The problem began in the 1990s, when many ranchers in the northern Plains switched over from raising cattle because buffalo fetched higher prices and were easier to raise: Buffalo drop calves unassisted, require no shelter in harsh winters, and are healthier.
But as supply outstripped demand, which was mainly from local restaurants in the West and Midwest, no one looked seriously into how to sell it more widely. Or sell it at all, for that matter. When Sexhus was begged by local ranchers to take over the flagging New Rockford co-op (before returning to the family farm in the early '90s, he'd worked in Paris as director of European operations for the International Harvester Company), he walked into the plant one day and found the manager slamming down the phone on a customer. "He was yelling, 'It'll be a cold day in hell before I sell to that son of a bitch.'
"'But Brad!' I said. 'That's the guy who's paying all our salaries.'"
To get out of the slump, buffalo ranchers are looking hopefully these days to Ted Turner, who last winter opened the first Ted's Montana Grill, in Columbus, Ohio. The restaurant, along with two others that have since debuted in Atlanta, serves nine-ounce bison burgers, along with chicken and beef dishes to lure in the more tentative customers. Nine additional branches will open up around the country by the end of next year, possibly more after that. "It's not the answer to our problem right now, but it could be in a year or two," says Sexhus, whose co-op does all of Turner's slaughtering. "If he decides to do something like this on a big scale, and I think he will, this could be really huge."
Maybe get huge, others concede, but along the way to achieving success, the buffalo industry could end up losing its soul. One who feels strongly in this regard is Alvin Jones, the foreman down on the Shape Ranch. In his lifetime a rodeo rider, a rancher, a livestock auctioneer, and an infantryman in the Korean War ("Not my choice," he says), Jones was raised in a sharecropper's household on the Little Colorado River near San Angelo. At 68 years old, he's got a droopy white mustache, carries a Colt single-action revolver while riding his horse around the ranch, and offers up his many opinions in a soft, West Texas drawl that contrasts sharply with the twang of, say, men in the Bush family. Jones was introduced to the creature back in 1963, when a restaurant owner in Tucson asked him to saddle-break a buffalo so patrons could sit on it and have their pictures taken. After considerable effort, he broke the animal, an endeavor he likened to being tossed around by a tornado. "But what the restaurant fellow didn't realize," he says, "was, 'Once a buffalo, always a buffalo.' Even though he was saddle-broke, when he looked around and found out he wasn't tied down anymore, just held by someone with a rope, why, he just left. End of story."
But if the buffalo should ultimately have its very nature changed by being force-fed, force-bred, and treated simply as a beef cow with a furry head, that could result in as great a tragedy as the great kill-off at the end of the 19th century. In Jones's opinion, "the buffalo doesn't mind being shot, doesn't mind dying, doesn't mind being in a commercial meat market, because he's an animal that realizes his destiny is to be used for some purpose, like he's always been. To me, that's just like being a good person. As I always tell my kids, that's what I'm here for. If I'm not any good to help somebody else, then I'm just not any good at all, and that's one of the things I feel I have in common with that animal.
"But if we change him, just because we can and because we think he can do something better than he's been doing for years and years, we're going to wind up with basically nothing. There's not anything else that's real. If we ruin the buffalo, make the same mistakes we've made with everything else, then that will be the end of it. Because we won't have anything else to ruin. Buffalo are the last thing left."
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