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• A Legacy of Conservation

  Over the last 65 years, The Nature Conservancy of North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota has worked to protect 1 million acres.

  But we don’t own a million acres. The Nature Conservancy has a series of preserves, a little over 100,000 acres in Minnesota, North and South Dakota.

  So there are so many ways to protect lands and waters, but what’s important is in so many cases, we keep the lands in those hands of the private landowners who are using those lands and working those lands to the benefit of people.

  So in the late 1970s, the landowners of Cross Ranch, the Levises, they were interested in selling their land to a conservation buyer. So The Nature Conservancy, along with the state of North Dakota, were talking with the Levises, about how can this become permanent conservation land.

  The state park director at that time had worked with our governor, Art Link. They started the process of getting state funding together to purchase the entire ranch, but the funding fell through. After a few years, The Nature Conservancy, buying the ranch, and then donating this tract of land where we’re at to the North Dakota State Parks Department to build Cross Ranch State Park.

  These grasslands evolved with two types of disturbance, fire and grazing. And so, part of our management for these preserves to maintain healthy ecosystems is continuing to mimic those disturbances across our properties.

  And so, you know, here at Cross Ranch, we do have the two bison herds. The stuff that isn’t utilized by the bison, we are entering into cooperative agreements with local ranchers to be able to utilize their cattle on our preserves.

  The Cross Ranch Nature Preserve provides an opportunity for people to get out, enjoy the mixed grass prairie ecosystem, view a variety of grassland bird species across the landscape. You can view, hopefully, one of the bison herds from the road, and it’s a unique opportunity to see the national mammal.

  These grasslands are disappearing at an alarming rate, and that’s why acting now matters. Any type of a conservation project like this is real beneficial, but I think as time goes on, conservation is becoming more prevalent in North Dakota. You see a lot more people interested in controlled burns out on rangeland and a lot more efforts to put grasslands back in place. And things like the nature preserve, that sets an example.

  It’s vital for us to try to protect some of these last stretches of intact prairie that’s healthy across here for generations to come and for ranchers to carry on their tradition and pass it on to the next generation as well.

  The way that we move forward to our next million acres is in partnerships, and it is in partnerships with private landowners. In North Dakota alone, over 90% of the land is in private ownership, which means that conservation happens with those that live and work and love this land.