Converting to Bison

Going from beef cattle to bison. Dave Carter is the president of the National Bison Association. After learning about all of the positive aspects of raising bison as a source of lean red meat with very little cholesterol, I pose the question if a cattlemen wanted to diversify a little bit and run bison. How would he go about it?

Well, the first thing anybody should do is go on to the National Bison Association Web site, which is Bisoncentral.com. We’ve got some great resources. Probably the best one is our Bison Producers Handbook. We call it the Bible of the business was put together by 25 people within our business that have expertise on everything from buying the right animal to marketing the meat. The second thing is to get involved with the association because we are a small community. The thing I love about the bison business is I always say we're too small to call us an industry. That's why I always call it the bison business. But it's a group of folks that love to help each other out. Within a lot of your mainstream commodities, a lot of times there's a little bit of hesitancy if somebody comes in from the outside and starts something up. But in the bison of business, even the folks that have been involved in it for 30 years or so probably didn't grow up with mom or dad raising bison. So almost everyone in our business came into it as a newcomer at some point, they remembered the challenges that they had and they love to help others coming in.

Bisoncentral.com. Great resource.