5% of every job goes back
to upstate conservation.

When we set up Bison Earthworks, the question came up early: does a land-clearing business have a responsibility to the land beyond the job site? We think yes. Concretely, that means a 5% commitment of company profits, every year, into ecological and wildlife work in our region.

What the 5% pays for

• Invasive species suppression on private and public land — Japanese barberry, multiflora rose, oriental bittersweet, glossy buckthorn, Japanese knotweed, autumn olive. These are the species rewriting upstate NY forests faster than anything else, and there isn't a public agency funded to take them out at scale.
• Habitat work for declining species — ruffed grouse, American woodcock, golden-winged warbler, New England cottontail, several shrubland songbirds. NYSDEC's Young Forest Initiative needs more young-forest acreage than the state can create on its own land alone.
• At-cost or pro-bono work on land trust properties — habitat management plans drafted by conservancy biologists rarely have an implementation budget. Sometimes a free crew-day is what gets the work from the plan to the ground.
• Equipment time donated to public conservation events — invasive removal workdays, youth and school conservation programs, regional habitat field days, contractor demonstrations for landowner outreach.

Why invasives, specifically

Japanese barberry has invaded an estimated 1.6 million acres of forest in the northeastern United States. It outcompetes native understory, forms dense thickets that block native regeneration, and has been linked in Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station research to tick density up to twelve times higher than in cleared forest. Multiflora rose, glossy buckthorn, and oriental bittersweet are all on roughly the same trajectory in our service area. None of them feed the wildlife our forests evolved with. All of them spread faster than any volunteer-only program can keep up with.

A forestry mulcher is one of the most efficient tools for taking out a barberry patch. The same machine that clears a fence line for a paying customer can clear a half-acre buckthorn block on a nature preserve. We bring it to both.

Partnerships we work with or are pursuing

Capital Region PRISM

The Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management (PRISM) program is a network of eight regional partnerships across New York, each focused on coordinating invasive species response within a defined service area. Capital Region PRISM is hosted by Cornell Cooperative Extension and covers an eleven-county area that overlaps almost exactly with our service footprint.

PRISM coordinates regional work plans, maintains the iMapInvasives database, organizes contractor partnerships, and runs landowner education. We track their priority species lists and offer mulching capacity on projects that fit our equipment and scale.

NYSDEC Region 4 and Region 5

DEC's Young Forest Initiative actively manages habitat on state-owned land — Wildlife Management Areas, State Forests, and conservation easements — to create the early-successional habitat that a long list of declining species need. Selective forestry mulching matches the habitat goals well: patch cuts, edge feathering, shrubland creation. We're available for that work and we keep open communication with DEC field staff in our region.

Local land trusts

Mohawk Hudson Land Conservancy, Saratoga PLAN, Rensselaer Land Trust, Berkshire Natural Resources Council, and The Nature Conservancy in New York all hold conservation easements and fee-title properties with management plans. Those plans typically include vegetation management components — invasive control, shrubland maintenance, edge management, boundary clearing. Land trusts almost always have plans without implementation budgets. We try to be one of the calls that gets made when a project needs a machine on it.

Audubon New York

IBA (Important Bird Area) stewardship and grassland / shrubland bird recovery projects. Several Audubon-prioritized properties in our service area have ongoing management needs.

Hunting clubs and QDMA chapters

Quality Deer Management Association chapters, local conservation clubs, and youth hunting organizations all run habitat workdays. Edge work, food plot prep, and trail systems are natural fits.

How this connects to paying customers

Every job invoiced contributes to the same fund. There's no extra fee, no upcharge, no opt-in checkbox at quote time. The 5% comes out of the company's profit, not the customer's payment. The number isn't conditional on the customer asking about it — it's part of how the business operates.

We'll publish an annual summary of where the giveback dollars went: which organizations, which projects, what acreage was touched. First public report is due at the close of our first full fiscal year.

If a customer has a specific cause in our region they'd like the contribution directed toward, that's worth a conversation. Some customers care about birds. Some care about deer habitat. Some care about getting barberry off the local rail trail. We can route accordingly within the conservation organizations we're working with.

Why this matters for the business too

Honest reason: we'd be doing this work anyway, on our own time, on weekends. Tying it to the revenue stream is the way to do it consistently at the scale where it matters.

Practical reason: keeping in regular contact with PRISM, DEC, and the land trusts means we learn what's working. The conservation community sees a lot of land. They know which invasive control techniques actually take, which habitat patterns recover, which mulching approaches leave the soil in the right shape for native plant return. We get smarter by being in those conversations.

Plain reason: people who live in this region care about this region. The work shows up better when the people doing it have a stake in the long-term picture, not just the next invoice.

5% is a commitment, not a marketing line. The math is straightforward and the work is public. If you want to talk through whether your job could include a conservation component — habitat-aware selective work, partnering with a local trust on a boundary project, anything in that direction — that's part of what the free walkthrough is for.