Neither do they take well to being pushed around like cattle. "In moving them, we try to give them a choice and make the choice they want to take the one we want, too," says Sexhus, who is also chief executive officer of the North American Bison Cooperative, a slaughtering plant in nearby New Rockford that processes some 12,000 buffalo a year, half the output of the U.S. industry. They're much quicker on their feet than cattle, and tremendously strong. Sexhus says he's seen a buffalo bull hook into a 1,500-pound hay bale with his horns and toss it up as if it were filled with air. And any rancher trying to move them against their will does so at his own peril. A few years ago, his partner on the ranch, Keith Kakela, left the safety of the corral fence to get a recalcitrant bull to come out of the pen. Without warning, the bull went for him, throwing him into the air twice, like the rag doll at a rodeo, then goring him under his rib cage with his horn and stomping him into the mud. It took him three weeks and 76 stitches to recover. Should something like that happen again, Sexhus now keeps a heavy .45-70 Winchester at the ready in the barn.
Buffalo also exhibit a notoriously low tolerance for stress and can throw a fit that is without equal in the animal kingdom. "No one can appreciate the level of pitch these buffalo can get to," says Sexhus. "They can absolutely lose it, and when you think they can't get any crazier, you discover they've just started. I mean, these animals will reach a point where they absolutely don't care, and they'll destroy themselves, run right into a wall, break their neck, smash their head. Some animals, if they're scared enough, will actually die of fright." Whatever effect these episodes have on an animal's psyche, they certainly don't do much for the meat. When his adrenaline gets flowing, a bison halts production of glycogen, which in turn works to raise the pH level in the muscle tissue. Should the explosion happen on the way to the slaughterhouse—which occasionally occurs, since being loaded into a stock trailer seems to tip them off about what's in store—the carcass becomes infused with a blackish red color (a "dark cutter," it's called in the trade), signaling that the meat has become tough and off-tasting and must be ground into hamburger or even thrown away. One day last February, a 934-pound cow that had been herded into the last chute at the New Rockford slaughter plant lost control just before being sent through the roll-up door into the killing station. She spent the last minutes of her life in a frenzy, kicking and bucking so desperately in the narrow confines that she almost knocked herself off her feet. Nothing unusual there, noted an attendant, who said that the steel bars on the chutes need to be rewelded about every month. What with North Dakota's brutal winters, short growing season, and vulnerability to drought, Sexhus's experience of raising buffalo is quite different from that of the ranchers in southwest Texas. Like Shape Ranch's Fitzsimons, he had his land passed down to him by his grandfather, a Norwegian who immigrated in 1894 and began farming a 160-acre area under provisions of the Homestead Act. "He obviously had it tough back in Norway to think this was good," says Sexhus, whose newly built brick ranch house sits in the middle of 3,000 superflat acres, offering a magical vista on a winter's morning of a sea of pure white bordered by towering elms sparkling with hoarfrost.
Whereas the Shape Ranch is waist high in broad-leafed buffle grass all year round, in North Dakota the grass is generally gone by the end of August and doesn't reappear until the following June. Grain, on the other hand, costs so little in the Plains states that it's generally cheaper to buy than to raise, which is one of the reasons why Sexhus puts his bull calves in a grain pen as soon as they're weaned and leaves them there until they're slaughtered at 15 to 18 months old. To get fat, lucrative hindquarters, he breeds large bulls to large cows, an approach that won him the $5,000 first prize last winter in the carcass contest at the stock show in Rapid City, South Dakota. But to ensure that his herd stays free of those drifting genes, he's scrupulous about keeping his breeding bulls in the grain pen so they won't adulterate his grass-fed cows.
Still, an element of defensiveness creeps in when Sexhus discusses his reliance on feedlots. "If I didn't have to make money off bison, would I have them in a feedlot? Probably not," he says. "But inevitably the people who criticize the guy taking them from cows and putting them into confinement are people who've got a lot of money and a lot of land. And I don't mean I'm against that, but the thing I object to is their holier-than-thou attitude where they feel somehow we're doing something morally wrong. It's always easier to sit there and say, "Here's how it should be done," when you don't have to worry about putting tennis shoes on the kids." However you do it, making money in the buffalo business is virtually impossible these days. Over the past two years, prices have dropped into the basement. Whereas in 2000 a buffalo cow bred by a high-quality bull would have sold for upwards of $5,000, today she'd be lucky to bring $500. As for the meat, there's a lot more of that around than people seem to want to eat. Sexhus's co-op alone is holding some 4 million pounds of unsold buffalo meat stacked up in freezers, and he's been asking farmers to accept delayed payment for their animals until prices begin to stabilize.
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