Four American farms, from zero wolf losses to 10,000 new trees
An Idaho ranch has lost no cattle to wolves since 2015. A Georgia farm employs more than 160 people in a town of 100, and a California ranch planted 10,000 trees.
Alderspring Ranch sits in Idaho's Pahsimeroi Valley. The ranch says Glenn and Caryl Elzinga and their seven daughters own and run it with a few hands, on 1,400 acres of their own and grazing permits on about 46,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land. Riders keep every animal on that landscape together as one group during the day and pen the herd near their cow camp each night, a system the ranch calls inherding. In the ranch's words, loss to wolves is zero since 2015, and the system keeps wolves off the cattle without shooting any of them.
White Oak Pastures is in Bluffton, Georgia, where Will Harris farms the same land his great grandfather settled in 1866. The farm covers almost 5,000 acres and raises five species of livestock. It describes Bluffton as a town of 100 people and says it now employs more than 160. Hides are dried into pet chews or tanned into leather, fat is rendered into tallow, and the parts nobody eats go into compost.
Sam and Carolynn Moffett sold their house in central Austin, left a 15 year career in digital advertising, and moved two small kids out to Shirttail Creek Farm near Brenham, Texas. Their cattle move to a fresh piece of pasture every day. The laying hens live in 13 large pasture coops, and every Thursday the crew moves all 13 of them. The farm says only lightning in the field calls that off.
Stemple Creek Ranch in Tomales, California has belonged to the Poncia family for four generations, and two daughters will make five. Loren Poncia's father fenced the cattle off the creeks and planted trees to keep the banks from washing away. Loren and his wife Lisa kept going. The Sand County Foundation, which gave the family its 2025 California Leopold Conservation Award, counts more than five miles of fence and 10,000 trees, and the ranch now draws beavers, badgers, bobcats, jack rabbits and foxes. According to the same citation, the family went from selling 10 head of beef a year to more than 1,500. "We're trying to dance with Mother Nature within our fencelines," Loren Poncia says.
