Challenges of Booming Demand

Challenges of Booming Demand. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. You could say it is a good problem to have...something so popular you can't keep up with the consumers demand. It has its upsides and of course the downsides. Dave Carter, Executive Director of the National Bison Association says that is where the bison industry is right now. CARTER: The consumer demand for bison continues to grow and that's good news but we wanted to put out a message to the marketplace because I know that a lot of retailers and a lot of restaurant owners are looking for bison and having trouble getting as much as their customers are asking for and so the major marketers from Canada and the United States got together last week and put together a joint statement to try and explain the situation and the fact that we're working to catch up with the demand Carter explains that it takes a bit more to produce bison than say chickens or pigs. CARTER: These are natural animals. Nature has perfected them over thousands of year; we're not tinkering with them with growth hormones or the genetic engineering, any of that kind of stuff. We let the animals grow the way nature intended them and that takes a while. Right now the prices that ranchers are receiving for the animals are at an all time high. A good bison bull slaughter weight is bringing about $2.60 a pound on the rail and that's usually for about a 650 pound carcass. The bison business could be viewed as an untapped goldmine. CARTER: It's very profitable right now and we're working very hard to get our current producers to expand their herds but to reach out to other folks and talk about what we're calling the bison advantage. We're working at workshops around the country. We're going to be at the National FFA convention in October to talk to students about the opportunities in bison production and of course we have a brand new handbook that we have put out that I think is probably the best guide for anyone who's interested in getting into the business. The Bison Producer's Handbook is available through their website. CARTER: It's a great resource and it's just one of the things we're doing right now to try and make sure that we're working to grow the production. It's always going to be a challenge for us I think as our marketers explained last week that last year we processed a little over 90-thousand animals in the U.S. and Canada under state and federal inspection and that was an all-time high for us but it's still not what the beef industry does in one day. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.