Save Bears, Drink Cider

For those perusing their local grocery store in Wyoming and its neighboring states, a can of Farmstead Cider might stand out. On the side of the can, big black letters read, “Save Bears, Drink Cider.”

The cans, along with several bottled varieties, come from a garage in Jackson, Wyoming, where locals Orion Bellorado and Ian McGregor are making small-batch ciders using apples harvested from nearby backyards and neighborhoods.

In Jackson, an affluent ski town on the edge of a highly trafficked national park, humans and wildlife coexist in the same space. The potential for conflict increases when these mountain neighbors get too close. Animals that become habituated to food sources like trash, bird seed, dog food or fruit-bearing trees run the risk of being either relocated or euthanized.

Farmstead has been selling cider since 2020, aiming to remove from the landscape animal attractants like crabapples that can entice bears, moose, deer and elk into neighborhoods throughout Teton County—situations that often end poorly for the animals, particularly large omnivores like black and grizzly bears.

“Every time that wildlife comes in, there's no world where the animals win,” Bellorado said. “Even if they win one time, they're not going to win more than one time.”

Farmstead harvests crabapples, plus some sweet apples, from 200 properties across Teton County each fall, removing at peak ripeness fruit that would otherwise fall to the ground and rot, attracting wildlife. Bellorado estimates that they cull apples from about 350 trees, and each year receive permission to harvest from a few more. It turns out, crabapples also lend themselves to dry, flavorful hard cider.

Once they harvest the fruit, Bellorado and McGregor allow it to ferment naturally, waiting for the apples to break down until they are blendable and ready to drink. They don’t add yeast like commercial cideries often do, but instead prefer a wild fermentation method that makes each batch unique. Using unwanted crabapples not only helps protect wildlife, but also gives Farmstead’s products a diverse, wild-foraged flavor, the cider makers say.

On the heels of their fourth anniversary as a startup cidery, Farmstead’s direct impact on reducing human-wildlife conflict is hard to measure, but the microbusiness is working to grow community awareness about animal attractants like crabapples, providing a free service—and a tasty beverage—to those living in bear country.

Farmstead came about through a mix of “random chance and relative luck,” according to Bellorado. He and McGregor grew up together in Jackson, later collaborating on two other food-related businesses, and by 2015 had both moved back to their hometown. That same year, Bellorado and his wife Heidi received a cider press as a wedding gift.

“Do you know the verb ‘to scrump’?” Bellorado asked, laughing over the phone as we caught up in mid-May. “To scrump is to steal your neighbor's fruit without permission.”

Excited to experiment with the new press, Bellorado and McGregor dutifully began looking for apples in the neighborhood to satisfy their New England wives’ nostalgia for freshly pressed cider. It was then that Bellorado’s roommate, a technician at the Teton Conservation District, caught wind of their efforts and it sparked an idea.

Drought had led to a sparse berry crop that year and wildlife were wandering into Jackson looking for food. At the same time, decorative crabapple trees hooked up to supplemental irrigation had produced a bumper crop of fruit, increasing the potential for human-wildlife conflict. Morgan Graham, who had recently been hired as a GIS and wildlife habitat specialist at TCD, remembers interviewing Mike Boyce, Jackson regional large carnivore biologist for Wyoming Game and Fish, about what projects needed extra support.

“Mike's very candid response was if we could get rid of all the crabapple trees in Teton County, it would make his life a lot easier,” Graham said.

Once word spread to TCD staff about Bellorado and McGregor’s urban harvesting, an opportunity presented itself. “Within the office, there was almost a joke that, ‘Oh, we're trying to figure out what to do with these apples to reduce the potential for conflict, why don't we pay Orion and Ian to go pick them up and make cider out of them?’” Graham added.

And that’s exactly what happened. From 2017-2019, TCD contracted Farmstead Cider to reach out to landowners throughout Teton County and request permission to harvest their crabapples, specifically targeting priority bear conflict areas identified by Wyoming Game and Fish. By their second year in 2018, Farmstead had nearly tripled the number of harvested trees, increasing from 65 to 172.

Bellorado and McGregor also mapped out where apple and crabapple trees were located throughout the county—a handy metric that other agencies had yet to determine.

After three years of funding support, the business officially launched on its own in 2020 and now distributes cider to restaurants, grocers and liquor stores throughout Wyoming and in the nearby states of Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Utah. Farmstead also operates an online “Harvest Helper” platform where local landowners in Teton County can either opt-in to having their fruit harvested or learn how to do it themselves. Those who harvest their own are encouraged to trade the fruit to Farmstead for, what else, cider.

When it comes to teasing out whether Farmstead’s mission to curb human-wildlife conflict is actually making a difference, finding a clear answer can be tricky.

Wyoming Game and Fish tracks instances of human-bear conflict in Teton County, but there is no data that explicitly links Farmstead’s work to lowering these incidents. Because a range of factors influence how and where humans encounter wildlife, Graham says calculating a Farmstead-specific statistic isn’t practical.

“It’s impossible to diagnose it as one individual thing,” he explained. “We can do our best to report on the things we know about, but it's not a controlled environment … it's not in a laboratory. And so there's always going to be difficulty in saying, ‘We did this and we had less conflicts as a direct result.’”

Still, Graham says Farmstead is helping to increase awareness and every bit of that education helps, even if there isn’t an easy way to quantify its impact.

“[Farmstead] has undoubtedly raised awareness across government agencies, and I would say undoubtedly among citizens of Teton County, that a plant food like crabapples is something that they should be aware of,” Graham said.

Since Farmstead started reaching out to landowners, countywide regulations have gone into effect, including an amendment that prohibits new ornamental fruit-bearing trees like crabapples from being planted, and requires existing fruit trees to be fully harvested each year or for wildlife fencing to be installed.

A 2023 report compiled by the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance shows a 60 percent reduction in human-bear conflict in 2022, from 103 incidents in 2021 down to 41. The year 2022 was also a huge one for crabapples; Bellorado says that Farmstead filled every truck and trailer they had five times in order to get through the harvest. But the downturn in conflict could have also been due to what Bellorado calls the “399 effect”: locals who saw or heard that Jackson’s celebrity grizzly, Bear 399, and her cubs were in town may have taken extra precautions.

“Once it was known [Grizzly 399] was running around, I talked to people who were buying electric fences and stuff to put around the compost heaps. They were just being proactive in a way that may not have happened historically,” Bellorado said, “as much as I'd like to say the drop [in conflict] is from us.”

Still, those proactive measures seem to include working with Farmstead: in 2022, the number of landowners signing up to have their fruit harvested increased by 60-70 when it typically went up by 15-20 in previous years.

In thinking about the future of Farmstead, Bellorado and McGregor’s approach is the same as it was when they began: two friends passionate about their hometown and comfortable with some organized chaos as they work to make a product of value for their community.

In fact, during the interview for this story, Bellorado was busy running electrical wires and laying out lights for Farmstead’s new garage space. He says the move doesn’t necessarily indicate that they’re scaling up, though the larger space will allow Farmstead to double its production if desired. Mainly, he says it will give him and McGregor room to slow down and evaluate how and what they distribute.

“Our goal is to have a sustainable life with our families and have a business that has an ethos that we can sleep at night and be content with,” Bellorado said. “How do we still deliver on our mission, which is to mitigate animal conflict in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, while maximizing the utility to our bodies and time to our families? It’s just about finding the right mix there.”

Just like with cider.