At Home on the Local Range:
Buffalo Roam Their Way into Oklahoma’s Local Food Scene

— Wylie Harris

Dennis Garrett and buffalo, near Eufaula

A hundred years ago, the once-great herds of buffalo were nearly extinct, and the United States farm population numbered some thirty million. Today, bison are back from the brink, and innovative Oklahoma family farmers are using them both to save themselves and rebuild the state’s local food systems.

James and Sandy Stepp of Hinton started their Wichita Bison Company when they began running buffalo 6 years ago. Three years later, they got into meat sales. In Eufaula, Dennis Garrett started his Belle Starr Buffalo Company in 2000, on land his father had previously used to raise Simmentals.

Stepp, who grew up on a farm, recalls when 100 head of Angus cattle would make a living and pay for land. Raising Angus as an adult, though, he quickly saw that it had become a big-operation game.

Buffalo, he says, “can eat native grass, withstand heat and cold. They don’t have birthing problems. They’re just stronger and sturdier.”

Garrett came to buffalo by a somewhat different route ­ specifically, by realizing how good it tasted at a time when he was serving it nightly to diners at a Colorado ski resort.

“They’re great, easy to take care of,” he says.

For decades, the mantra of U.S. agribusiness has been, “Get big or get out.” Both Garrett and Stepp are living examples of how small operators, even starting from scratch, can cash in on small-farm advocate George DeVault’s contrary advice: “Get small, and get in!”

Like half of all farmers and ranchers in the U.S., both have off-farm jobs ­ Garrett is a certified public accountant; Stepp is a project management consultant. Both anticipate a time when their ranch operations will support them full-time.

As a small operation, Garrett says, he has to make his bison enterprise pay by maximizing profit rather than building volume. To do that, both he and Stepp follow strategies common to many innovative small-scale stock raisers, selling meat with unique nutritional qualities to specific local markets.

Bison meat has an established reputation for leanness, which attracts many health-conscious customers. In addition, Garrett says, the National Bison Association maintains a “Certified American Buffalo” standard that prohibits the use of steroids, antibiotics, and synthetic growth hormones, contributing to bison’s “all-natural, all healthy” image.

Unlike beef, bison meat has about the same amount of fat ­ roughly 2 grams in a 100-gram serving ­ whether finished on grass or grain. However, finishing buffalo on grass does confer other nutritional benefits absent from the grain-fed variety, such as increased levels of omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acids (CLAs).

“People say grass may someday be like wines,” Garrett says, “with different regional tastes.”

Regional meat flavors may still be in the future, but regional and even local markets are very much a part of a successful bison rancher’s program for economic viability in the here and now.

Not long ago, bison ranchers came as close to extinction as the buffalo themselves did back in the late 1800s. Bison numbers nationwide grew at 14 to 18 % during the 1990s, says Garrett, but meat sales lagged behind, at half that rate or less.

Eventually, that gap got too large, and ­ helped along by a Plains drought that raised feed costs ­ the market for breeding stock collapsed in 1999-2000. Buffalo cows were selling for $200 per head. Most of the bison ranchers who stayed in business were those who had developed innovative markets for their animals’ meat, rather than focusing exclusively on selling breeding stock.

For Garrett, those innovative markets include bison-like herds of drive-up customers who come straight to the farm for their bison meat. In summer, he says, there are so many that “I can’t walk to the barn.”

Garrett also does a steady business through the Oklahoma Food Co-op, has sold at the Tulsa State Fair and farmers markets in Jenks and Muskogee, and supplies a local restaurant as well. His biggest sellers are ground meat, followed by a variety of specialty products including hot links, summer sausage, and jerky sticks.

In addition to meat, he sells artfully decorated buffalo hides and skulls.

Stepp got his start with home deliveries of quarters and eighths of bison. Like Garrett, he also sells through the Oklahoma Food Co-op, and he’s since branched out into supplying buffalo meat to several restaurants at truck stops along Interstate 40. His client list also now includes several grocery stores and a couple of large health-food stores.

To make a successful sales pitch to one of the stores, Stepp installed freezers for his meat in the store at his own expense. His bison meat has since become that store’s top-volume item.

Such unique sales arrangements are common fare for farmers venturing into direct and niche markets, and they require new expertise. As Stepp puts it, “My dad couldn’t say where on the cow the T-bone came from, because he didn’t need to know.”

“You have to be involved from gate to plate,” Garrett agrees.

One critical stage in that involvement is processing, to transform buffalo from an animal grazing on the range into a steak gracing a dinner plate.

“My biggest obstacle is processing,” admits Garrett, who drives his animals five and a half hours to a plant in Kansas.

Stepp also takes some buffalo to Kansas, as well as using a state-inspected plant in Weatherford.

Part of the reason for the long haul to an out-of-state processor is that no USDA-inspected Oklahoma processor currently handles bison. In addition, local processors may not be as willing to leave carcasses hanging long enough to age tenderness into bison’s leaner meat, or may have inconsistent quality control on package weights.

But there are challenges in a federally inspected plant, too. Bison is classed as a “non-amenable” species, meaning that a producer pays the USDA inspector’s hourly fee, instead of the flat or weight-based rates commonly charged for cattle.

The exception to the trend of local direct marketing in bison meat is Ted Turner, who is reputed to own a whopping 10% of the North American bison herd, along with a new restaurant chain devoted to bison.

Opinion is divided on the opportunity the restaurants might hold for small bison ranchers. Some hope that Turner’s eateries will source their supply from nearby producers, but others suspect that the chain will do well just to absorb the meat from the millionaire’s own herds.

Garrett and Stepp may be small-timers compared to Ted Turner, but they’re expanding just as quickly.

With his herd swollen to 65 head after buying animals from another rancher leaving the business, Garrett is looking for more land to support them. His other projects for expansion include increasing his freezer capacity, doing some of his own processing in-house, and offering hayride tours of the ranch.

As a corrective measure against commercial cooks unfamiliar with cooking lean meat, he’d also like to start his own bison meat restaurant, á là Ted Turner.

Stepp started with six head on 320 newly-bought acres. Last year, he slaughtered 225 animals, and is aiming for 25% above that figure this year.

With all the breeding stock he can afford to have, he buys 100 to 150 yearling bulls each year to finish. The pool of suppliers of those calves hasn’t grown as quickly as he expected. But that limit on his volume can also spell opportunity to those who’d like to enter the buffalo business on the cow-calf side, without the added challenges of processing and marketing.

Whatever the attraction of buffalo ranching, both Stepp and Garrett offer words of caution to newcomers. For those who haven’t boned up on the basics of bison first, Stepp has blunt advice: “Don’t do it! You need to seriously understand what you’re getting into. They’re not just another breed of cattle.”

Garrett and Stepp agree that the hardest part of raising bison is working and loading the animals. Both use pasture fencing that seems surprisingly light to those untutored in bison lore ­ standard five-strand barbed wire, as well as high-tensile electric on flexible fiberglass posts, appears to do the trick.

But, says Stepp, “You have to have a really good corral” ­ as in, 7' lengths of 3-1/2" welded steel pipe, with “crash gates” to keep the animals from leaving the chute ahead of time. “Design your facilities to reinforce the stress points,” Garrett explains.

Corralling the animals is only one of many hurdles that would-be bison ranchers face. “There’s no infrastructure as far as distribution,” says Stepp.

“The bank won’t loan on buffalo,” adds Garrett. “You can’t sell at any time, as you could with a cow. People who have one bad experience with buffalo won’t ever eat it again. If it’s beef, they’ll just say, ‘That’s a bad steak.’ If it’s buffalo, it’s ‘I don’t like buffalo.’”

Still, for all their awareness of the gopher holes in the landscape of bison ranching, its current crop of Oklahoma practitioners seem unlikely to abandon it anytime soon. The best part, according to Stepp, is to ride out on a beautiful evening into the middle of a herd of resting buffalo, “and just enjoy the world with them.”

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