Christmas is a time for dreams, and for dreamers. It’s a time of wonder.

I wonder …

There’s a proposal making the rounds to create a new National Monument in western North Dakota, encompassing 11 areas in the North Dakota Bad Lands, land owned by the federal government but leased to ranchers for grazing their cattle.

What if those ranchers out there on the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, in the spots about to become the Maah Daah Hey National Monument, got together and created a brand of beef unique to this part of America?

What if they called it Maah Daah Hey Beef, or Badlands Beef, or Little Missouri Beef, or even Medora Beef? Or National Monument Beef?

What if the state of North Dakota got behind them and created a meat packing and distribution facility in western North Dakota, reminiscent of another state-owned facility serving our state’s farmers, the North Dakota State Mill and Elevator, which began operations just about exactly 100 years ago?

Y’know there might be as many as 100 ranchers running some cattle on the 140,000 acres in those 11 Bad Lands sites. There might be a couple of thousand cows out there, getting fattened up on grass so lush and nutritional that in the 19th century, cowboys drove whole herds of cattle from Texas to feast on it, in places like the Long X Divide, one of the proposed monument sites.

What if, instead of hauling those cows down to the sales barns at Schnell’s or Kist’s when it’s time to market them, they took them to Belfield, or Watford City, or Killdeer — heck, there might even be an abandoned site in Medora — and instead of selling them at the sale barn for a buck and a quarter a pound, they slaughtered them, cut ‘em up and sold lean ground beef for six bucks, or sirloin roasts for ten bucks a pound?

I have to admit this idea didn’t originate with me. Badlands Conservation Alliance Executive Director Shannon Straight hinted at it in a letter to the editor in the state’s newspapers this past week, and I talked to some Bad Lands ranchers who said the idea of creating a brand for beef from a National Monument was exactly the next step to take, once President Biden signs the order creating the monument.

I think the North Dakota State Mill is the prime example of how the state can help bring “added value” to North Dakota agriculture products. Just a couple of weeks ago, our state’s agriculture commissioner, Doug Goehring, the state’s No. 1 cheerleader for Value Added Agriculture, announced that the  North Dakota Agriculture Diversification and Development Committee had awarded more than half a million dollars from the Agriculture Diversification and Development (ADD) Fund to four meat shops around the state, in such unsuspecting places as Upham, Mylo, St. Anthony and New Rockford, to add or expand meat processing facilities. Precedent.

There’s a legislative session coming up in a few weeks. What if the Legislature hauled out the enabling act for the North Dakota State Mill, rewrote it to enable a State Packing Plant and used some of Doug Goehring’s Value Added money to build it?

What if?

National Monument Beef?

Why not?