Bison and Cardano pt 2: BisonLand

The Bison (closeup), 2021. Patrick Salamon and Tyler Case. inkless ballpoint pen, seashells, razorblade on Living Canvas.

digital: Cardano Conks physical: Fungallery. Philadelphia, PA, USA

The network effect of taking fences down.

Fencing is expensive. Fences keep wildlife out. An economic incentive aligns with an ecological incentive.

Fences do some very useful things: they delineate property boundaries and keep mobile property (livestock) inside and threats to that property outside. No self-respecting rancher would take fence down without first assuring that the services the fence provided remain after the fence is gone. The replacement should serve the purposes of the fence but be cheaper, easier, more trustworthy, and perhaps offer more upside than traditional fencing.

Enter the mighty Bison. And we’re not talking about Bison way out in the reaches of Canada. We’re talking about bison that live closer to human populations, where there is local demand for nutritious protein and a preference for fences over roving packs of wolves. Let’s get into it.

First, A Primer on Silvopasture from the post “Ethiopian Highlands” might be helpful. The part to understand here is that the predator-prey dance is absolutely essential to the ecology of the Prairie. We want herds of bison acting the way they do when wolves roam the prairie. But we can’t reintroduce wolves because the folks who live around here aren’t hip to wolves walking through their backyards, at least not yet.

Here’s the basic idea: If you’re a Bison Rancher in, say, Wyoming, we want you to consider a possible way of getting around the problem of fences. Hopefully your fences are in need of repair/replacement near term and we can help you keep money in your pocket. If you raise cattle and would consider transitioning to bison, we’d like your ear too.

You are welcomed into a network of Ranchers in your area. But we’re just starting out and looking for pioneering ranchers to begin building this network. At first member ranches may be isolated. As more ranchers join, each fence that comes down between two neighbors makes the overall network stronger, and each rancher better off. It makes more room for wildlife to roam. True, but most critical is it gives Bison room to act like Bison, which means more head of bison / hectare which means more revenue for ranchers.

The dream of BisonLand is that economic incentives drive ranches to join together to create vast stretches of pasture regenerating the Prairie ecosystem at scale, while respecting property and giving ranchers the keys to govern their network. The prairie is big sky country. Big herd country. The bigger BisonLand gets, the more natural patterns return to the land. Millenia of bison eating, stomping, peeing, pooping, fleeing, charging and migrating in vast numbers gave us some of the deepest topsoil in the world. For the past century much of this soil has been lost: stressed by drought, industrialized farming, improper grazing. The original prairie is all but gone. But the land has the potential for rapid regeneration when we realize that ranchers, like bison, are stronger in numbers.

The downstream effect of taking fences down is greater drought-resilience, carbon sequestration, soil building, transpiration, biomass, natural diversity, livelihood, community, and wealth. Ranchers will enjoy a share of increased meat production, steady production, and perhaps even carbon credits (not a necessary incentive, but if carbon credits are a thing, there’s a LOT of additional carbon being sequestered in soil and perennials on regenerating pasture and profit to be enjoyed as a result.)

At this point, you’re probably saying “no fences? you’re a crazy hippy.” That may be true, but hear me out. First, this basic technology already exists. Vence is a company that is at the forefront of virtual-fencing, and they believe they can double a ranch’s profitability. We would like to put Vence technology into the hands of ranchers networked through the Cardano blockchain.

WARNING: I’m going to be talking about putting a computer chip in a bison. I don’t get off on putting chips in bison. If NFTing a bison is digitizing an aspect of a sacred being, inserting an Internet-of-Things device into their body takes this to another level. It’s not up to me to outline what a humane and reverent approach to this process is, or even if it’s possible to do so. But it’s something we should think about- both ethically and practically.

In making a home for Bison in Cardano, we have history, wisdom, and stories available to us that we shouldn’t ignore. We have an opportunity as a community to make room for people whose ancestors lived alongside the buffalo, migrated with the buffalo, revered them, intertwined their fates until we nearly lost both forever. If we succeed in gaining the trust of indigenous people, make them stakeholders in our ecosystem, we may find that the bison is a more powerful ally than we could have imagined.

Here’s how it might work (in a very rough form at this point):

When you join BisonLand, you share your property boundaries with the network, we update the big map on the blockchain, and we give you the opportunity to allow the BisonLand team to chip your bison. The chip identifies your bison, it collects data, communicates with a secure digital network, and potentially much more.

It’s essential that a project like this runs on a third-generation blockchain. First we need the level of assurance that a secure decentralized blockchain provides. Ranchers need the absolute assurance that the property they enter the network with is going to be fairly valued and protected. Beefchain may have something to say about this. The network also must interact with a variety of types of trusted oracles that are widely distributed….

From a governance standpoint, ranchers and other stakeholders need the tools to make important decisions that affect every stakeholder. This is especially important early on as the community develops a framework around making decisions that ultimately defines the culture of the community. The stakeholders in BisonLand are a DAO- a decentralized autonomous organization. DAOs generally need a token to operate. Tokens also come in handy when, for instance, accounting for value flow and distribution in an economic network.

Back to the Chips. Let’s give these hypothetial chips, for purposes of this thought experiment, a lot of power. It’s a GPS tracker, a biometric sensor, it is a brain-computer interface, it can communicate with devices nearby and upload data to the cloud. It has the ability to download new software. It has hardware built-in waiting in the wings for to-be-invented software to make use of.

The imagined team behind BisonLand has done the work of putting bison in bison-sized fMRI’s and observing how their brain lights up when they see a visual projection of a pack of wolves ( when I said “enth I meant it! This might not be necessary, but let’s throw it in for color).

The device sends an electrode up into the amygdala of the bison that is able to artificially induce just enough fear inside a bison that it behaves the way it would had it seen a predator on the horizon. This way, your bison will know when they are butting up against the edge of BisonLand. And, importantly, it also gets them to behave the way they would if there were Wolves around, which is crucial to increasing the total hanging weight of bison per hectare in BisonLand. Today, most ranchers do holistic management with fenced paddocks. When your herd has the virtual fence embedded inside their bodies, linked to GPS, there’s no need to move herds from one paddock to another: the chips can do that. I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but at Cardano we have the best tech, the best minds, and the best community and we’re going to bring all of it to bear on this complex engineering problem.

But as is the case when we engage with natural systems, and also when we engage with open digital networks, it is much more than an engineering problem. It’s an engineering problem nestled within a complex of questions scientific, ethical, and social. We must ask ourselves questions like what do we want the Program to acheive? And how does it change over time? The process of regeneration is successional, generational. It’s a dynamic system changing the landscape radically over time. It echoes ancient patterns and simultaneously pushes into new technological frontiers.

Eventually, the goal is to have herds exercising their own natural rhythms. But it’s been over a century since these rhythms played out across this landscape, and we need to build up to that intelligently. In fact, there are only a small number of Plains Bison in the US that have no history of domestication. With a herd of chipped bison, you can, to some degree, move the entire herd where you want them to go. Who decides? Well it should be a conversation between experts, ranchers, perhaps an artificial intelligence informed with biometric data, GIS data, on-the-ground oracles and all parties have a healthy respect for the ability of Nature itself to work things out in ways more complex than we can fathom. We may have the best tech, minds, and community at our disposal, but the Bison is challenging us to strive even harder to build better things. I think we’re up to the challenge.

As the economics of BisonLand incentivizes more contiguous Ranchers to join, we net more ecologically significant unbroken wildlife corridors. These are wild bison corridors, and they are commercial bison corridors, and corridors for countless other species, some with a price tag.

For every comfort that technology has gifted us, it’s taken away a key aspect of human self-reliance. When we get indoor plumbing, that comes with a severing of our understanding how to process our waste and our role in the nutrient cycling of our environment. Should public waste treatment systems break down, amongst other eventutalities, we would be at serious risk of outbreaks of dysentery, without immune systems that have any exposure to these pathogens.

Similarly, we must be careful when using technology to help us manage natural resources. When we artificially manipulate a bison’s behavior we want this to have as minimal effect on the capability of that animal to thrive in purely natural conditions. I believe that we can use technology to help restore natural systems. Think of it this way. If we can succeed in using technology to preserve the wild nature of the bison while restoring the wild prairies to something of their former grandeur, we are building in wild resilience. Meaning, once the system is fully operational, if we took chips out of the equation, allowed natural predators back into their native range, the ecosystem would tend towards something more resembling the pre-columbian era. Wolves and cougars would return to their former niches as chip-free bison are born, along with many species threatened by habitat destruction. Not that we want to take humans out of the equation, but it would be irresponsible not to consider a future state without a large population of humans and AI exerting their influence.

There are no doubt flaws in the author’s current thinking about this challenge and important considerations that haven’t come to mind. No ranchers have been pitched this idea yet. But I will try to imagine what some of their concerns might be:

Fair compensation: One rancher has been doing holistic management on their land for years. The pasture is superior to all of their neighbors. There are more bison, healthier bison, than any of my neighbors. These neighbors would LOVE the opportunity to get their bison onto their grass. Not everybody’s pasture is the same quality at the start. Not everybody’s herd of bison are the healthiest bison, or the most adapted to this kind of system where they are reverting back to more wild behavior.

So how does the network fairly assess the value of a new ranch joining the network? The goal would be to get to a point when we can rely on trusted oracles: bias-free electronic and virtual gatherers of real-world information that can transform that information into data and share it with the network. But we wouldn’t be acting from first principles if we left this job up to digital oracles, no questions asked. It may work best for ranchers if they can figure this piece out amongst themselves, and they might be more accurate than any oracle. It can be a conversation. The number can be negotiated and end with a handshake, a signature and a line in the ledger. The important thing is to incentivize more ranchers to join, not to insert high-tech whenever given the opportunity. But at the end of the day, the data is uploaded to the network, and the network can get smarter and inform those oracles that we’d like to rely on down the road when the network is expanding quickly and rapidly. In short, the Trust that must exist between two individuals entering into an agreement can inform a trustless system that runs via the network but doesn’t rely on any individual’s honesty.

These oracles might take GIS data on vegetation patterns, herd behavior, snapshots over time. IoT devices on the ground can analyze soil and feed that data up into the network that in turn communicates with the Cardano blockchain to give it the reliability and security needed for such a trustless system to funciton.

When you join BisonLand with pasture that can support twice the animal density as the average ranch (either verified by peers and/or oracles), and you have twice the number of animals to prove it, all of that factors into your equity. It might not be double, because there is less room for improvement, and in regeneration, improvement is the name of the game. Resources need to flow to where they are most needed. Maybe the valuation is double minus the Liabilities from physical fences, or something like that. At the end of the day, it has to be a figure that makes financial sense to the rancher. BisonLand is a decentralized collective, and as a member you have the power to make your case, choose to participate or note, and if you chose to join you’ll have a vote on the parameters as a member of the DAO.

Once the project is up and running and bison are chipped, if we imagine the chip as a biometric sensor, it can record data on the animals’ nutrition over time, and that’s correlated with putting on this much weight, and we can tell that they’re eating grasses and not bulking up on spent brewers grains (give those to pigs as a part of their balanced diet!). You may also be rewarded when such biometric sensors in animals not from your original herd tell the network that this many animals put on this much weight on Your property, and only this much on your neighbors.

A quick thought about the transition from cattle to bison. Realistically, I don’t think we don’t have the numbers of bison to replace cattle on ranches, nor is the market necessarily poised to make the switch overnight. But do we want cattle and bison coming into close contact while we make the transition? Probably not. We can limit the potential of disease spread but we cannot entirely rule it out. Brucellosis poses a serious threat to the cattle industry and while there may be other means to mitigate this risk, the issue of physical contact is one that many ranchers take very seriously. The question of cattle early in the project is an important one to get right. And if we’re asking ranchers to make room for bison and time to get their numbers up, that’s a period of potentially limited revenue. Like many regenerative projects, there is an initial period of resource building: perennials need years to grow before they net produce. But thereafter the output grows and grows while inputs from outside the system shrink. Like any perennial project, BisonLand needs some funding up front to make the transition economically feasible for ranchers on the near term. Perhaps this is where the community can step up. NFTing Bison, issuing security tokens for the project. We have many tools at our disposal. But we also have the option to approach this problem by taking the whole of BisonLand and sectoring off areas for cattle and other areas for bison. Cattle will continue to bring reliable revenue in while regenerating the soil like the bison. Eventually, cattle-land can shrink and make more room for bison. This type of transition isn’t feasible on the scale of a single ranch, but it is for the land under management by the network.

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Let’s address the issue of Ownersip. Ownership of Bison. Ownership of land and resources. Utlimately, the DAO of ranchers will decide what works for them individually and as stakeholders in the collective resources. But here’s one way it could work: When you join, you unleash your bison and free up your pasture with the whole of BisonLand. BUT, you still own your bison and you still own your pasture. It’s akin to delegating your ada for staking. When you delegate your stake to a stakepool, this benefits the network by providing more security, and you benefit passively without ever passing off ownership of your ada. The worst that can happen is a stakepool changes their reward parameters and you don’t earn interest. In BisonLand a lot more can certainly go wrong- we’re talking about real animals out on the prairie. All of your bison could wash away in a flood a hundred miles from your ranch. But as the network grows, risk spreads out and miminizes the risk to any one participant (via insurance, or moving to a shared-profit model rather than property-based model.) On the positive side, if you stake your ada you might earn 5% interest annualy. We believe that BisonLand has the ability to regenerate the resource base and grow the carryhing capacity of land measured in quality protein at a higher rate than 5%.

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What does BisonLand look like in 20 years?

Let’s dream for a minute: Bisonland is an average of 50 miles wide and runs from western Kansas up to Montana. Ecologically, the prairie is beginning to look like it did 200 years ago. There are over 2 million commercial bison and half a million wild bison. Populations of antelope, prairie chickens, golden eagles, black-footed ferrets, cranes, crayfish and catfish etc etc are all trending strongly upward. The network of ranchers has decided (voting with their value) that rather than using the Chips’ neural interface to coax their buffalo and their offspring back when it comes time for harvest, it makes more sense for the AI to direct bison for culling. The AI knows how much demand there is where and it knows which individuals are best to harvest at a given time (for hanging weight as well as the health of the herd and the prairie) and directs these herds to slaughterhouses and Hunting Grounds.

Hunting Grounds are something new to BisonLand that have evolved out of conversations between ranchers and tribal leaders. Wolves are not the only major predator to bison. For ten thousand years or more, the ancestors of these tribes have hunted bison, and so they are a part of the natural pattern that BisonLand relies on. Rather than update the neural-interace’s “predator” software with a “people with bow and arrows” plug-in, the ranchers and tribal leaders together decided that they would see what happened when Native People came (back) to the land to provide the service of harvesting the animals. While much of the slaughtering overall takes place in modern facilities, a growing number of customers who buy BisonLand products choose to get it directly from the tribes. This has provided tribes income that they can use to purchase back unceded territory, giving them private ownership of land (the Deed is mightier than the Treaty) with which they can teach future generations how to manage and hunt the way their ancestors did.

The job of being a rancher has gotten much more enjoyable and lucrative. No more fixing fences. No more moving animals from one paddock to another (or letting them freely graze which wasn’t doing anything for their pasture). Walking their ranch, they don’t see bison every day, but two to three times a year a megaherd comes through numbering in the hundreds of thousands. They never dreamed that such a site was possible, yet alone on their ranch. When bison aren’t there, they love seeing all the new wildlife, thought it’s hard to see it over the tall grass. It seems like it’s raining more, by the way. The cattle ranchers to the east certainly say so.

By now the children of the original ranchers have taken charge. They log into the BisonLand app where they can see money passively flowing into their wallet as their equity works for them. They have access to loans for purposes of improving pasture (e.g. planting perennials) and expanding their acreage.

You can clearly see BisonLand from Space. It’s an unstoppable force. It’s financially irresponsable for ranches to resist joining. The fence industry put up a huge fight, but the wise fencemakers saw the writing on the wall and got in early on the new cottage industries that sprung up around BisonLand. Eco-tourism takes off. The project has derived a lot of value from participating in the Cardano network but likewise the Cardano community has derived value from BisonLand. Ada is accepted for all manner of products ranging from meat shares to eco-tourism vacations to assets like tokenized soil carbon and prediction markets based on wildlife numbers. The project has networked important stakeholders from landowners to indigenous land stewards who can now act together to drive even greater change beyond the initial dream of BisonLand. The project helped drive the advancement of IoT and oracle technology while simultaneously growing a culture that can use this technology ethically and avoid fragile dependencies on technology.

The American Prairie is just one sacred place among many on this planet where we can hear the call for regeneration and answer the call.