- [Stan] Coming up on Impact.

What are tourist towns to do when the visitors they need overwhelm their infrastructure?

- [Troy] Tourists are what make us our money, but they're also the ones that cause the most influx on our systems.

- [Stan] We'll unpack this unpleasant dilemma.

And consolidation in the meat industry makes it tough for local processors to compete.

- We need to get back to where we're growing our food locally, processing it locally, to be eaten by our neighbors.

- [Stan] We talk to ranchers rising to the challenge.

That's next on Impact.

- [Promoter] Production of Impact is made possible with support from the Otto Bremmer Trust.

Investing in people, places and opportunities in our region.

Online at ottobremmer.org.

The Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(dramatic music) - Welcome to Impact from Montana PBS Reports.

our series featuring in-depth reporting on issues important to Montanans.

I'm Stan Parker.

Our first story takes us to the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park where the millions of yearly park visitors pass through gateway communities on their way to the bison and geysers.

But this summer influx can push their wastewater systems to the brink.

Montana PBS's Victoria Eavis went to two gateway towns where the impact on the infrastructure is building.

(traffic bustling) - [Victoria] Tourism fuels Montana's gateway towns and their residents.

Deb Purvis, co-owner of the Beartooth Cafe in Cook City relies on visitors to Yellowstone to keep her business afloat.

- [Deb] Hi, how did it go?

- [Victoria] But these very tourists are causing a tough predicament for Deb, her community and the surrounding communities.

- We have more than a quarter of a million people going through the Northeast Gate, you know, three miles down the road every summer.

And then that doesn't include the number of people who recreate around here.

So, we have considerable usage and a very small population to help pay for it.

All right, everybody, shall we gather?

- [Victoria] Not only is Deb a business owner in Cook, she's also the Chair of the Sewer Board and she's trying to get an upgrade for one of Montana's smallest gateway towns.

Deb and her colleagues are trying to piecemeal together what is likely to amount to roughly $8 million for a community septic system and find somewhere to put it.

- We do not have a community wastewater system right now.

Everybody is on individual septic systems, and they are failing, they're aging.

There's no more space for people to create new drain fields.

So, it's not functioning anymore.

- [Victoria] While an overworked wastewater problem is not a brand new issue, the situation has gotten much more dire in recent years.

- I think people think their systems work if the toilet flushes, and if they don't have raw sewage running across their lot.

- [Victoria] Unfortunately, there can be raw sewage in the street in Cook City.

- There have been reports at various times of septic systems failing and either gray water, the effluent from a septic tank, or in some cases raw sewage floating down the street from a failing septic system.

There have been also times where there are vents in a drain field, a pipe that comes up out of the ground and occasionally those will spout sort of like a geyser spraying gray water on the ground and it smells.

- [Victoria] The businesses in Cook City often feel the brunt of the failing wastewater infrastructure.

There's only one public restroom in town so when people pass through, they'll often use the bathroom of the restaurant they're eating in.

This trend means that the restaurant owners run up bills amounting to thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, just to keep their bathrooms up and running.

- We pump it several times a season.

Just do everything that we can to keep it running, because you know, as you can imagine in a restaurant when the bathrooms go down on a busy day, you just can't be open.

- [Victoria] Has that happened before?

- Yes, it has.

- [Victoria] What was that like?

- A loss of income, you know, five to 6,000 for that day, plus the expense of having it repaired, which would be $10,000.

- [Victoria] If Cook City had a community septic system, the businesses would no longer have to pay for or do their own maintenance.

For Troy Wilson, former member of the Sewer Board and owner of the Cook City General Store, running a business without toilets in Cook City feels like a relief.

- Do you want a bag?

- Yeah, is it okay?

Yes.

We got lots.

- $3 extra.

(shoppers laughing) As far as business perspective, sort of lucky that I don't have public facilities in this building.

That was part of the deal when we built the Visitor Center.

The reason we did it wasn't because of a museum or any of that.

It was so that we had public restrooms in town.

And so, it was built with that knowledge and now you have, in the summer months, you have four to five buses a day stop.

- [Victoria] There are numerous tall hurdles that have to be cleared to build an adequate wastewater treatment plant, one of which is funding.

In 2019, the Montana legislature passed an optional 1% increase to the resort tax.

A levy that these small, tourism-driven communities are eligible for.

The revenue from this increase is specifically aimed at remedying infrastructure issues and both West and Cook adopted that additional 1%.

- Yeah, so Montana does have a resort tax that our smaller communities have access to, and so, they're able to tax the visitors coming through and that some of that money can be used to pay for big infrastructure projects.

I'm not sure that that's enough.

So, I think at the state level we need to be looking for other ways to fund these infrastructure projects and provide the technical support so our small communities have access to that money.

We do have lodging tax in the state and I think there's an opportunity to allocate some of that revenue for our gateway communities and for these communities that are feeling the pressures of all the visitors coming through.

- This leaves Cook City pretty dependent on grant funding to make ends meet, but when a town is unincorporated like Cook is, it can often struggle to find the staff power to seek out and apply for these grants, because those grant writing jobs simply do not exist.

And sometimes unincorporated towns aren't eligible for certain pots of money.

The other major roadblock is location.

Cook City is in a steep valley surrounded by federally-owned land.

Meaning that the land they do have access to is often too steep to put a plant on.

Deb and her colleagues also have to take into account things like soil quality and proximity to Soda Butte Creek, which runs right on the edge of town into the park and eventually, flows into the Lamar River.

- Tourists are what make us our money, but they're also the ones that cause the most influx on our systems.

- [Victoria] For now, Cook City is still in pursuit of enough grant money and a feasible location for their community plant, but Cook City is not alone in this problem.

Even gateway towns that already have much larger, centralized plants are experiencing the issue as well.

(engine purring) West Yellowstone's year-round population is quite a bit larger than Cook City's, but the Southwestern Montana town is also home to the most popular entrance to the park.

Roughly 4 million people will come through the town of West Yellowstone in the summer months.

- You know, right now we are hydraulically limited.

We, you know, we really are at max flow.

The plant is taking as much as the plant can possibly take.

It really can't take anymore.

- [Victoria] The wastewater treatment plant in West Yellowstone is rated for 450,000 gallons per day, but in the summer it will consistently see around 730,000 gallons in a single day.

Nearly every year since 2016, there has been a new sewer hookup moratorium in West Yellowstone, which in practice essentially means that no new buildings can be built.

- It all stems around this new wastewater treatment plant.

So, we can't develop, we can't do this, we can't do that, until we get that plant up and running.

- [Victoria] And as it goes in Montana, when there are housing shortages there comes staffing shortages.

- When it comes to wintertime, it's a whole nother ball game.

You can't survive in a trailer very well.

It's very hard.

So, you know, our staff, you know, may just this fall just say a few of 'em say, "Hey, we're outta here."

And then we gotta try to scramble for rehire.

- [Victoria] The state puts limits on the amount of pollutants like nitrogen that can be present in the water once it's been fully treated.

West has exceeded those levels multiple times, because there's too much waste coming into the system, but not enough to start contaminating the groundwater Brown said.

- If you kept going and you allowed growth to still come into West Yellowstone and still build until we can get a handle on the new treatment plant, you definitely would see an increase in your total nitrogen per day.

- [Victoria] Despite the fact that wastewater issues have seeped into other parts of West Yellowstone, a tired plant has actually been an issue for decades.

- At the end of the day, we gotta pay for this project going in.

And if we don't have the funds, we can't pay for it.

- [Victoria] Over the last couple years, the town has pieced together enough money to meet the $37 million price tag that an adequate plant comes with.

Most of the funding is coming from two major pots.

Pandemic error relief funds and state revolving fund loans, which is a low-interest loan program for water and wastewater projects.

If everything goes according to plan, they should break ground on the new plant in the spring of 2024, and the construction is projected to take about two years.

In the best case scenario, Brown, his team, and the town only have to hang on for about two and a half more years.

On the northeastern side of the National Park, Deb and her Sewer Board colleagues, who are working on a volunteer basis, are continuing to seek out grant funding.

- The pandemic definitely accelerated the trends that were already happening.

We saw a really big spike in 2021 with visitation and I expect that those really high visitation numbers are not gonna go away.

So, I think these pressures that our gateway communities are experiencing are going to persist.

- The simple fact is there's no place like West Yellowstone, Montana.

It's pristine, it's beautiful, it's breathtaking, and we'll make sure we manage it, you know, for what we have to do.

We'll make sure that we keep going down that road and making sure we produce water quality at its finest and take care of the wastewater.

So again, I encourage everybody to come and visit West Yellowstone, Montana.

- [Victoria] And for seasons to come, small gateway towns like these are going to have to keep addressing the issues that having a tourist economy brings.

For impact, I'm Victoria Eavis.

- Some of the communities that surround Glacier, Montana's other iconic national park, also experience similar infrastructure issues.

For our next story, we turn to the meat industry.

Only a fraction of cattle raised in Montana are processed and consumed here.

Montana PBS's AJ Williams talks with ranchers who are working to change that.

(birds chirping) - [AJ] Rancher Bart Morris and his crew ready their horses for a day of cow herding in the nearby Sapphire Range.

- The reason you get into what we're doing is for the ranching aspect of it.

I mean we love the land and we love the animals and that's why you do this.

- [AJ] Today, they're hauling some cattle back to the main herd and picking out 10 to send for processing.

- We kinda do things a lot different here with our operation.

The animals are raised here, they go travel 45 miles, and they come back here, and they're consumed here.

Welcome home!

- [AJ] Oxbow Cattle Company operates differently than most small ranches do.

They raise, process, and distribute their beef locally in Montana.

They've had success selling direct to consumers, but it's proved to be a massive job for a small operation.

- We have a ranching business, and we have a beef business, and they're both full-time jobs.

And so, we get strung pretty thin on that deal.

- [AJ] Like many ranches, they want to achieve a business model that balances economic opportunities with a sustainable workload.

- Yeah, right on their back.

I wanna see how our brisket is.

I'd come this way and push 'em out that way so we don't push 'em into these guys.

- [AJ] And they want more processing and distribution options for long-term stability, which has them considering another unconventional path.

The fragility of national meat processing plants has led to more ranchers seeking out local processors, but there are limited options, which makes for limited capacity.

Less than 5% of cattle raised in Montana are processed in the state.

Oxbow has a local option that they haul to every other week called Superior Meats.

- Unless you're built in like we are with Superior, you're like months out to get a slot and that's all post-Covid stuff.

If we were to lose Superior tomorrow, what that would do is that'd put us in a major bind, 'cause we haul every other week.

And so, we depend on that consistency.

(nostalgic music) - [Narrator] The story behind this markup wholesomeness begins with the millions of animals moving from America's farms and ranches through federally-inspected slaughtering plants each year.

- [AJ] This 1964 film clip, illustrates the way product has been moving in the cattle beef industry for some time.

Now, 60 years later, the market's cross country streamline has shut down much of the local processing infrastructure that used to exist in Montana.

- And it really is a result of a 50 years of a cheap food policy.

What happened is that we have consolidated and concentrated much of our food processing and production into the hands of a few.

- [Narrator] On the average, there are more than 1,000 miles between the places where livestock is raised and where people eat it as meat.

- [AJ] Over 80% of the world's beef is controlled by four companies.

- [Narrator] This has led to the construction of great livestock markets located in Mid America, mostly in cities such as Chicago, Illinois, Cincinnati, Ohio, Kansas City, Missouri, South St. Paul, Minnesota, Waterloo, Iowa, and others.

- And what we found out is that that's not very resilient.

And we need to get back to where we're growing our food locally, processing it locally, to be eaten by our neighbors.

(cows mooing) - [AJ] Though the companies still keep prices low for consumers, Schweitzer says there are consequences for mass producing food.

- Most of the cattle in Montana that are born here are shipped outta state to a feedlot somewhere 1,000 miles away where they're finished and then they're shipped to a processing plant that's also 1,000 miles away from us and processed, packaged, and then delivered back to our grocery stores.

It really is because of the corporate concentration of our food system.

And here in Montana, we eat about 100,000 head a year, but we're only processing about 30,000 for sale.

That means we can't even feed ourselves.

We need to change that.

- So, these are just some beef that we had processed that will go into our retail exempt program.

- [AJ] Montana beef rancher Cole Mannix has launched a collaborative solution along with other ranchers to make staying local easier, called the Old Salt Co-op.

- It's what we've been operating in since we started about a year ago.

- [AJ] Based out of Helena, Old Salt is building a vertically integrated meat company in which many local producers process and distribute their beef together.

Mannix says that having another processing facility helps with Montana's limited capacity, but the bottleneck itself is just a symptom of the much larger problem of market access.

- The processing infrastructure is lacking in our state, but part of the reason it is lacking is because of the access to market through both distributors and retailers of meat.

And so, the principle behind Old Salt was could we work together on a small kind of regional level to put multiple ranches and farms under a brand and make a dent in this the fact that we just market so little of the product that's raised here locally.

For the ranches what it can do is diversify their market options so that they're not as beholden on the very few kind of commodity options that they have to sell into.

And our goal is to sell primarily to Montanans who have a chance of knowing the landscapes, because they do all kinds of things in the state.

They travel across it, they recreate in it.

And so, our goal is to work on this.

Less than 2% of the meat eaten in Montana is from here.

- [AJ] As the company is still in its infancy, its founding ranches covered much of the overhead to build Old Salt's processing plant.

But building infrastructure doesn't come cheap.

And Mannix says that buy-in from more rancher participants and Montana consumers will be essential for its long-term success.

- You can't build a processing facility and pay your note back on that facility unless you can be confident that you can sell its products.

And a lot of people find that it's not just the ability to you know, process and package, but then how do you sell enough volume to keep that facility busy.

- [AJ] Mannix points out that it's a tough market to remain in given that commodity beef is still the main economic model of the industry and that most Montana ranchers are able to make a living from.

- The mainstream system we have is quite efficient.

So, there's a lot of cattle are gonna continue to move that way, but having other options is always good.

- [AJ] Grande says that both the cattle and beef markets are experiencing record inflation.

Meaning it still comes down to the consumers and how they're willing to spend their dollar.

- The money in our industry comes from the consumer.

So, to have a time, like right now when every segment of our industry, the cow calf guy, the feeder, the packer, the retailer are all making money simultaneously.

How is that possible?

Well, it's possible, because the consumer is paying a lot of money for beef right now.

So yeah, that does create a hardship on the consumer.

- [AJ] Grande points out that beef processed in state can also participate in export markets, which could benefit prices on the cuts Montanans buy the most.

- Part of the reason why our export markets are so successful is different cultures like different products.

We don't have to charge a consumer as Billings Montana as much for hamburger, if we can make more money off the carcass by selling our hides to China or Korea.

Those all help us, which helps the consumer.

- [AJ] All Montana ranchers are looking at options in how to make the most of their business model, while working with tenuous systems.

(cow mooing) According to Morris, being responsible for raising, processing and distributing food in a pressured market, has been a heavy load.

As they think about the longevity of their work and how to pass it on, joining a group effort that's values aligned like Old Salt is something to seriously consider.

- Middle too.

Maybe all three of us will put this up.

To pass this beast of the beef business on, that's a whole different deal and that's where Old Salt could possibly fit in with us.

- [AJ] Morris says that there's a lot to consider as they decide what happens next, but they believe that having more local options could help others economically access beef that's grown in their own home state.

- You can scale at the size of Old Salt, they can hopefully, bring those prices down and the processing isn't so extreme, which can then put it in more people's fridges and freezers throughout Montana and make it more affordable and more competitive.

We never wanna compete with Walmart or that, 'cause we're a whole different deal.

That's not our business.

- [AJ] As a part of their market, Old Salt is one of its own direct buyers and supplies their beef to their Old Salt Outpost restaurant located in downtown Helena.

- [Mannix] How's it going?

- [Customer] Good, how are you?

- Very good, what can I get you?

- Can I do a double combo?

- Yep, is this for here or to go?

- [Customer] For here.

- [AJ] Morris says that time will tell, but he could see Oxbow joining in to feed Old Salt's hungry customers Montana raised and finished beef.

- [Morris] I think that is the future, because what that does is that allows people to ranch, get a value for their animals that is fair, and they aren't leaving.

They're coming right back to the communities that they're raised in.

Whether I join them or not, I'm cheering them on 110%, 'cause I think that's the future.

- [AJ] For impact, I am AJ Williams.

- Old Salt Co-op's next step is opening up a butcher shop in downtown Helena in early 2024.

That's all we have for this episode of Impact.

Next time, we'll explore how a sharp increase in home values has sparked tough new conversations about property taxes.

And could Amtrak return to Montana's major cities?

We'll talk to those trying to make it happen.

From all of us here at Montana PBS, thanks for watching.

(suspenseful music) (suspenseful music continues) (suspenseful music continues) - [Promoter] Production of Impact is made possible with support from the Otto Bremmer Trust.

Investing in people, places and opportunities in our region.

Online at ottobremmer.org.

The Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(bright music)