Wild Idea Buffalo Company, purveyor of grass-fed, grass-finished, and humanely field-harvested buffalo meat, announced they achieved Regenerative Organic Certified Silver, making them the first bison company and the first commercial meat company is in the U.S. to be certified under this program.
“Wild Idea is thrilled to achieve this revolutionary certification for regenerative food that represents the world’s highest standard for organic agriculture, with stringent requirements for soil health, animal welfare, and social fairness,” said Wild Idea CEO Phil Graves. Wild Idea aims for everything they do to be 100% transparent and verified, a rarity in a food industry rampant with greenwashing.
Conservationist and author Dan O’Brien originally founded Wild Idea in 1997. As a biologist working with the endangered Peregrine Falcon, Dan saw first-hand the devastating impact modern industrialized agriculture has on the environment and the crucial role keystone species, like bison, play in restoring damaged ecosystems. For more than 25 years, Wild Idea has taken a strong stance on protecting the grasslands from conversion. It has even rehabilitated degraded land by planting native grasses that provide cover for ground-nesting birds.
Dan began with a small herd of bison and a vision to heal 1,000 acres. Today, a combined 8,000 acres of Dan and family-owned land and nearly 27,000 acres of protected Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, plus the entire herd of bison (about 800), is Regenerative Organic Certified, ensuring healthy soil, habitat for wildlife, and the protection of 35,000 acres for generations to come.
The holistic approach of the Regenerative Organic Certified model considers all elements in the farm system, from the soil microbiome to the people stewarding the soil, providing a crucial baseline for an ethical supply chain. With Wild Idea, it means large-landscape grazing and humane field harvests; Wild Idea’s bison are harvested on the open prairie where they have lived since birth, so the animals never experience the stress of transport and confinement. The buffalo are 100% grass-fed and grass-finished, eating forage free of GMOs, herbicides and pesticides, and are never given antibiotics or hormones.
For a quarter century, Wild Idea has also partnered with Native Americans to bring back the buffalo and conduct humane field harvests on Indigenous lands. Last year, the company conducted the first bison harvest at the Wolakota Buffalo Range, the largest Native-owned bison herd in the world.
About Wild Idea Buffalo
Wild Idea was founded in 1997 by Dan O’Brien. Through partnerships with like-minded ranchers, Indigenous communities, and conservation organizations, Wild Idea is repairing a broken ecosystem and food system by returning buffalo to the Great Plains.
