I haven’t covered the bison industry much for years. I don’t cover beefy type livestock much at all anyway, but with bison everything seemed to go all bad about a decade ago. I remember writing stories about imploding prices, meat gluts, bankruptcies and all sorts of woe.
It wasn’t the kind of stuff that makes you want to run out and find new angles to cover.
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So it was nice on Saturday to roll back into a bison story and see close up how everything’s gotten so much better. I’ve heard and read reports – often in our own newspaper – that prices are great, demand is growing and producers who survived the slump and crash are now getting paid back for their grief, but there’s nothing like seeing it with your own eyes.
I didn’t visit a Canadian farm but instead was on one in Minnesota, where I’m on my yearly ramble through parts of the U.S. Great Plains and Midwest on the way to Des Moines, Iowa, for the World Pork Expo. (Piggy types of livestock I regularly cover.) A couple of weeks ago the U.S. National Bison Association announced it had aligned a vast array of politicians and bison groups to support its effort to get the bison named the U.S.’s official mammal, and I thought that seemed to neatly encapsulate the rebounding confidence and optimism in the North American bison industry. (I haven’t heard of any attempts to get the ostrich named North America’s official monster-toed, flightless, ponzified bird, but perhaps that’s under the radar.)
Sure enough, things in buffalo country are good, according to the producer I went out to see. There’s lots of demand, good prices, ample grass in most places and a sense that the industry has matured and moulted the skin of the start-up industry it used to be. Gone are the days when everything was bred for the breeding market and in are the days when producing a meaty, healthy animal through good genetics and careful management are in. That sounds a lot like the cattle biz and if the bison biz de
