31st NBA Conference Recap

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Happy Saturday Friends!

Hope all is well, in your part of the world, I am guessing it's a little chilly wherevery you are, and probably a good day to make some bison chili too.

It's been a wild week here, gonna do the best I can to relay the high points... and there were quite a few, and plenty of our usual brand of crazy. It's 3 am here now, and yesterday at 3am we were still in Denver, having fun and getting things done at the 31st National Bison Association Conference.

We did manage to pull off a successful world premier of the best film ever made on bison, NATIVE | The Prodigies of an Icon, part 1 "Keystone". 5 years in the making, and it truly exceeded expectations by a long shot. SO FLIPPING AWESOME.

T, dad and I had to bug out early and get back to make sure everything here at RATHranch was ok for this little cold snap. We hated to cut the conference short, so many great people and good things happening. It truly was the best yet by a longshot, and it was already a pretty high bar.

We made the decision to leave the truck there and fly home, will fly back and get it next week, just happened to meet the FedEx driver bringing the new ponchos from Faribault mill when we pulled in. Got all the pre-orders shipped out, and then got fresh bedding put out and stuff set up for the critters here, was a busy day. We finished pretty late last night, so I am leaning hard on the coffee this morning.

Head is still spinning with all of the stuff that happened. But for the moment, we still have power here, not sure for how long, and we did get the well shut down and water system drained, not looking for a repeat of Icemageddon, where we went without both for more than a week, but at the moment, all is good.

I hope you enjoy what we have here today, and it's really not possible to capture all the moving parts here, I am really just hoping I can do it justice and not forget any of the good things, worst case, we will continue it next week or ???

Hope you have a wonderful day!

Ron, T, Cecil, Stacy, Paula, and Piggy Wrangler, current staff here at the BWC

We just hit 100k subscribers here, and I cannot thank you all enough for spending time with us. I still get blown away when someone comes up and tells me that they read these things. It's quite humbling and very encouraging. We are grateful for all the support from you awesome friends, and we are blessed to be able to do what we do.

The 31st National Bison Association Conference.

I am just gonna start off by saying that this truly is the most amazing group of people you could ever meet, and we are honored to call them friends. We had a record attendance this year. It has grown every year, and not slowing down.

These are the folks who have pulled off the greatest comeback story in history, and each and every one of them is a complete badass and a wonderful person. It's pretty hard to capture the spirit and power of these people. They are inspiring and awesome and there are a whole lot of them too, and I hope that over the next couple years, I can write a piece on each and every one of them, but in the meantime, Charlie and Shauna Rankin have done an incredible job of capturing the big picture story, and telling how this comeback happened and why it is so important to our planet.

The conference kicked off with a fun welcome reception on Wed, got to meet new members from all over, people just getting into bison ranching, people who want to get into bison ranching, and catching up with a lot of old awesome friends. Then after that, we got to experience the culmination of 5 years of effort by Charlie, Shauna and Abner of "Meet My Neighbors" productions and see the first part of Native: Prodigies of an Icon, "Keystone" We managed to secure the big theater room at Alamo Drafthouse, so we had a powerful projector, excellent sound system, and some very comfortable recliners to experience this. Presenting it to the NBA membership would be the harshest critics and the response was unconditionally extremely positive... impressing this crowd was a huge win, and we can't wait til everyone can experience this story.

I knew the film was gonna be good, but honestly, it blew me away... exceeded expectations by a lot, such incredible cinematography and such an impressive cast, but mostly, the story was so well presented. It presents an inarguable case for the bison being the most important species on this land, showing just how important they are for maintaining flora, fauna, and our entire ecosystem.

I learned a fair bit personally, and am ready to watch it again as soon as possible. We have seen more than few films on bison, and we understand what an impact they have on the ecosystem, but seeing it presented so powerfully, and in such detail, I believe everyone in the room learned some new things, and I know we all enjoyed seeing it so beautifully presented. There was a whole lot of "WOW" and this is just part 1... It is going to be run on the film festival circuit this spring, and then after it picks up what could be a whole lot of awards, the streaming services and DVD's can be released. It could also be picked up and shown in theaters nationwide.

you can click the image below and reserve a copy for yourself. Ordering now also helps them get parts 2, 3, and 4 done. You are gonna want to have this in your collection.

then Thursday morning we had a new member welcome breakfast, hosted by one of my favorite people, Moritz Espy, just an incredible dude. We got to staff the region 6 tables, and we met new members hoping to get started in bison ranching, some wonderful people up from Mexico raising bison, and I am gonna see how we can help there, some unusual challenges down there, and we met an artist working on a bison "War Memorial" project... he has some brilliant ideas, and then the show really got rolling, I have already run this too long for the Google, so will see if I can get a coherent blog post together on it, or continue it next week, I really don't have a plan yet though.

One really exciting thing is that the archives of Karen Conley, editor of Bison World Magazine, probably the most extensive collection of articles and knowledge on bison in existance, is going to be digitized and organized by the SDSU Bison Center of Excellence, spearheaded by Dr. Philip Erso, so it's going to be done right. This was a personal mission, Karen is one of the most powerful and knowledgable people and so busy doing the hard work on chronicling this story, she has written and curated thousands of articles over many many years, getting this in motion is a huge win and it's going to be an extensive and exhausting project, but it's worth it.

T and I each had our respective board meetings, where we get to serve with some pretty great people, we met some new friends, caught up with dear old friends, and have come home with some new exciting projects...3 pretty big ones that could help our industry in some very cool ways, and some other fun stuff that will help our mission here at the BWC. We got a lot of work to do, but it is truly an honor to be able to serve.

Well, that's more than we have room for, and it's just the beginning... the best is yet to come.

Like I mentioned in the opening, we just got the rest of the Bison Ponchos in, and Faribault did an excellent job on them, If you want one, I do recommend grabbing it quickly, they sold out really fast last batch, and we have the red striped blankets up next. Mike at the Knitting Mill has just shipped us more gloves, bison beanies and we have a restock on the extremly popular Ultralight Cowls. Nester Hosiery has gotten busy making more socks too, should get some info this week on when we can expect some restocking there too.

Thank you for spending some time with us.