For years, Patagonia has been sourcing the humanely harvested meat for our Patagonia Provisions® Buffalo Jerky from Wild Idea Buffalo Company in South Dakota. Their mission is to regenerate the prairie ecosystem by reintroducing and increasing the free-ranging herd size of its largest native herbivore, the American bison.
Wild Idea’s general manager Jilian Jones sums up the reciprocal purpose of their work:
“We have to have healthy land, healthy soils, and then that feeds the buffalo, which then, in turn, feeds us.”
But it never sat right with us that the hides were ending up in the compost pit, so we came up with the wild idea of making a boot out of material that would otherwise be wasted.
A Wild Idea shares a day in the life on the ranch and the ethos that informs every aspect of their work, how our Wild Idea Work Boots are crafted in Portugal by fifth-generation cobblers, and how everyone involved in the process is motivated to leave things a little better than they found them.