At Red Canyon, Ranching and Conservation Are Intertwined : Wyoming: Nature Conservancy bought the 5,000-acre spread in 1993. Thus far, the theory works.

Bob Budd drives through a gate toward a haystack twice his height, steps out of his muddied, white GM pickup truck and starts hauling bales onto the back of the vehicle.

Budd ignores the chill, dusting off a few snowflakes, then piles the bales back on their original spot. He heads back to the pickup truck--its door decorated with the green oak leaf symbol of the Nature Conservancy--drives out the gate and returns minutes later to do the same daily chore again. And again. And again.

About an hour later, a film crew hired by General Motors is satisfied it has what it needs for a commercial lauding GM’s association with the Nature Conservancy. Budd may be a part-time actor on this day, but he’s a full-time rancher every day, responsible for managing the Conservancy’s 5,000 acres and 29,000 acres of federal and state leases.

The historic Red Canyon Ranch that he runs represents the conservancy’s attempt to show that ranching and conservation can peacefully coexist. Budd, 39, a former executive director of the Wyoming Stockgrowers Assn., says he enjoys the challenge.

“I feel very strongly I’m doing just as much good here for the WSA as I was there,” Budd said. “Some people think it was a huge leap, some kind of betrayal. Most don’t. Others [on the environmental side] feel I’m an interloper.”

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The Nature Conservancy bought the ranch in December, 1993, for $2.4 million, along with a $1-million donation from the owners, who wish to remain anonymous.

Part of the reason for the purchase was the ranch’s rich wildlife habitat and the presence of rare plants on the red sandstone hills. Barnaby’s clover, for instance, has been found nowhere else on Earth but in this four-mile-wide valley that runs for six miles through the rugged Wind River Mountains.

Although the conservancy and other groups often acquire ranchland to keep it open and out of the hands of developers, the land usually ends up in government hands or as a preserve.

The conservancy decided to take a different approach in the case of the sprawling Red Canyon Ranch--to run it as a working ranch and learning environment, complete with its own cattle, according to Kim Parfitt of the conservancy’s Lander, Wyo., office.

“It’s easy to talk about compatibility,” she said. “We have just jumped off the cliff with a bungee cord. We are ready to take the plunge. And we may fail. One of the interesting things is, not everybody believes in what we’re doing on either side. There are people who don’t think we should be running cows.”

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The ranch is valued today at $6.5 million if new buildings, 200 cattle purchased by the conservancy and other factors are taken into account. The conservancy expects the ranch to start paying dividends in three years.

“Our purpose is not to tell ranchers how to ranch. They know how to ranch. Our purpose is to try things,” Budd said. “The best thing we can have is ranchers making money. Then they have no reason to sell out.”

Budd, who ran 800 head of cattle on the ranch last summer for a local rancher, says his main management strategy is to graze cattle in various areas for no more than 30 days in one place. Traditional practices involve grazing cattle on larger pieces of land for longer periods. The hope is that the cattle have less impact on any one piece of land and gain better forage.

The practice has already paid off in the ragged Cherry Creek wetlands area, where forage and habitat grazed down over the years returned after grazing in the area was sharply reduced last season.

Besides showing that ranches can be compatible with conservation, Budd says the ranch serves as a non-confrontational learning area where ranchers and environmentalists can break bread. The biggest surprise, he says, is that those who visit the ranch are more interested in learning about the other side.

“Ranchers who came here would scuff their boots on the ground and say ‘So, where’s this clover?’ ” he said. “The environmentalists who would come around with their shorts, Birkenstocks and earrings would come and say, ‘Hey, man, where’s the cows?’ ”

More than 400 people visited the ranch last summer. Educational programs range from high school field trips to an internship program with the University of Wyoming.

Despite all the distractions--the film crew left one day before a high school group struggled to put up fence posts as part of a stewardship program--Budd says the main emphasis is still as a working ranch.

“A lot of conservancy properties are preserves. This is not a preserve. It is a ranch, and the ranch work takes precedence,” he said.

Visitors such as the GM crew witness “a pretty honest, down-and-dirty, hand- up- the- rear- end- of- a- cow look at it.”

That was exactly the case when the crew gathered around and watched Budd and assistant manager Todd Graham help free a calf that was birthing sideways and backward, a position that normally would have killed the newborn.

“For me personally, yes, it was an experience,” said Dodonna Bicknell, producer for Epoch Films in New York. “I’ve never seen a calf born before. That was cool. Then it was intense. . . . can’t imagine doing that every day.”

Budd, a fifth-generation Wyoming rancher, couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Not only does he put his ecological degrees and ranching background to work, but he and his wife have the chance to raise their three children in a high-alpine home that is host to everything from elk to Barnaby’s clover. “It’s a pretty neat piece of the world,” he says.