,” she said. “To think that by not raising them or not managing them that’s going to solve our climate change problems, we’re missing the whole puzzle of how a healthy ecosystem works. A healthy ecosystem works in relationship with grazing animals.”

“There were probably signs that this was where my life was leading me, but I was an athlete in college,” Gleason said.

Growing up in Colorado Springs, Gleason swam and her life revolved around sports.

Her family had no agricultural experience, but she was always attracted to ranching and farming, envisioning herself wrangling wild horses as a child.

After college, Gleason eventually found her way to Durango, where she worked in marketing and public relations for Zuke’s Pet Nutrition for two years.

Gleason moved to Lexington, Kentucky, with her future husband, Mike, but after stints with Whole Foods and the Savory Institute, a holistic management nonprofit working to regenerate the world’s grasslands, she decided to start a bison ranch and they moved back to Durango in 2019.

The previous eight years, Gleason had shadowed ranchers with the National Bison Association while working full time to learn what it took to manage bison. It was while visiting operations and learning from producers around the country that Gleason confirmed she wanted to start her own ranch.

“I worked this really hard, freezing cold round up in Walden, Colorado, outside of Steamboat,” she said. “Bison round up is not romantic (like) people think it is. It’s cold, it’s hard, it’s loud because they’re slamming into steel gates and the squeeze shoot is going. I was cold and tired and hungry, and it was kind of sad. And I felt like: ‘This is it. This is what I want to do.’”

Gleason connected with Tom and Penni Compton of Compton Cattle Co., who agreed to lease her an about 900-acre ranch in Hesperus, and she bought her first 15 pregnant animals from 777 Bison Ranch in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Since the inception of Gleason Bison, Gleason has practiced holistic management and regenerative agriculture.

The two terms are buzzwords representing a more environmentally friendly type of agriculture.

They are a carryover from Gleason’s time at the Savory Institute, but they have real-world implications. Both guide Gleason’s management of the land and her bison herd.

“(Holistic management) is actually a decision-making framework,” she said. “... It’s a whole process of planning our moves, then monitoring what’s going on, and then re-planning according to how fast pastures are recovering or what’s happening with the animals.”

Gleason moves her bison between 11 different pastures as they feed on grasses, keeping a close eye on the forage available in each pasture and the recovery time of the grasses in each field after grazing.

“My goal in how I manage them and move them is to mimic nature in a way that creates healthy soil because at the end of the day, it starts with soil,” she said. “Healthy soil (creates) healthy grasslands, healthy plant life, healthy animals and then healthy people.”

To ensure that her operation is not only sustaining, but improving the environment, Gleason joined the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification program.

The program uses data from a series of measurements, including wind and water erosion and dung decomposition, to measure if ranchers are improving and “regenerating” the land through their work.

“Most of us are starting to recognize that the vast majority of ecosystems and the vast majority of grasslands around the world have been impacted by human management negatively,” said Kelsey Kerston, Ecological Outcome Verification program lead. “... Sustaining a damaged ecosystem isn’t really ideal, so (regenerative agriculture) shifts the conversation to how do we rebuild ecosystems that have been damaged?”

“It’s not maintaining a lackluster status quo, it’s acknowledging that there's better management strategies to rebuild these broken systems,” Kerston said.

Rather than promoting prescriptive ranching practices, the Savory Institute’s EOV program allows ranchers like Gleason to use their own management practices.

Trained and accredited monitors visit Gleason’s operation annually to collect data from 10 short-term sites across the ranch. Every five years, they do more extensive monitoring at three long-term study sites.

Gleason uses that data to confirm that her management practices are benefiting soil health, biodiversity and natural ecosystem functions like the water cycle. If the metrics show her operation isn’t improving the environment, she can then change her practices.

“It makes me a better land manager,” she said.

Some important measurements like soil carbon will take years to track, especially since the Comptons’ practiced holistic management as well. Others, Gleason has already seen a difference in two years.

A ditch runs through one of the paddocks on the south side of the ranch. Bison, which can jump up to 6 feet high, according to the National Wildlife Federation, constantly jump over the ditch.

The impact of their hooves has compacted and flattened out parts of the ditch, reducing erosion. Parts of the ranch have also seen significantly more perennial grasses establishing themselves, Gleason said.

Gleason Bison is one of about four bison operations in the country to receive the Savory Institute’s EOV designation, which allows producers to market their products with a Land to Market label.

According to Dave Carter, executive director of the National Bison Association, regenerative agriculture and holistic management allow producers to combine environmentalism and ranching.

“Sarah is an outstanding example of someone who is embracing and utilizing holistic management and regenerative practices to restore soil health and capture carbon, but also produce a delicious meat for the marketplace,” Carter said.

Some scientists and companies are planning increasingly complex technologies like carbon capture or even geoengineering, which would deliberately alter the Earth’s natural processes, to tackle climate change.

Gleason and other bison ranchers have a different vision.

“The bison are a tool to create healthy soils and (a) healthy ecosystem out here,” she said.

Bison roamed across North America’s grasslands for centuries. Historically, they sustained grasslands with many of their behaviors.

“(Bison) had a pretty significant impact on the soil surface and the vegetation, not just by eating but also by raking or stepping on the soil,” said Chris Pague, senior conservation ecologist with The Nature Conservancy who has worked extensively with bison.

As bison rake and impact the soil, they incorporate their urine and dung. That work builds the organic matter, creating a healthier soil and better environment for grasses to regrow.

“We are in an ecosystem in the West, and along the Great Plains that evolved in concert with the bison,” Carter said. “The grasses need the bison or grazers just as much as the grazers need the grass.”

But just as bison have disappeared from much of the continent, so have grasslands. According to the Audubon Society, 550 million acres of grassland once covered North America, but now less than 40% of that remains.

Grasslands play a critical role in mitigating climate change.

“Grasses are incredibly efficient in capturing carbon and sequestering it in the soil,” Carter said. “I like to call the grasslands ‘North America's rainforest.’”

While a lot of attention has been paid to forests as carbon sinks, which store more carbon than they release, research suggests that grasslands rival forests.

A study by researchers at the University of California, Davis found that grasslands store carbon more reliably than forests since forests are prone to wildfires, which release carbon and contribute to climate change.

In contrast, when grasslands burn, the carbon stays fixed in roots and the soil.

A special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading scientific body on climate change, found that carbon sequestration by grasslands and croplands represents one of the best chances to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“The soils that we’ve degraded over the years can contribute a great deal to sequestering some carbon,” Pague said.

That’s where bison come in.

By building healthier soils, bison can help restore grasslands that remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the ground.

In the drier climate of Southwest Colorado, the benefits are even more pronounced.

“Plants that are out here won't decay, they’ll just oxidize,” Gleason said. “There’s not enough moisture in the atmosphere to decay those plants by themselves.”

Oxidized plants never add their nutrients back into the soil, which starves the soil and can lead to a process called desertification, which turns grasslands into deserts.

Bison bridge that gap.

“They harvest that excess and they run it through their rumen (part of a bison’s stomach), where moisture helps decay it,” Carter said. “It comes out the other end as fertilizer, as nutrients for the soil. If it’s done properly, the bison help those grasslands take that carbon out of the atmosphere and put it down into the soil and lock it away.”

While Gleason planned her bison ranch for years, her meat business is in its infancy.

“I'm only in year two of operating the meat business,” she said. “Itt’s still a learning process.”

Gleason’s goal is to produce nutritious food for Durango by caring for the environment.

“I think our community is amazing,” she said. “I want to provide the healthiest, best protein I possibly can to help feed my family, my friends (and) my community.”

“I’m not trying to make a million dollars. I’m just trying to make a living off of raising animals the right way and having a positive effect on the environment,” she said.

This dual purpose of environmental stewardship and food production is not unique to Gleason’s bison ranch; other ranches around Durango like James Ranch employ the same principles.

But it’s a model that Gleason hopes will inspire a new generation to pursue ranching.

“I hope that especially the young people that come out think that ranching is attractive,” she said.

“Right now, we have this aging population of our farmers and ranchers, and we have this narrative (that) being a farmer and rancher is you work 24/7, you’re broke your whole life, and you have no quality of life,” she said. “... Some of that is true. I’ve never worked harder in my life. A lot of it is super stressful, and a lot of it is really hard. But man, the benefit and the value and the beauty that you get to see and feel is unmatched.”

By sharing her own story, Gleason wants to show that anyone with a passion for the environment and their community can pursue ranching and make a difference.

“Sometimes, my ranching friends tease me,” she said. “I was an athlete (and) my husband and I both worked in the outdoor industry and are big skiers and mountain bikers. They're like, ‘How'd you get into ranching?’ It’s not a very big jump, right? I love the outdoors, I’m concerned about climate change. And now I am a steward of this big tract of land.”

ahannon@durangoherald.com

A previous version of this article stated that ranchers who receive the Savory Institute’s Ecological Outcome Verification designation can market their products with an EOV label. It has been corrected to reflect that ranchers with the designation can market their products with a Land to Market label.