Anyone Raise Bison?

My uncle is trying to get me to raise bison. Just wondering if he is bsing me with the current prices? He says ground bison/burgers are going for 8.00lb and yearlings are selling for 1500.00 each. Them prices seem way to high?

Don't know about prices but several things come to mind. One is that state to state you have special laws reguarding keeping them big critters contained. Putting in the fences here can be very expensive. Another is liability. Know a guy near Pelican Rapids Mn who has had tourist in his buff pasture trying to get close enough to get good pictures with small children. I do know that one of my BIL's has a good freind who works full time for a smaller farmer (about 300 acres) and thats all this guy raises and has for years.

I do know that in my area we are seeing more and more people putting them in.

Rick

only fence i seen hold them onery creatures was crossties on 4' centers and cattle panels.

Check the cattle markets. Yearling steers are selling near that amount of money without all the hassle of handling bison. My 2 cents. Joe

They make fantastick steaks! Fences need to be able to stop a tank though.

There"s a Buffalo farm near me. Fence posts are
10 foot railroad ties,(those are used where two
track"s come togather, in a Y)with about 4 feet
in the ground, 6 feet above, and heavy woven
wire fenceing.

Not going to disagree with anyone on fences,but neighbor has had them since 1947 with no more fence then you might,just might try to hold baby calves in.Baling wire and hog panels patchs.Had 2 escapes that I know of in that time frame which I don't think any cattle or horse people can claim.

I don't know much about raising Bison but I do know that two different guys around me here have gone broke trying to raise them. The one ended up 1.5 million in the hole. Dubuque Bank and Trust eat the paper on that one.

The biggest problems is that you will need to market them yourself. I don't know of any Bison market that you just sell the live steer too. You did not say where you are at. If it is far away from major population centers then your market is going to be very limited. Plus the big dollars of retail will also have you putting a lot of time in marketing.

As far as yearling selling for $1500. Well they had better be because beef steers are just about that high. I have been seeing 800 lbs steers bring $1.80 delivered. That is $1440 and the guy will have to finish that steer to 1200-1300 lbs. To me they are fools but that is the market right now.

To me Bison is just another fad that will come and go. There will be a few guys make big money selling breed stock and whole bunch of guys loosing their shirts. Anyone remember Emus twenty years ago???? Then it was Lamas. I would put the majority of the organic farming in the same class. A few do a good job and the rest raise some real big weeds. LOL

There was a whole herd of them running loose a few miles from my folks' place yesterday. Don't know the whole story yet but I think they had to shoot one of them...

Took the farmer hours to get them corralled back up.

There's a fellow in northern Alberta called 'Bison'. He checks out 'tractor tales' now and then, if you can't get him thru modern view search, just post a call to him.

(quoted from post at 08:22:42 03/12/12) I don't know much about raising Bison but I do know that two different guys around me here have gone broke trying to raise them. The one ended up 1.5 million in the hole. Dubuque Bank and Trust eat the paper on that one.

The biggest problems is that you will need to market them yourself. I don't know of any Bison market that you just sell the live steer too. You did not say where you are at. If it is far away from major population centers then your market is going to be very limited. Plus the big dollars of retail will also have you putting a lot of time in marketing.

As far as yearling selling for $1500. Well they had better be because beef steers are just about that high. I have been seeing 800 lbs steers bring $1.80 delivered. That is $1440 and the guy will have to finish that steer to 1200-1300 lbs. To me they are fools but that is the market right now.

To me Bison is just another fad that will come and go. There will be a few guys make big money selling breed stock and whole bunch of guys loosing their shirts. Anyone remember Emus twenty years ago???? Then it was Lamas. I would put the majority of the organic farming in the same class. A few do a good job and the rest raise some real big weeds. LOL

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LOL I remember the Emu thing.....sis and BIL tried it. After about 8 years they got rid of em after only feeding em and never getting a return.

Rick

We have a few ranches that raise them and the National Bison Range is about 5 miles from our place as the crow flies.

Every Fall the National Bison Range works their herd and there are viewing stands for the public to watch. It"s a real eye opener if you are used to domesticated beef cattle. You might be able to find some pictures of this on youtube, etc.

Bison are wild and you can"t work them like regular cattle. I sold some hay to guy who raises them and he says he never handles his live ones and he harvests them by having hunters come onto his place to shoot them for a fee. He skins them and sends the carcass to a local butcher shop for processing. Our valley has more cattle then people and if he"s not vaccinnating his animals he runs the risk of having a disease outbreak that can spell big problems for any neighboring ranches.

From what I"ve seen of the buffalo meat market is it"s a special niche market that can command high prices when the supply is short. Several years ago there was a glut of buffalo on the market and they couldn"t give them away. Ted Turner is the biggest owner of bison in the US and he was bemoaning the fact that he didn"t have a market for his meat. (Big capatalist that he is, he even got Congress to approve buying bison burger for school lunch programs at inflated prices to help him out, but that"s another story!)

It"s hard enough to make a buck in the regular beef market without trying to raise a wild animal like a buffalo. The promoters are always out there telling you how much you can make (remember emus, ostriches, vincuna, llamas,etc etc) but there a few people who will eke out a living on bison and the rest will make a killing on convincing you to buy their high priced breeding stock.
Don"t take my word for it. Go gather some facts and go visit a working buffalo ranch to see what it takes to properly raise buffalo. Look at the investment you"ll have to make in land and handling equipment just to be able to load them out as well as to handle them for routine vaccinations, (whch any responsible bison rancher should be doing).
Do let the lure of "making a killing" raising bison cloud your judgement.

I don't agree that Bison is a fad. I eat a lot of Bison. I buy it at Walmart and it is not that much higher than beef. I like it because it only has 15% the fat of beef.

A farmer behind me has a small herd and I have never heard of any excaping. Hes been raising them for several years. He says hes making pretty good money on them.

I've eaten Bison & Beefalo but never raised any just fatten out 2 Beefalo. The Beefalo's were wild enough for me. I like both but one needs to know it takes less time to cook it than beef because of the lower fat content.

Oh my oh my :shock:
What a misconseption there seem to be about keeping these bison. :roll:

I been raising them since 96 and believe me or not i will never have an other beef cow,there's just no comparison as to the workload.
If you know what you are doing(yes there is a learning curve,..what else is new)
A 5' page wire fence is the best,but people have been keeping them succesfully behind 4 strands of barb wire,and i know of one guy who has 300 of them winter grazing behind a single strand of electr fence right along the yellowhead highway just east of Edson Alberta.
A bison once used to your place and fed well will never leave you,and are very easy to drive back if a fence goes down for some reason and the herd gets out.
I had them out only twice in the 16 yrs i have them,Both times my own fault cause i had left the gate open. :roll:

I have a 120 cow herd and work them trough the system only once a year in jan or febr to wean the calves.(i can do that by myself with no help) I don't tatch them at all for the rest of the year.The calves get fed seperate and kept for an other summer on grass and sold as long yearlings in fall.
I don't vaccinate or medicate,other than occasional deworming by mixing it in trough the salt.
In winter i feed every other day,just to have something to do.Takes only an hr or two.But one can just as easy feed them once a week or month.I just set the bales on the ground and take the twine off,no feeders requared or even wanted.
THey don't waste a blade of hay,which can't be said of beef who given the chance waste half the bale.

Bison are very smart in figuring out what you want before you do.
One has to take that in considderation when handling them.One has to think ahead.
A sturdy handling system is a must cause bison can get rowdy when pushed to hard(one needs to learn how to handle them)
Out in the field bison behave no diff than beef altough they are constantly on the move when grazing.

So my total physical workload is 6 hrs a week feeding in winter,a couple days sorting and loading out and just checking up on them over the summer.
A easy life indeed. :wink:

And yes the prices are high right now.
I sold my 800 lb long yearlings for $2.50/lbs on the hoof FOB farm.Calves are worth up to $3.60/lbs.

I suggest you contact the American Bison Association for more info,i'm sure they'll help you out.

The meat is great, but if the one we got was any indication, you won't make much money on them. We got a long yearling for less than beef price, because it "treed" the guys wife, and she was taking a pretty dim view of the whole incident.

Not wishing them any hard luck, but we're running a little low on meat, and would be willing to take another troublemaker off their hands. . .

Your comments match what I see a neighbor does.......Several dozen in his herd, single barbed wire, very self-sufficient. No shelter in central MN, never needs birth assist. Feeds hay and distillers from local brewery.

Neighbor has a small herd of them and when they first had their calves, the bull brutally killed the baby males. If they get off of the truck they chase the neighbors. Then they started dieing and found out the hard way that you can't feed them bread.

(quoted from post at 14:39:17 03/12/12) Neighbor has a small herd of them and when they first had their calves,

[b:469f5de24b]the bull brutally killed the baby males.[/b:469f5de24b]

[b:469f5de24b]If they get off of the truck they chase the neighbors.

[/b:469f5de24b]Then they started dieing and found out the hard way that you can't feed them bread.

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That is the biggest BS i heard in a long time :roll: .
The herd will however kill a sick herds mate if it treated and been kept seperate and reintroduced at a later date(prob smells different),either that or they keep it at a distance.

Bison are nosy and investigate anything new to them,but will chase only something they see as a threath.

He must've had a disease running trough them that killed them off,a couple slices of bread certainly wont unless it was all mould.

(quoted from post at 12:25:43 03/12/12) The meat is great, but if the one we got was any indication,[b:06e37c8a21] you won't make much money on them. We got a long yearling for less than beef price[/b:06e37c8a21], because it "treed" the guys wife, and she was taking a pretty dim view of the whole incident.

Not wishing them any hard luck, but we're running a little low on meat, and would be willing to take another troublemaker off their hands. . .

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So, you base your knowledge on a single animal.

prices hot hanging weight on the rail run $3.80 to $4/lbs for a finnished bull or heifer.
1200 lb on the hoof,59 to 61% yield...i let you do the math.
Try that with beef :roll:

JD Seller already said everything that I was going to say.

(quoted from post at 17:13:01 03/12/12)
JD Seller already said everything that I was going to say.

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ell,then you are just as ignorant as him and know nothing about it either.

(quoted from post at 09:38:08 03/12/12) We have a few ranches that raise them and the National Bison Range is about 5 miles from our place as the crow flies.

Every Fall the National Bison Range works their herd and there are viewing stands for the public to watch. It"s a real eye opener if you are used to domesticated beef cattle. You might be able to find some pictures of this on youtube, etc.

Bison are wild and you can"t work them like regular cattle. I sold some hay to guy who raises them and he says he never handles his live ones and he harvests them by having hunters come onto his place to shoot them for a fee. He skins them and sends the carcass to a local butcher shop for processing. Our valley has more cattle then people and if he"s not vaccinnating his animals he runs the risk of having a disease outbreak that can spell big problems for any neighboring ranches.

From what I"ve seen of the buffalo meat market is it"s a special niche market that can command high prices when the supply is short. Several years ago there was a glut of buffalo on the market and they couldn"t give them away. Ted Turner is the biggest owner of bison in the US and he was bemoaning the fact that he didn"t have a market for his meat. (Big capatalist that he is, he even got Congress to approve buying bison burger for school lunch programs at inflated prices to help him out, but that"s another story!)

It"s hard enough to make a buck in the regular beef market without trying to raise a wild animal like a buffalo. The promoters are always out there telling you how much you can make (remember emus, ostriches, vincuna, llamas,etc etc) but there a few people who will eke out a living on bison and the rest will make a killing on convincing you to buy their high priced breeding stock.
Don"t take my word for it. Go gather some facts and go visit a working buffalo ranch to see what it takes to properly raise buffalo. Look at the investment you"ll have to make in land and handling equipment just to be able to load them out as well as to handle them for routine vaccinations, (whch any responsible bison rancher should be doing).
Do let the lure of "making a killing" raising bison cloud your judgement.

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A good handling system lets one or two do the job of sorting and loading.I they have to go trough the sqeeze a third person will speed things up.More than 3 people becomes only a nuicance.
A well designed buffalo system don't have to cost more than a beef system.
I work my bison by myself,no yelling,cussing or getting mad.
Bison are not any wilder than a bunch of longhorns or angus.It usually is the ignorance of the handlers when things go wrong.
If people have to revert to shooting them in the field is because they have a local market or they have no handling system to speak of or they lack the knowledge how to.
The people that went broke were the greedy ones that invested big when the breeding market was at the peak and sold out when the market crashed cause there was no meat market.I sold out when the prices started to dip and still made some money.I stayed in it trough the low years by buying calves back for $50 a head and letting them multiply,then started selling the bulls when the market improved again.there were years i didn't make any,butI never lost a buck on them.There never was a "glut",just a lack of meat market.That caused the crash.The BSE had a hand in it too.
Things have come full circle now,and demand for bison meat all over the world is at an all time high which is reflected in the high prices the bison processors pay for any bison.
Bison is hear to stay,we just need more producers.They are not a "fad" like the emus or llama.
Bison is an exellent choice for people that want to farm and have an off farm job and little time to do the farming cause unlike beef cows,bison take very little work and will look after themselves.If you are in cattle country it may be wise to vacinate,cause the beef diseases could be a treath to the bison,not the other way around. bison have a very high immunity system but are succeptable to common cow diseases.
Land is the same price wether you run beef or buffalo :roll:

My 2c

(quoted from post at 22:02:17 03/12/12)

(quoted from post at 17:13:01 03/12/12)
JD Seller already said everything that I was going to say.

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ell,then you are just as ignorant as him and know nothing about it either.

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There ya go.... Bein antisocial again :shock:

Wife wants to see more baby pics.....

(quoted from post at 00:34:03 03/13/12)

(quoted from post at 22:02:17 03/12/12)

(quoted from post at 17:13:01 03/12/12)
JD Seller already said everything that I was going to say.

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ell,then you are just as ignorant as him and know nothing about it either.

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There ya go....[b:a8a551a90a] Bein antisocial again [/b:a8a551a90a]:shock:

Wife wants to see more baby pics.....

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learned that from you :shock:

Tell yer Honey she's got to wait,.. calving season is nuther month away.

Okay, okay... Bison are the quietest most docile animal ever. Not wild at all. They never escape, they never charge, they never hurt anyone. All they need is a wet noodle strung up for a fence. You can walk right up to one and take a bite out of it and they won't even flinch. The meat is in demand and worth its weight in gold. Everyone should raise bison then we'd all be rich.

I must've imagined what I saw.

(quoted from post at 11:52:41 03/13/12) Okay, okay... Bison are the quietest most docile animal ever. Not wild at all. They never escape, they never charge, they never hurt anyone. All they need is a wet noodle strung up for a fence. You can walk right up to one and take a bite out of it and they won't even flinch. The meat is in demand and worth its weight in gold. [b:a78f1bae81]Everyone should raise bison then we'd all be rich[/b:a78f1bae81].

[b:a78f1bae81]I must've imagined what I saw[/b:a78f1bae81].

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If you have a herd of beef on the loose they scatter in all directions,at least bison stay together,more farmers get hurt by beef and dairy cows than by bison.

Rich is just a "term",it means diff to diff people,at least with bison one don't have to work himself to death to try to make ends meet. :wink:

You take one incident and use that to paint them all with the same brush. :roll:
But,..believe what you want....I know better

Hummmm. Where is Tom T country lawyer? If this was a court case, well, let's see. Bison here is the one adding to the post who actually has reciepts, records, notarizied statements from neighbors and local medical authorites as well as hard- well, fuzzy proof, that he is actually "IN THE BISON BUSINESS". The rest, for or against, is all hearsay evidence... 'my brother in law's neighbor knows a feler that sez..'
I rest my case your honor.... So when in the west are you Jim? Time for some road trips/ fact finding missions of your own...
BTW, BISON! can you post some of those pics of the herd from last summer? Those were cool!

(quoted from post at 18:59:58 03/13/12) Hummmm. Where is Tom T country lawyer? If this was a court case, well, let's see. Bison here is the one adding to the post who actually has reciepts, records, notarizied statements from neighbors and local medical authorites as well as hard- well, fuzzy proof, that he is actually "IN THE BISON BUSINESS". The rest, for or against, is all hearsay evidence... 'my brother in law's neighbor knows a feler that sez..'
I rest my case your honor.... So when in the west are you Jim? Time for some road trips/ fact finding missions of your own...
BTW, BISON! can you post some of those pics of the herd from last summer? Those were cool!

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Besides hearsay, there are also articles written about bison by people with credentials in many agricultural periodicals. It has been a fairly hot topic. For many years people have used various forms of media to disseminate information, so that the average person can learn not only by first hand experience but also by education. Sometimes someone with money invested in something has an opinion perhaps "colored a little" by his investment since of course a dropping general public view of something could reduce it's value in the marketplace.

Here ye go Tony,..just don't get to close or they bite ye :wink:

Here, the elusive white buffalo, yes its mine,born brown and turned white as a ten year old.

Here,other pic from last month

Well Bison: I DID NOT throw a personal insult at you for YOUR OPINION on buffalo. I am on two different bank boards in this area. We have gotten three or four people each year trying to get money to started into the Buffalo business. NOT a single one of the business plans we have been given will make a profit. ALL of them have too much money in their stock to make a profit in a reasonable time to be able to service their debt. Plus not a SINGLE ONE of them has a reliable market for the finished product. Maybe in Canada there is a market but here it has to marketed by the person selling the buffalo. Way too many pie in the sky numbers to be able to loan money on.

So if you want to use your own money to buy them, then great go for it. Remember that you have to sell what you raise. For a person in a remote area then the marketing is the hard part of the deal. I would assume that there are groups that market together like many in the organic food industry do. There are not any close to around here.

I still maintain that they are a niche market that is not going to be the most stable. Some making money while most don't.

Also if the Uncle is trying to get him to raise Buffalo why is the Uncle not putting HIS money into it????? IF it was such a good money maker why is the Uncle not jumping in with both feet????

(quoted from post at 23:09:39 03/13/12) Well Bison: I DID NOT throw a personal insult at you for YOUR OPINION on buffalo. I am on two different bank boards in this area. We have gotten three or four people each year trying to get money to started into the Buffalo business. NOT a single one of the business plans we have been given will make a profit. ALL of them have too much money in their stock to make a profit in a reasonable time to be able to service their debt. Plus not a SINGLE ONE of them has a reliable market for the finished product. Maybe in Canada there is a market but here it has to marketed by the person selling the buffalo. Way too many pie in the sky numbers to be able to loan money on.

So if you want to use your own money to buy them, then great go for it. Remember that you have to sell what you raise. For a person in a remote area then the marketing is the hard part of the deal. I would assume that there are groups that market together like many in the organic food industry do. There are not any close to around here.

I still maintain that they are a niche market that is not going to be the most stable. Some making money while most don't.

Also if the Uncle is trying to get him to raise Buffalo why is the Uncle not putting HIS money into it????? IF it was such a good money maker why is the Uncle not jumping in with both feet????

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Bankers are notoriously lousy in extending loans to any beginning and even established livestock farmers,...'been there done that'. :roll: .
In Canada the Government extends $100.000 loans with 0% interest to a qualifying bison producer

I have no problem selling my animals,there's a real shortage in meat animals right now,the 6 or so proccessors here on the prairies are fighting to get what ever there is.
Matter of fact,i sold all my yearlings for export to the US for the last 5 years,I am 6-700 mls north of the border so distance is no obstacle..
There's feedlots and slaughterplants gathering to bison in the US.A big share of the Canadian bison production end up getting exported live to the US.
Saying it is a niche market is BS.

If i was the Uncle i would not sink my money in a relatives venture either,...prime way to loose all your investment,and that is a fact.

(quoted from post at 06:50:45 03/12/12) only fence i seen hold them onery creatures was crossties on 4' centers and cattle panels.

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5' page wire and 5-6" dia fenceposts 20' apart keep mine in comfortably, but if they really want out(always the handlers fault),..nothing short of a concrete wall will keep them in.

Hmm,..wonder where all the " i've heard....,a neighbor has....,i've seen....,"bison experts"went. :shock:

Could they be somewhat
:twisted: