In 2018, a Texas-born cowboy lost the Oklahoma ranch he'd run for years when it was sold off in a family inheritance split.
He was 67. He'd been raising cattle since he bought his first calf at 14.
Two years later, at 69, he and his Japanese wife moved to Kuromatsunai, a town of about 2,300 people in southern Hokkaido, and bought land nobody had farmed in 15 years.
He turned his cows loose on it.
No barn, no grain, no chemicals. Angus cattle, later joined by Japanese Brown cows brought over from Okushiri Island, grazing year-round on whatever grew back — grass, bamboo, mugwort — moved to a new patch almost every day.
He named it Gladney Farm. It opened in November 2020.
Japan raises its famous wagyu in barns on mixed feed. Local cattlemen didn't know what to make of him.
So he sold the beef straight from the ranch and let people come look at the cows.
Then the researchers came. Surveys of the stream running through the ranch found masu salmon spawning beds had increased since the cows arrived — no sign the herd was fouling the water. Hokkaido University students awarded the ranch an agricultural award in 2022, and the prefecture developed a zero-carbon roadmap around it in 2023.
Today it's about 200 acres and 58 head, run by two people who say the daily work takes about two hours.
The first steers went to market in 2024, at 30 months, and every cut sold locally — some of it now on menus in town.
In his fourth year, a foreign company announced plans to mine gold in a nearby mountain. He's fighting it over the water. A town meeting on the plan turned rowdy.
A documentary about him aired on Yahoo News Japan this weekend, raising the question the town is now asking: gold or the cowboy's way?