We're cultivating a community of ranchers and rural landowners to form a landscape-scale prairie conservation network, returning agricultural land to native habitat and bringing healthier, more sustainable grass-fed beef to consumers.

Of the 262,000 square miles that makeup Texas, 60% constitutes grassland or prairie ecosystems, including the most endangered ecosystem in North America – Blackland Prairie. The vast grasslands of Texas are a part of our heritage, our culture, and our economy. These landscapes are under increasing pressures for development that threaten their integrity as a healthy habitat for birds and other wildlife. 

A prominent conservation crisis of the 21st century is the widespread and ongoing decline of grassland birds - birds that have an affinity for grasslands and grass-shrub habitat. 

The decline is a result of a cumulative set of factors. Major causes include afforestation in the eastern United States, fragmentation and replacement of prairie vegetation with a modern agricultural landscape, and large-scale deterioration of western U.S. rangelands.

Agricultural ecosystems cover over 75% of Texas and provide important habitats for many wild plant and animal species. However, rising demand for food and other agricultural products has seen large-scale clearing of natural habitats to make room for intensive monocultures. By fostering the conversion of modern agricultural lands back to healthy, biodiverse, native habitat Audubon is not only sustaining threatened grassland bird species, but benefiting all other grassland wildlife as well as the landowners, who gain a connection to healthier lands and turn higher capital gains on the end product – sustainable, grass-fed beef. This network of grass-fed beef producers provides the opportunity to protect and restore native prairies and grasslands with agricultural practices that are financially lucrative, economically stable, and ecologically sound.