Ep. 874: How To Start A Bison Ranch

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear. Listening toast, you can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com.

00:00:35
Speaker 2: That’s f I R.

00:00:37
Speaker 1: S T L I T E dot com. All right, man, Joined today by Matt Skogland from north Bridge or Bison a private Uh like a like a buffalo rancher.

00:00:50
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, I’ll tell you.

00:00:52
Speaker 1: The first thing I want to tell you about is, Dude, the the hangar stakes that you gave me, you give me off those animals is like is I hate to say it because uh, I should be saying this about like deer meat or something.

00:01:10
Speaker 2: But dude, that is some of the best stuff in the world.

00:01:12
Speaker 3: Man, I know, it’s so good it we we eat a bunch of them and it’s like the flavor texture.

00:01:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, they’re just so good.

00:01:23
Speaker 1: Hey tell people, because that’s not like if you’re cutting up a deer, right, hanger steak isn’t not on the menu, you know what I mean, like like tell people what, like it’s it’s.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: An off cut.

00:01:34
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it’s it’s funny. So it’s this. It’s this steak that hangs suspended right in front of the tenderlines. And so early on I would, you know, I kill a buffalo, got it, take it to Amsterdam and meat chop our butcher, and they’d be like, where’s the hangar.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: I’m like, guys, like, what are you talking about?

00:01:59
Speaker 3: And they’re like, you know, blah blah blah blah right here, and I’d be out there by myself. I’m like, I’m like, are they messing with me? Like I cannot find this thing? And I add to YouTube it. But so it’s it’s hanging and it’s suspense, and it’s it’s covered in like fashia skin. It doesn’t look like anything. And if you didn’t know, it just comes out with the gut pile and it’s kind of like attached to like the liver and the lungs. But once you once you know, you take it out and there’s one per animal and it’s called a hanger hanging tender. What is that thing’s purpose?

00:02:30
Speaker 2: Man? I don’t know. I’ve wondered the same thing.

00:02:32
Speaker 1: It easy to find out what it does for the animal, Like if he was born with no hanger, would you know it?

00:02:39
Speaker 2: That’s a great question.

00:02:42
Speaker 3: I know. It’s just just this weird muscle, just literally hanging.

00:02:46
Speaker 2: And they used to call it mooment.

00:02:48
Speaker 1: Hey, Phil, if you get a minute, like when you’re over there, do whatever you do over there?

00:02:54
Speaker 2: Sure, what like purpose does it serve the hanger? Yeah? Like what is it doing for the animal? Sure? I’ll do some quick research.

00:03:02
Speaker 1: We should all know this. Just I think it’s just meant to be a good thing to eat. It’s like a gift from God to humans exactly.

00:03:10
Speaker 3: Literally, it just hangs there and you cut it out, cut that tendon out, and you got two beautiful steaks.

00:03:15
Speaker 2: So when you the ones? What let me let me explain why I’m talking about this.

00:03:21
Speaker 4: We do.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: We did a dinner recently here at our office and I called Matt. I was I was looking for some of the like added value product or some of the not standard products that would come about.

00:03:37
Speaker 2: You know what I didn’t hit you up for? Is it some tails man? Oh?

00:03:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So he he gave me some marrow bones. Okay, some hangar steak heart, try anything else. We had some shank pieces. Oh yeah, yeah, shank pieces.

00:03:57
Speaker 2: And we cooked all this stuff up.

00:03:58
Speaker 1: So we did this big meal of all like sort of the non like non typical, non standard things from from one of your animals and the hangars. We just marinated them yep, and grilled them and then kind of cut them against the grain. Dude, it’s the like it is a it is a perfect food. Yeah, that’s amazing.

00:04:19
Speaker 3: And the thing that’s quo you can. I’ve done it multiple times where I’ll kill a buffalo, got it, and just grab the hanger for us and we’ll eat it for dinner, you know, six hours later. Perfect like so good.

00:04:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell people, Tell people specifically what you do, like like what your business is like, how you make your living.

00:04:38
Speaker 3: Totally so pretty straightforward. So my wife Sarah and I and our kids out on Greta we started our Bison ranch north Bridge of Bison. We started it from scratch eight years ago and we’re located.

00:04:52
Speaker 2: Has that all it’s been?

00:04:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well you’re kicking ass for eight years?

00:04:55
Speaker 2: Has it?

00:04:56
Speaker 1: You’ve just been doing it eight years? Eight years?

00:04:57
Speaker 3: Wow? And so yeah, we’re up in the Shield Valley thirty miles northeast to Bozeman, and we it’s pretty simple. We raise bison as well and then sync with nature as possible. We’re all about biodiversity. And then we sell. We raise them for meat, sell one hundred percent direct to consumer, and then every byte and we sell by the quarter half whole bison and then everyone we sell. I personally field harvest each bison, so no live bison leaves the ranch field harvested two yesterday and yeah, so I kill them on the ranch, bleat them, gut them, and then ultimately take them to our butcher Amsterdam meat chop and then we either deliver it to the customer and then we ship all over the country and that’s it. We keep it super simple. How do people go, like, like how do people come find you? Yeah, our website so literally just Northbridge of Bison dot com and then like shop meet and shows what options are there. So there’s quarter half hole and then an all ground by an option, and then a primal blend, which is ground bison with some heart and some liver, oh okay, which is yeah.

00:06:06
Speaker 2: And that’s it.

00:06:07
Speaker 3: So yeah, we keep it like we were obsessed with details, strive for excellence. So we don’t want to get spread thin chasing shiny little objects, so it’s raising buffalo as well, and then sync with nature as possible and then really trying to provide our customers with the best red meat they’ll ever taste in their life.

00:06:28
Speaker 1: Well, like, walk me through, like how did you how did you get interested in? Do you? I mean like like why that animal and not sheep or cattle or totally goats, you know, or drafts or something like like why that?

00:06:42
Speaker 2: Right?

00:06:42
Speaker 3: Yeah? So I guess to like to back up. So, so I’m born and raised in Chicago, zero background and agriculture whatsoever. Uh, And then we moved to Bozeman eighteen years ago, two thousand and eight, and I spent ten years doing environmental else work for conservation organization. And the main issue I worked on was bison, focused on wild bison, mainly the bison population around Yellstone National Park and just you know, fed, fell head over heels in love with the species.

00:07:18
Speaker 2: So you were doing that as an attorney.

00:07:20
Speaker 3: So no, so yeah, so what went went to law school, had a short stint as a lawyer, realized very quickly that being a lawyer was just not for me, and but had this, you know, you were.

00:07:31
Speaker 2: Doing like normal corporate law dog and exactly.

00:07:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, so did you have a billboard on the side of the highway.

00:07:38
Speaker 3: Scoland gets tough for you, you know, I love it, No, we know. So I graduated No. Five, kicked the ass, uh graduated, oh five, clerked for a federal magistrate judge in Chicago for a year. Incredible, amazing guy. We’re still very close. He married Sarah and me, and then I went really yeah. And then I went to a big firm for two years, which I knew wasn’t for me long term, but it’s a good place to start.

00:08:08
Speaker 2: And then we were just what kind of law was that? Just?

00:08:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, corporate litigation, big firm, just a grind like suit and tie in it. But you had you kept a suit and tie behind your the door to your office in case a partner called you at like two o’clock and it was like, hey, go to court, and you’re like, shit, I gotta throw a tie on. And then we were just we were dying. I’d fall in love with Montana Northern Rockies a long time ago, and we were dying to move out here. So we we and eight we were just like we were getting married, and we just felt it’s now or never, Like, if we don’t do this right now, life’s just going to get more complicated.

00:08:47
Speaker 2: You have a kid, and so.

00:08:49
Speaker 1: You’ll get all dug in exactly, everything will be a pain in the ass.

00:08:52
Speaker 3: And so we so we we quit our jobs, got married, moved to Bozeman. Friends and family thought we were batchit crazy. We were like, now we’re just we’re doing it. We’ll figure it out and uh. And at that point I knew I was I did not want to be a lawyer, and so I get this was a dream job for me. It was uh, non litigation policy. So it’s like the perfect job for a former lawyer. And the main issue I worked on is bison, So you know.

00:09:18
Speaker 2: Like like let’s talk about that. Let’s let’s talk about that issue.

00:09:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, because you talk about like around the park, right, Yeah, So I just want to I want to. We’ve talked about this one hundred we talk about this all the time on the show.

00:09:30
Speaker 2: YEP. It’s like a.

00:09:33
Speaker 1: It’s a subject I’m deeply interested in. You you’re gonna know more about it than me, as much or as much about it as me as more and you’re gonna know different aspects. But when when you’re talking about that, I’ll just tee it up and you can comment on where you want. Is there’s this just never ending conversation right right. It was like, uh, I moved I moved to Montana in nineteen ninety six.

00:09:58
Speaker 2: I think it was nice.

00:09:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, ninety six, it was being talked about then, it’s being talked about now. It’s basically, what is the relationship what are the relationships between the states of Montana and Wyoming with the bison herd that resides in Yelso National Park. You can’t separate all these things totally out. There’s this great quote about the park. It’s like it’s like whatever, it’s two million acres of paradise surrounded by reality or something like that. Right, So, it’s like there’s these thousands, thousands of animals that live within the park, but wild animals aren’t good at recognizing like jurisdictional boundaries, and so they’re routinely spilling out of the park into surrounding private lands, national forest lands, and there’s just a constant debate about what should the states tolerance for these animals be, what should be their designation currently and you know, pardon me, listeners. We talk about this all the time on the show currently, and it blows my mind. If a buffalo walks out of the park onto into Montana, it crosses the park border.

00:11:18
Speaker 2: It becomes livestock.

00:11:24
Speaker 1: Because the state doesn’t recognize any real difference between the owned livestock animals in the wild free roaming animals. An interesting hook here to say that there is a way that this can work out. We’ve talked about this too Colorado recently, Pa, I don’t know if you just saw this. Colorado recently passed legislation that says if a bison walks into the state on its own four legs, it is wildlife, right, drawing a distinction, and not to like discredit private producer totally or not to take private producers property from them, but drawing a distinction between some of these are wildlife, some of these are livestock, and recognizing that there’s there’s two versions, which is a pretty like I don’t know, I was. I was quite pleased with that distinction over there. Sure, So with that little bit of set up, what aspects of this did you work on so well? One?

00:12:26
Speaker 3: I think so my understanding and I don’t follow it as closely. But in Montana, the dichotomy, if you will, is that so when they’re in the park, they’re wildlife and then they they literally they step over this boundary that like you said, they can’t see. They enter Montana and and at that point they’re jointly managed between Fish, Wildlife and parks they managed wildlife and then the Department of Livestock they manage livestock.

00:12:55
Speaker 2: But like old yeah, so.

00:12:56
Speaker 3: They’re they’re I mean, I’m splitting hairs, but they you know, because they have you’re correct. So so so it’s there like fish, Wildlife and parks would say that’s a wildlife species, but we have joint management with Department of Livestock and that’s the only species in the state that has that, And so what what what? What I worked on very succinctly was expanding the tolerance for yellowstone bison outside the park in Montana because we’ve got, you know, millions of acres of public land where bison are not welcome and and and the thing that was cool was we actually made progress. Like it’s this issue, like you just laid tolerance zones, yeah.

00:13:37
Speaker 2: And they weren’t. So when I started on it, there were.

00:13:42
Speaker 3: It was there was much less tolerance for bison outside the park, and uh, there was this group of us and it was you’ll appreciate this so that so you know, the Yellowstone bison are managed under the Inner Agency Bison Management Plan the ib n P. That all stems from a lawsuit but between the State of Montana and the Feds and a negotiated settlement in two thousand and so it’s Montana. What’s Montana Fish Whilelife and Parks, Department of Livestock, the Forest Service, the Park Service, usda APHIS, which is the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, and then the Inner Tribal Buffalo Council Nez Perce CSKT, and they they wanted to see more tolerance outside the park. And there was a Congressional review report that came out in like two thousand and six or something, and one of the criticisms was that the IBMP partners weren’t getting enough citizen feedback and acting on it. And so they would talk about it. They had three meetings a year Winter meeting. Yeah, I think it’s three meetings a year, and they would and it was like three years they spent talking about find a way to get more citizen input, and they were struggling with it because you’ve got state, tribal, federal entities, and I could see you it didn’t come They were acting in good faith, they were just struggling with a mechanism to do this. And there was this one meeting where the former state veterinarian Marty Zeluski, who’s a really good guy and a good friend of mine, and he was frustrated and he’s like, look, you know, we’ve been trying this for three years and we’re stuck. And he’s like, there’s nothing to stop the citizens, the people that are concerned about this from starting something. And he said, he goes, you know, if if Matt Skogland, a bison advocate, an Ariel Overstreet from the Montana Stockroers came to me and said we think you should do this. He’s like, that’d be powerful if you had wildlife advocates and stock rowers. And so after that meeting, Ariel and I and a few others, this great local sheep ranch of Becky Weed, we formed this citizens working group that the agencies all supported. The former Region three Fisheral Life and Park Director Pat Flowers was a huge help. Mary Erickson from the Forest Service, and we got this just very diverse group of peoples, a couple ranchers, wildlife advocates, hunters, local business owners and gardener and West Yellowstone landowners and we basically and we spent it was a facilitated process for over a year, and we came up with consensus recommendations, delivered them to the agency partners, and they actually acted on it. And so some of them were like they were pretty simple. Like the best example I can give was that the Horse Butte Peninsula north of West Yellowstone. It’s this peninsula that goes out into Hebgod Lake and on the east side is bordered by Yellowstone Park. Twenty five years ago, there was a public grazing lease and a private cattle ranch on Horse Butte. The the federal grazing leases have been permanently retired and that private ranch was bought and the cattle are gone. But so you have this peninsula that never has a a cow on it ever, and we’re still using tax that we were still using taxpayer dollars to haze bison back into the park to protect cattle that literally don’t exist. And everyone agreed, We’re like this is crazy, and so stuff like that that we were able to agree on present to the partners and they expanded the tolerance and that was like really satisfying work. And I would say, but now I feel like, you know, I feel like we accomplished all the low hanging fruit and now it’s just it’s tough.

00:17:42
Speaker 2: It’s a tough issue.

00:17:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, when you mentioned that that, I don’t want to spend too much time on this subject, but you mentioned that like joint management, there has been for sure, like the bringing in public hunts. Yep, right, So they’re they’re like there are of the animals coming out of the park and whine, there are try hunts. There are public draw hunts. I put in for one of the I put in for there’s three there’s three different hunt codes or hunt availabilities. I put in for the one that you’re never going to draw every year. I put in for that one. So there are and like guys here in the Office of Drawn have drawn the tags and so there is a there is an increased management perspective, but it is not as clean as it’s not as clean as what say Elk and Joy.

00:18:32
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, no, not even close. Yeah, No, it’s a it’s a it’s a complicated issue with unfortunately no no clear end insight.

00:18:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, so when you were doing that and you were involved in trying to restore the animals as wildlife, and I think I want to add one interesting point about that is, Uh, when I first got into the subject all these years ago, someone had mentioned like we had solved the problem of genetic extinction, right Like, if you go back to nineteen hundred, there was a real risk of the species going genetically extinct or going through like really terror. You know, it did go through terrible bottlenecks, but there was like there was a time when, like I’ve made this point for it, there was a time when a lightning bolt could have feasibly killed a significant percentage of all the animals that existed. I mean, they were bottlenecked down. And so people are like, we solve the problem of genetic extinction, right Like, we got different soros herds and conservation herds scattered around like there’s no thing that’s going to happen.

00:19:48
Speaker 2: They’re separated.

00:19:49
Speaker 1: There’s not like some like strain of anthrax is going to all of a sudden in fact, the herd and kill off half the animals known to exist. So like genetic extinction, but they pointed out that ecological extinction that they are like effectively ecologically extinct for sure, They’re not a participating member of the natural biome across most of their range. Right, And you would in your work was sort of addressing yeah, that like ecological extinction yep. And then you eventually got into a line of work that’s sort of like addresses it from a whole other angle, right, Right, What was the connection between the two things, Like you’re working on behalf of wild animals and then you decided to get into into ranching them on deeded land that you own.

00:20:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, no, very very well said. And so for me it was, you know, I spent ten years at this organization and just over time the nonprofit environmental policy work. It’s it’s frustrating because you lack control. And so like the example I always give, you know, there’s been this push to restore buffalo in central Montana, in and around the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, the Missouri Breaks and blah blah, and the state did all this work to tee it up with a very very you know, start with a very small population and you know, and I’d meet with like a state agency scientist and a federal agency scientist and I’d be like, you know, you guys need to do this, and they’d say, Matt, we couldn’t agree more with you, but politically that’s a non starter. And you go back to your office and you’re like, what are we doing? Like they have these public meetings, people write letters, they have this whole thing, and it’s a dog and pony show because it’s a political decision that whoever the the power that be is at that time is not going to make. And so I just you feel like you’re spinning your wheels. And so I just started to get frustrated with that process. And at the same time, I know, and you know, conservation groups are super important. I respect the hell out of that work. I just found it wasn’t for me. And I also found, like, big picture, I didn’t think. I don’t think that that that work really moves the needle the way people think it does. And I say that because I, you know, explain that to me. You see these groups that you know, you get these fundraising emails, you know, donate fifty dollars to save the whales, donate fifty dollars to save the elephants. And so someone someone writes a check for fifty dollars and they feel like, all right, I did I did my I did my public duty for wildlife biodiversity conservation for the year, and then the rest of their and the rest of their life, they don’t really think about it. Yeah, And so that fifty dollars, you know, it’s like it’s like a giant wildfire and you know, putting an ounce of water on it, it doesn’t do anything. And so if we’re really gonna tach biodiversity, which you know, in the middle of an extinction crisis, it has to come from how we produce things and how we consume things, like through the business world. And I just came that just became very clear to me, and so I wanted to leave the nonprofit world go into the for profit world. And I was really attracted but to food because you know, when you think about it, we have billions of people on the planet and if you’re lucky, you get to eat three meals a day. You fact that out across the billions of people on the planet, and you realize very quickly that the production of food has enormous environmental and social consequences. And then very simply, I also, I just like I love all the leopold I love land, and so to be able to like work on a piece of lot, a piece of ground that you can touch, smell, feel, watch it through the seasons, hopefully improve it, increase the biodiversity, and then provide food for people that is you know, amazing for the environment, amazing for them, great for biodiversity. Like that just really appealed to me. And then and and and so I had fallen in love with bison, and and so that’s why we you know, there’s I always joke like there’s some parallel universe where we’re doing the same thing with grass fed beef. I just I love bison, and we wanted to do it with bison. And then also, you know we still uh, you know, we’ve only got four hundred or five hundred thousand bison in North America and so are herd. You know, it adds ultimately, it helps with the long term conservation of the species. But yeah, so that’s that’s why we did it.

00:24:39
Speaker 1: That’s one of the things that I’ve always admired about the producers and when I and I’ve always defended producers like you because it helped it. Like it you know, it puts the animals on the landscape and puts the animals where people can see them absolutely, do you.

00:24:55
Speaker 2: Know what I mean?

00:24:55
Speaker 3: And it’s like, but it puts them on native range, Oh dude, you know what I mean. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more with that. Like, there’s so much fear around bison because they’ve been gone for so long and so people are just scared of them, right, Like I joked like early on, I’m like, people think that bison are gonna like go down and rob the bank like with a with a with you know, like they’re just evil. And then they’re out there like for on our ranch. They’re out there, people see them and they’re like, huh, they’re just doing their thing. And so yeah, that that’s a big I think about that a lot. Like a big thing that that we I feel like a big service we provide is just comfort familiarity with the species that most people either never see or they’re like it’s only in Yellowstone and so yeah, it’s it’s it’s making people more comfortable with bison back on the landscape.

00:25:44
Speaker 1: And it was funny because I have a deep suspicion of suspicion in some cases dislike of the captive.

00:25:54
Speaker 2: Servid oh industry.

00:25:56
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, Like because raisin, deer, raise an elk, those aren’t absent from the landscape totally, do you know what I mean? Like, those are like ecologically viable creatures that are that are sort of like culturally ingrained and have people that are willing to stand for them. There’s organizations that defend their habitat right bile just to work on their behalf. There’s this whole like infrastructure of deer and wild deer and elk support. I’ve always view the bison thing different because they’re otherwise absent. I think it’s you know, I know it fluctuate fluctuate maybe by like a part of a percent over recent years, but ninety four or ninety five percent of the animals in existence of the bison and existence are privately owned. If you scratch those off, you you have you know, there’s what, like I said, like half million of the animals. You you like, scratch away the privately owned ones, and you’re looking at a ninety five percent reduction.

00:27:00
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:27:01
Speaker 3: No, it’s just like you’ve reduced it next to nothing. Yeah, I’ll take a step further. I mean, one, I couldn’t agree more. I hate game farms. And it’s funny I quote you all the time because when we met years ago, when you spoke at the Montana Bison Association conference, you you laid it out perfectly. You were like, I hate game farms, exactly what you just said. But bison is this weird this it’s this unique thing where it makes sense and we’re not a game farm, we’re a ranch, but where you know the importance of private ranches for buffalo and so yeah, it’s like ninety something like ninety five percent of the population of bison North America are on ranches like are on ranches like ours. And then even the conservation herds that are out there, the majority of those, almost all of them aren’t wildlife. Like to me, a wildlife species, I know you would agree. Is it goes over the hell it wants to go? Yeah, And so like whether it’s Custer, wind Cave, Teddy Roosevelt, these various parks, they’re ultimately fenced, they’re managed. They you know, they round the bison up, and even Yellowstone right like they’re not allowed to freely roam and so if you really, like, if you really want to split hairs and say how many wild bison are out there? I mean it’s a fraction, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage you have.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: I recently did sort of a round up of of well I tried to define wild Yeah, and it’d be like something that can cross political boundaries totally right when you get down to hers that are allowed to cross political boundaries without without management status changing as they cross political boundaries. I mean you get into like small handfuls. There’s a handful in Alaska that can cross political boundaries. The Henry Mountains, I mean, you know, yeah, the north rim of the Grand Canyon. There’s something can cross political boundaries. But and you could go on and name a few, but I mean we’re talking about handfuls of animals.

00:29:08
Speaker 3: Yeah, tiny, tiny number of animals.

00:29:10
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they’re you know, they’re doing some super cool work. We had a guest that I’m talking about that they’re doing some really cool work in Alaska. I that one, you know, to bring in uh like a sort of phenotype eco type of the animal called the woods bison bison into Alaska, which is cool work.

00:29:29
Speaker 2: But how like.

00:29:32
Speaker 1: When you decided to go down this path, like, how did you even start getting into it?

00:29:37
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? And what was that? What was the sort of capital investment required? Yeah?

00:29:42
Speaker 3: No, So it’s it’s a funny story. So literally, I’m not exaggerating because I worked on bison, Yellowstone Bison. I have a I had a Google alert for Yellowstone Bison. One day, I get a Google alert that there’s a Bozeman Daily Chronicle article on the National Bison. The National Bison Association had just had their summer conference in Big Sky and they did something at Ted Turner’s Flying d Ranch.

00:30:12
Speaker 2: And that’s the producers. That’s like the producers Association.

00:30:15
Speaker 1: Because there’s national I don’t know if it’s even National Bison Society active, I don’t know either way. Yeah, National Bison Associations of Producers organization exactly.

00:30:26
Speaker 3: And so it’s the article just said that they had their summer conference in Big Sky and that demand for bison meat was growing they were looking for more producers. And I literally read the article and I was like, man, I’m like that sounds so cool. Clearly not for me as a kid from Chicago, but for somebody that’s going to be awesome, and I just wonder, I wonder. I went about my day, and and then a couple months later, it was still like kicking around my brain and I was like, I feel like there might be something there. But I was like, you know, to like give afo this great life on a ranch, and because they haven’t been domesticated, shipping him to slaughter is like super high stress. So it’s like an ethical humane component to that. And then all that stress negatively impacts the quality of the meat.

00:31:13
Speaker 1: I want to tell you a story about that. You will share your own. But yeah, when I lived in Miles City for a couple of years, yep, and I lived next to a guy that had a slaughter plant. Yeah, some days he was inspected. Yeah, get like some days on his schedule when he was federally inspected, and some days on his schedule, and he did custom slaughter. And I remember telling me, man, he he used to try and it quit bringing in bringing in bison for custom slaughter.

00:31:41
Speaker 2: You said, they’re just too crazy.

00:31:43
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, I mean I like to try to bring them into his facility. He had had to change a bunch of stuff. It was like two chaotic un bring them into his facility and then and then shipping them was very tough.

00:31:56
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s just exactly super high stress. Also lots of bruising. You know, you throw a bunch of bison on a truck and they’re whether it’s intentional or unintentional, they’re goring each other.

00:32:06
Speaker 1: A lot of bruising. He mentioned that, and he eventually just got done with it.

00:32:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, a lot of guys do that, and so so I was like, yeah, I just I don’t want to. That’s just each to his her own.

00:32:15
Speaker 2: That’s not for me.

00:32:17
Speaker 3: And then I read this this amazing book, Buffalo for the Broken Heart, this memoir by Dan O’Brien, who who.

00:32:24
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of people bring that book up. Man, it’s an amazing book. He started wild idea a buffalo in South Dakota. Huge hero of mine. And in that book, you know, I’m Avid Hunter. And in that book he talks about so he pioneered the modern day field harvesting of bison, which you know you’ve seen it because you were up on the ranch with your kids that one day when I field harvest had won. Oh and then obviously the Clovist experiment. But it’s basically just instead of you just reverse the process. So instead of shipping him.

00:32:53
Speaker 3: To slaughter like yesterday, I just drive out to wherever they are that day and it’s a headshot with a copper bullet from like twelve yards and it’s instant, like as ethical and humane as it gets.

00:33:05
Speaker 2: The meat’s amazing.

00:33:06
Speaker 3: And so when I read, literally when I read about field harvest in that book, it was an instant light bulb moment. I was like, I didn’t know this existed. This is the way to do it, and I know there are people that are going to resonate with this because I just kept meeting people that were like, I’ve seen food ink, I’ve read Michael Pollen. I’m done with meat, ye, and I don’t hunt. But if my neighbor kills an elk and gives me thirty pounds of elk, I’m like, oh my god, it’s like the greatest thing ever. I’m like, oh, so you’re not done with meat. You’re done with like the factory farming hell that you see in documentaries, which I totally get. So Dan O’Brien’s book is what sent us on this path. And then my next step was like, Okay, I know absolutely nothing. So I literally went to Google and typed in Bison Wrenching Consultant and then there’s amazing guy rolland Cruz who lives in Bozeman and it’s just a general like regenerative ranching consultant. It works a bunch with cattle ranchers, a bunch with bison people. And we met for lunch and Bozeman and I was telling him my story and you kind of cut me off, and he’s like, you should I teach this holistic management workshop on a bison ranch.

00:34:18
Speaker 2: You should come to it.

00:34:19
Speaker 3: And I took it in two ways, One like this would be very beneficial for you, and then two is like a test like are you a dreamer or are you wasting my time? Or are you serious? So I went to his I went to his workshop, and then I came back like all excited, Like to Sarah, I was.

00:34:38
Speaker 2: Like, we we got to do this.

00:34:40
Speaker 3: But I and I still had this like uh, you know, insecurity or just kind of you know, anxiety around it. Of like I just thought, if you didn’t grow up ranching, you couldn’t be a rancher. But I’m like, we’ll just keep putting one foot in front of the other Yeah, that’s pretty reasonable.

00:34:57
Speaker 2: It is, man, And you.

00:34:59
Speaker 1: Know, you something that I wish I had, I kid, but I didn’t mention it. If if if you you folks listening, have ever seen our YouTube video where we worked with some anthropologists and archaeologists to do an experiment with using stone tools to butcher that that was mass place, yep. Yeah, So I should have made that connection because because people love that video and.

00:35:21
Speaker 2: That was one of your animals on your place yep. Yeah. And then we got to eat all that meat. That was good.

00:35:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:35:26
Speaker 3: That was that was that was that. That was such an amazing day. I’ll never forget. Like that morning I said to Sarah, I’m like, look like I don’t know what time would be home, but like eleven midnight.

00:35:38
Speaker 2: Like these the boys are gonna be working with headlights. Just that.

00:35:41
Speaker 3: I’m just like that, that’s the deal. And like four o’clock, you guys were.

00:35:45
Speaker 2: Like we’re good. Yeah, I could believe it.

00:35:47
Speaker 3: Bones were crystal clean, like it was. It was so impressive.

00:35:51
Speaker 2: That good.

00:35:51
Speaker 1: And the other point you made that I wanted to comment on is like not growing up around it.

00:35:57
Speaker 2: Yeah, because that’s the thing.

00:35:59
Speaker 1: When I had out with buddies of mine that grew up around livestock, be like like cattle guys, horse guys, whatever. When they look at something, they see a thing that I don’t see totally do. I mean, like buddies of mine that grew up on you know, they grew up horseback, right, Yeah, I look at a horse. I just see a horse, you know what I mean. I’m like a horse. Maybe I’ll get like and then it’s got an old vibe to it, or I might get that it’s got like a somewhat unpredictable vibe to it. They look at it and they see like its whole history totally.

00:36:32
Speaker 2: They see the history of its parents, you know what I mean.

00:36:34
Speaker 1: They like they just see things not to mention it. And like with cattle, like you know some cows standing there. I’m like, oh, it is a cow standing over there. They’re like, something’s wrong with that cow. That cow’s got whatever the cow is this the cow? Like you can’t. I’ve always felt you you’ll never catch them.

00:36:52
Speaker 2: Nope, you’ll never catch up to them.

00:36:55
Speaker 3: No chance not to mention, Like, you know, they could be standing there and you know, the truck breaks down and they’re like, I’ve got bailing twine, a toothbrush, a cana w D forty and uh, a tin of tobacco. Yeah, and they’ll they’ll fix the truck, like like mind are neighbors, They’re amazing humans and like and yeah, I’ll never you know, I will never have.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: Their level of knowledge.

00:37:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’ll never.

00:37:25
Speaker 3: Catch no chance. And I and I respect the hell out of them, like so much. I’ve learned a ton from them. But but the interesting thing, so when we were when we were going down, you know, I literally I can’t. I would say to Sarah, I’m like, I’m like, I think we can do this, but but I feel like there’s something someone’s not telling us, because like, if you don’t grow up ranching, you can’t be a rancher. And I kind of feel like we can and uh. And then I met a couple guys who were like me, no no background whatsoever, and they were like, you’re gonna make mistakes, like, but not having any background in agriculture, there’s actually there’s a huge advantage to that because you have no no bad habits to unlearn, and you know, there’s no like my last name is Scogland, there’s no like this is the Skogland way of ranching.

00:38:22
Speaker 2: This is how we do it.

00:38:23
Speaker 3: We just say, like what’s best for the animal, the land and the business will do that and so so yeah, so we and and I I mean we could have a four hour podcast about I mean, I burned a truck to the ground, I broke my ankle, the bison got out, been stuck in the mud rolled afore.

00:38:42
Speaker 1: I mean, I can just go on and on all the things you screwed up.

00:38:45
Speaker 3: All the things Like I remember early on laughing with with with one of my neighbors. I was like, after one of my you know, epic you know screw ups, I was like, I’m like, I think you guys have a bet down at the bar of when the Scoglands are gonna go bankrupt. I was like, and now I think there’s a second bet of when when’s Matt gonna die. And there was another time where a neighbor I did something and I was telling my neighbor about it, and he looks at me, dead serious, and he goes, Matt, I’m concerned that you lack agricultural caution. He goes, what’s your wife’s cell phone number? I think we need to have her number, and I look back those cattle producers. The one was a cattle producer. The other one is he rebuilds cars and trucks. And but I look back those first couple of years and I’m like, it’s I feel like it’s a miracle.

00:39:38
Speaker 2: I’m alive.

00:39:39
Speaker 3: But but again on the flip side, and this, this has talked a lot about. This has talked a lot about currently in ranching because a lot of ranches are being passed from you know, the older generation to people our age, and there’s there could be some tension where it’s like, well I’m going to mix things up and the parents or the in laws or whatever, like, no, no, We’ve done it this way for one hundred years, you’re not changing it. So so there’s definitely some advantages to having no background in agriculture. But yeah, I was I felt like, yeah, I just felt like we were missing something, that someone wasn’t telling us, something that that summer of twenty eighteen we were getting started.

00:40:18
Speaker 2: But yeah, we’ve we’ve learned. One thing you were probably missing was land.

00:40:21
Speaker 3: Yeah so that’s so so so so so Yeah. So I came back from the Holistic Management workshop all fired up. You know, I write a business plan, and Sarah’s all in, but she’s like, she’s like, no offense to the rest of America. It’s got to be within an hour of Bozeman because our community is here. And at that point we have two kids and at that point our daughter had just turned one, our son was like four, and and she was like, I’m just not starting over in Colorado or eastern Montana or wherever. And so I looked for land and like the dream died very quickly. But I’m a stubborn person because.

00:41:05
Speaker 2: You couldn’t find any You couldn’t find anything.

00:41:06
Speaker 3: Oh, just so it’s impossible.

00:41:08
Speaker 1: It’s just like so expensive, so expensive. I just came back from a state I don’t even to name the state and.

00:41:15
Speaker 2: Like that’s where you need to go. Yeah.

00:41:18
Speaker 1: No, it’s like I was like, I finally like it’s like a awesome area. And then looking at land prices, I’m like it hasn’t gotten crazy.

00:41:27
Speaker 3: Yeah no, So we were lucky. This is so this is like March of twenty eighteen, and I’m stubborn. So I just kept looking online and looking online, and then I came across this ranch broker’s website and there were these three parcels up in the Shield Valley, which was our that was our ideal area because we love it up there. It’s beautiful and as you know, I mean, it’s hardcore ranching country, you know, so there’s no threat, not a big threat of like subdivision that sort of thing. But when I came across this website, the prices were so low and the website was a little, you know, kind of low tech. I was like, I was like this, this has got to be like ah, this got to be from like two thousand and four. And the guy just never took it down. And but so I called him. The name was Don Vanonmin. So I called him expecting to like, you know, this number has been disconnected, and he was like Don Vannermon and I was like, holy shit.

00:42:25
Speaker 1: And I was like hey, I’m like.

00:42:28
Speaker 3: And I was like Don, I’m like, uh, I’m like these I’m on your website and there’s these three parcels up in the Shield Valley. I’m like, are those for sale? And he’s like you bet you. I’m like, can I go look at him? He’s like, whenever the hell you want. I was like that Saturday, took the kids up expecting to find like a toxic landfill in the middle, and we got there now played out and I was like, holy shit, like this is spectacular. So we came back and I was like, Sarah, I’m like, next weekend, we got to go look at this. And we you know, we did our due diligence, So we kept looking online to see if something else made more sense. That was that that our land. It’s the only land we looked at in person. Nothing ever, nothing else even came close to make us go look at it. And by late May we were like, you know, and this was pre COVID, pre Kevin Kostnery Yellowstone TV show, but even then we were like, the way Bozeman’s going, if we don’t get this under contract, all this work goes up on a shelf, and the way Boseman’s going, it’s never coming off that shelf.

00:43:33
Speaker 2: Yep.

00:43:34
Speaker 3: And so we got it under contract and got as long a closing date as possible. We’re able to pull it together and get across the finish line. But if we didn’t get that, like if we had, if we’d waited a year, two years, there we would reach we wouldn’t be sitting here like it was. There was we found a needle in the haystack in twenty eighteen and we’re damn grateful for it.

00:43:58
Speaker 2: Yeah. You know what I wanted to tell you about is random night.

00:44:04
Speaker 1: A month or two ago we went down to Cody, Wyoming and we gave a talk about We gave it was in we were in coordination with the Buffalo Bill Cody Museum, and we went down the road do because they needed we had needed a little bit of a bigger space, went down the road to like a there’s a hotel, the big convention area, just like a community thing. Yeah, we gave a talk about our Buffalo Hide Hunters audio work called the Hide Hunters. Uh. There was some dude, Like, there’s some dudes there that were real anxious through the whole thing, Like they were there for the comment section. You know, Like you know when you get you ever address an audience. Yeah, so you’ll sometimes if you know, you’re kind of like doing your talk or whatever, you become aware of certain figures you know, that are on fire. And it was like a guy, that’s there’s three of them that were there to to to challenge me as an outspoken advocate, as an outspoken Buffalo advocate, right, like I just I routinely bring up my conviction that we should be doing more and more places to welcome the animals back as wildlife, Like I bring this up.

00:45:24
Speaker 2: He wanted to challenge that. What was surprising to me is they were producers, huh.

00:45:31
Speaker 1: And I always felt that there was like producers, bison producers, bison ranchers, and I always felt that like that that bison ranchers were first and foremost like enthusiasts for the species and they got into it for love of the animal.

00:45:46
Speaker 2: But but they don’t. He didn’t.

00:45:49
Speaker 1: They don’t like that talk, which I thought was so weird. And he kept saying if my animals got out and telling me all the damage that like school children wouldn’t be safe if his animals got I’m like, you know the kind I engaged him for a while and that I said, I’m just gonna like, we’re gonna have to have other people ask questions. I engage them for a minute on it, and it was sort of like, I’m like, I’m not aware of anybody suggesting that your animals be let go. You’re making your you’re setting up a straw man argument about your animals getting out and attacking school children on the road, like, that’s not what we’re discussing. But was surprised by that perspective among the producer community, which I think is an exception rather than the rule. But one of the biggest things that I’m bringing up this whole convoluted story to ask this question of like you have once you get land, you’re not keeping them in with like three strand barb wire, right, So so you like, when you you got property, you you have to be thinking about how to like really confine them. Oh yeah, yeah, that’s a I mean, that’s the thing that was that was part of this guy’s deal is if they’re out right, how you’re not gonna stop them from going anywhere totally? You know.

00:47:18
Speaker 2: It was kind of his argument, right yep.

00:47:20
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, So we when we got the land under contract at the end of May, with the closing date in September, I went into what I called sponge mode, just trying to absorb and learn as much as possible. And I got to visit different ranches, got to visit one of Ted Turner’s ranches and they’re this this great rancher. He actually had bison and cattle on different pastures up in Molt, Montana, north of Laurel, and he connected me with a fencing guy that he had trained on his fencing, and that’s what we put on our place. And it’s awesome our so our fencing people look at it and they’re like, this keeps buffalo win Like are you like because it’s it just looks super weak. It’s uh, our perimeter fence, five wire high tinsel all wildlife friendly, so prong horn can go under, deer elk and moose can go over, and the middle wire is hot and it’s ultimately a psychological barrier like they touched.

00:48:22
Speaker 1: That explain some of that terminology for people like like sure, oh yeah, yeah under like talk about that.

00:48:29
Speaker 2: Yeah, so okay.

00:48:30
Speaker 3: So so you know prong horn iconic species in the West that uh uh you know, second second fastest animal on earth behind the cheetah. They live, you know, their defense mechanism is their speed. So they like to hang out in flat, open country and see what’s coming and they’ll outrun it. And for whatever reason they they they can they can jump fences, but like a lot of them.

00:48:55
Speaker 2: Don’t know that.

00:48:56
Speaker 1: You see it now and then.

00:48:59
Speaker 3: And so they all under fences and there’s a lot of work being done to remove the bottom wire on ranches because in big winters they’ll find dozens of prong horn dead prong horn piled up in the corner of a of a ranch or public round whatever because the snow drifted there and they can’t crawl under the fence and they don’t know then go over. So our fence so high tinsel. It’s just a smooth wire and it’s got a flex to it, so deer, elk and moose can jump over, prong horn can crawl under. I see mule deer do both, like they sometimes crawl under and sometimes jump over.

00:49:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, becausey’ll get a little dug out areas, and they’ll keep using it and use it and it’ll eventually get like a little trough under their exactly yep.

00:49:46
Speaker 3: And and then when I say the middle wire is hot, so it’s it means it’s it’s electrified. So we our whole fence runs off solar and that middle wire is hot and it and and when a if a bison touches it, they get shocked, and they’re super smart, so they learn to avoid it. And then that behavior is passed on down through the herd. So they all avoid the fence. But I say it’s a psychological barrier, because if they wanted to run through it, they could run through it, like like we put our arm through through a spider web. You know, it would take nothing. So I always say, like, if you really want a buffalo proof fence, you need like a fourteen foot brick wall, because any even if it’s barbed wire woven wire, like, they could bust through it. But the great thing you have going for you with bison is their herd instinct is so is still so strong. You know, it’s tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have programmed into them safeties with the herd. They always want to be together, and so it ultimately comes down to your management. As long as they’ve got plenty of grass and water, they’re not looking over the fence line and they want to be together. And it’s funny because this time of year is when we have issues because the grass is starting to grow. They’re excited about that, and the youngsters, like yearlings, they’ll periodically get on the wrong side of the fence, and I would think that they were like when I was sixteen it’s like whoo, I’m I’m going to raise hell and you know, go explore and it’s the opposite. You can you can feel their stress. They’re they’re walking the fence like how do I get back to the herd because I’m I’m I’m vulnerable by myself. So yeah, so so again, And that’s like another example of like people were skeptical of our fencing and now they see the bison on the right side of the fence they’re grazing, they see me field harvesting them, and they’re like, yeah, we’re cool with this.

00:51:44
Speaker 2: How big is a bull?

00:51:47
Speaker 3: So you know, a big mature bowl is is well over two thousand pounds. They’re they’re they’re they’re massive and and their heads. I had to I had to. I had to. I had to field harvest a big bowl last Memorial last year of Memorial Day weekend by myself. And it’s their heads must weigh like two hundred pounds. Like just they’re massive animals.

00:52:14
Speaker 2: And no separate fencing for those.

00:52:16
Speaker 3: No, we just we we run it as one herd year round. Yeah, just you know, because and the thought process there is from a from a land health standpoint, If you zoom out, you know, a thousand years ago, you know, we had tens of millions of buffalo, tens of millions of elk, pronghorn. So the entire West evolved with grazing animals, removing animals from the landscape, totally unnatural. Like the West evolved with animals full stop. Can’t argue that. But the way that they the way that they grazed, like the Gallatin Valley, they you know, thousands of animals would have come in here and they would have grazed, pooped, peed, wallowed, just just made a mess of the place and then and then left for a long time.

00:53:03
Speaker 2: So the West of all.

00:53:04
Speaker 1: To the point where mythologies, like native mythology grew were formed.

00:53:11
Speaker 2: Yes, around where do they go? Where do they go?

00:53:14
Speaker 1: And in many cases, if you look at like like planes, tribes, in many cases you see there are literal interpretations of these, but then there’s also these stories is parable.

00:53:27
Speaker 2: But it’s that they went into a hole in the ground.

00:53:30
Speaker 1: Yep, yep, right, they went into a mountain, because they would be so gone, yeah, you know, and yeah and then all of a sudden they’re back, right, and yeah, it would inspire like mythologies to explain like where do they go?

00:53:43
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I’m endlessly fashionated by that stuff. Like your buddy Dan Flores been on here has his own media to podcast, like his book Wild New World was like that just blew my mind, like just over and over and it’s inching. I was just reading, I mean, I’m a little late to the game and finally reading Braiding sweetcrast amazing book, and she just the chapter I just finished. Because the other thing with what you’re talking about was it was like where did they go?

00:54:09
Speaker 2: And it was like how do we get them back? Like what do we do?

00:54:12
Speaker 3: And I was just reading that some tribes in the Pacific Northwest had the same thing around salmon where they would light light light the grass on fire on a cliff along the ocean, basically sending a signal out to the salmon time to come back, which I thought was super cool And I didn’t know that.

00:54:33
Speaker 1: Man, I gotta tell you, this is such an old This is like from way back in the earliest earliest days of this show of this podcast. Is probably one of my favorite segments we ever did is we were interviewing a mccushy. He was from the Mcushi tribe in South America in Guyana.

00:54:52
Speaker 2: Huh.

00:54:54
Speaker 1: And it was the second time I had gone down there and hung out with them. The first time I went and spent time with the Mkushie, they hunted a lot of tape here. They had a white lipped tape here, So there’s three They’re sorry, I’m not tape here. A packery, so we have like a havelina is a collared packery, there’s a chock owen packery, and then there’s a white lip packery. Huh okay, the white lip packery lives in his huge herts. So like you know, like collared packeries or havelena is you know, you like a big group of those a dozen, twenty whatever.

00:55:32
Speaker 2: White lip packory would be hundreds, got it.

00:55:35
Speaker 1: And they would periodically have white lip packery move through their village areas and they would harvest a whole bunch of these white lip packerys. They hadn’t seen you in a long time, he was telling me, and he’s telling me this on the podcast. He’s explaining that there’s another village that that’s very jealous of our village, and they trained a shaman and that sham has apparently locked our white lip packreas into a mountain.

00:56:05
Speaker 2: Huh.

00:56:07
Speaker 1: We are training up a new shaman who’s developing the skill set necessary to unlock them from the mountain to bring them back, and he’s just like telling us all about this on the show.

00:56:21
Speaker 2: So did they have it be that?

00:56:23
Speaker 1: It was like that, you know, which you imagined to be an ancient wisdom totally on a thing like a podcast. Always just struck me, as Jemmy, I want to go like refine that bit and talk about but it was the same thing.

00:56:38
Speaker 2: I was like, where did they go?

00:56:39
Speaker 3: Where did they go? How do we get them back? And yeah, and like the creation stories, I just find all that stuff like so interesting, fascinating.

00:56:50
Speaker 2: I got y’ all messed up.

00:56:50
Speaker 1: Can you talk about how you gallop that that grazing practice there and not there?

00:56:55
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they’d come in, make a mess the place and then leave for a long time. So the West evolved with high intensity, short duration impact followed by a long recovery. So we have our ranch, so we’re trying to they call it biomimicry, just mimicking nature, and that’s what we’re doing on a vastly smaller scale on our ranch. But we have a cross fence and a whole bunch of different pastures and then the herd just moves around and so whatever pasture they’re in, every other pasture is being rested. And this time of year it’s particularly important because we’ve got all sorts of nesting grassland birds, waterfowl, sandhill cranes. And what happens is you create this mosaic, which is what would have happened a thousand years ago, where you’ve got stuff they haven’t hit yet, and by you know, late June, that grass gets pretty tall. Stuff they grazed, you know, maybe a month ago and that’s like medium, and then stuff they just hammered, that’s like a Walmart parking lot. And because the entire West evolved with this for birds, depending on whether they’re you know, nesting, raising chicks feeding, like, they use all those different habitats differently and so so yeah, so so so that’s what we do in our place. So we run it as one herd year round. So wherever the herd is, the rest of the ranch is being readed. So the bulls always stay with them, yep, yeah, and and and and do they are they.

00:58:18
Speaker 1: Like even though in captivity, are they still following that, like they’re running in June and July, or do you wind up having calves drop in year round?

00:58:28
Speaker 3: Or when we when we started, we we had we had some calves dropping in the fall.

00:58:34
Speaker 2: But now.

00:58:36
Speaker 3: We they’ve they’ve now they uh, we’ve gotten to a point just naturally where uh, yes, that are our herd acts the exact same as Yellstone. So they they the rut, They breed from mid July through the end of August, and then they calve mid April through the end of May. They shed their winter coats in the spring, grow winter coats back in the fall, and then the and then you know, so a bison herd, it’s a matriarchal society. So you’ve got a lead cow that calls the shots, and there’s a whole pecking order there, and the bulls fall in line. But once they’re like three four five, they leave the herd and kind of they’re like, I’m my own man now. And and so we saw that on our place where you know, the herd would be here and then like the breeding bulls would be like four hundred yards over here, and then you’ll, I think you’ll find this interesting. So when we started, we had breeding bulls because that’s how you do it, and the breeding. The breeding bulls are the ones that cause problems, not from a safety standpoint, like they’re they’re like, I mean, I’ve never had an issue with one of our bulls, but because they they have this, you know, I’m my own man mentality, everything’s going great, and then one morning you wake up and they’re like, I’m walk into the crazy mountains today and nothing’s going to stop.

01:00:02
Speaker 2: He’s striking out looking for just.

01:00:04
Speaker 3: What you know, and then for us it becomes extremely stressful. The big thing for me, it’s not like losing a bull or like the economic consequence of that. It’s that we have great relationships with our neighbors and we take that very seriously and we’ve earned their trust. And so if bulls start leaving and walking all over the neighbors rightfully, so it would be like, what’s going on, Matt, Like have you lost control of your animals?

01:00:31
Speaker 2: And so and so.

01:00:33
Speaker 3: While I was kind of struggling with this a year ago, I’m always reading, listening to podcasts, trying to stay on top of the best available science around modern day ranching. And I listened to a podcast with one of Ted Turner’s ranch managers, and he was saying the way on a couple of Turners ranches, they’ve moved away from breeding bulls. And the theory is, with breeding bulls, it’s unnatural because it’s humans selecting the animal for what humans like. And so bison, they’re they’re sexually the mature it. They’re sexually mature it too. So they got rid of all their breeding bulls and they leave they let all the two year olds in there and just let nature work it out. And the theory is the biggest, strongest, highest sex drive bulls are the ones that are going to breed, and that’s who you want to breed. So when we had so when our last breeding bull, well.

01:01:27
Speaker 2: How is that not if he’s a breeding bull? Why is he not a breeding bull?

01:01:31
Speaker 3: So because so before I guess, I guess, so the exactly the other system. You’d have like a six year old bull and an eight year old bull, which are literally more than twice the size of that two year old.

01:01:45
Speaker 1: And that’s who’s most likely to strike out.

01:01:47
Speaker 2: And exactly got it.

01:01:48
Speaker 3: And so when I heard that and then this had this bull that left last Memorial Day weekend, I was like we’re done with breeding bulls, and I just I’m all about having our ranch and our hurt or be as natural as possible, and so that really appealed to me. And so last summer was our first experiment with it, and it was so cool because in June you’ve got all these two year old bulls running around and it’s like kind of whatever. And then by late July there was one guy who I was like, oh, you’re the man, Like he was fighting off other bulls, like he clearly was the guy.

01:02:23
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:02:24
Speaker 3: And then and then we work our animals once a year in the winter where we move them into corral and you know, ear tag the calves and we preg checked the females. So I was kind of curious to see what this experiment would do. And last year was our our highest breed up rate ever. So all of our cows that were supposed to be bred, only one wasn’t. And and so now this, you know, letting, letting a bunch of two year olds take care of it is our past go forward.

01:02:53
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s kind of cool.

01:02:54
Speaker 1: Huh, Hey, did you find like when you’ve had him break out and go, do they want to go a certain direction? Sure?

01:03:00
Speaker 2: Is it random? It’s random. It is.

01:03:02
Speaker 3: It’s totally random, and and it fortunately, you know, it’s only happened a handful of times. And I remember the first, the big one that we had three breeding bulls. They all left and I was like freaking out and I called a mentor and he’s like, look, he’s like, I know you’re freaking out and you want to go chase him. He’s like that’s the worst thing you could do. He’s like, there’s just nothing you can do. And he’s like, I’m convinced they have a homing instinct and like they’re going to come back. And this was on a Friday, went out Friday night, couldn’t find them or didn’t see them. Saturday morning, not there, Saturday night, not there. Sunday morning. I’m like on the edge of like, you know, panic attack. Not there Sunday afternoon. There they are, like they never left. And I was like, you sons of bitches, but yeah, and but yeah, no, they have like a homing instinct where they they come back.

01:03:56
Speaker 1: Do you do you get scared around those big bulls.

01:03:59
Speaker 3: No, Nope, you don’t.

01:04:00
Speaker 1: You don’t have you don’t do anything like you just want you’d walk right up the.

01:04:03
Speaker 3: Wow, I should say no with an asterisk, which is I do you know I wouldn’t like I would never walk up and try to scratch one by the ear.

01:04:13
Speaker 1: Sure it would kill me, but you’d be out doing your work. And yeah, I mean I kind of.

01:04:16
Speaker 2: I always.

01:04:19
Speaker 3: I’ve I’ve been charged a couple of times by our lead cow. I mean like like like like she was coming, she was coming. This was not a game where I had to dive over a fence dive into the truck. So now I always make sure that the truck or side by side is relatively nearby. But you can you can read their body language. And yeah, the big bulls non event never had an issue like zero. It’s the it’s the old cows that you got to watch out for.

01:04:49
Speaker 1: That’s who’s coming.

01:04:52
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

01:04:53
Speaker 3: The first one just a funny story. It was our first summer and I was doing a pasture move and when I move them, I pull them, I don’t push them, so like I get their attention, and they’re so smart they know what I’m doing. So they follow me to the next pasture where there’s a whole bunch of fresh grass waiting. But this day there was this wetland and I had to get on the other side of the wetland to move them across, and I did it on foot, and I had zero issues up to this point. And it’s this beautiful spring day. The whole herd’s walking in front of me, and I’m like, you know, and every day that I’m out there, it’s never lost on me that I’m a kid from Chicago. Yeah, I’m like, I will never get used to it, Like hopefully I live to be like ninety. When I’m eighty nine, I all wake up and be like this is crazy. I can’t believe I do this, Like I just you know. And so I’m like walking and like the mountains are covered in snow and I’m like, man, I’m like I’m the Bison whisper, like look at this, you know, and They’re all I’m just looking at all these butts. And then all of a sudden, it like took a second to register and this number four is coming like full tilt. I was like, holy shit, and I ran. I mean, I must have run like a three nine forty to the fence and I did this awkward, crazy superman hive over the fence and she stopped and was like pawn at the ground and the first thing I did was look up and down the road to make sure no neighbors saw because it would be like just hear all about that. More humiliation from that. But ever since that, I’m like, wow, that was a close call. But yeah, it’s really the old cow is the only ones that that that you have to worry about?

01:06:35
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, yeah? So, uh tell me how the like the.

01:06:44
Speaker 1: Sale process? Sure, like what is a what is an animal that you know? How are you making your determination? Like who’s going to stay around as breeding stock and replacement haffers?

01:06:57
Speaker 2: Yep? Right?

01:06:58
Speaker 1: Like how many? How many calves you get out of a cow?

01:07:01
Speaker 2: Sure? How do you determine what I’m going to sell? This many? You know what I mean?

01:07:04
Speaker 1: Like like, what’s all that dynamic? Like I guess herd dynamics or demographics? What’s that look like?

01:07:09
Speaker 3: Yeah?

01:07:09
Speaker 4: So so so we so we we We had a significant expansion last summer, which is exciting.

01:07:21
Speaker 3: So are you know are we’re now trying to figure out what those numbers look like. But for the last several years, the easiest way to explain it is like June one to June one, So June one last year, we had let’s say, fifty five cows with a calf by their side, so fifty five pairs, fifty five yearlings and fifty five two year olds. Over the course of the year, I field harvest basically all of the two year olds, keep a few replacement heifers because we know all a few a few open cows. And then June one, this year we should have fifty five cows with a calf by their side, and then last year’s calves become yearlings, the yearlings become two year olds.

01:08:06
Speaker 2: We just do it again, okay.

01:08:08
Speaker 3: And then and so basically, and then when we when we work the animals in the winter, any open, non bred cow immediately becomes a meat animal.

01:08:19
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:08:20
Speaker 3: And for two reasons, or for three reasons. One, we’re not Ted Turner. We don’t have one hundred and ten thousand acre ranch. Two, we’re working to build just a super healthy, self sufficient herd where they thrive on our landscape. The cows have a calf in April, May, they’re bred back in July and August, and they just do it year after year. And if any year they don’t get bread, they’re out of here.

01:08:50
Speaker 2: And I mean you got to have something to sell to support the whole thing.

01:08:53
Speaker 3: So yeah, and then the third one is our demand, like we have we are demand ex seed supply, so it does.

01:08:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we you have to turn away business.

01:09:02
Speaker 3: Not necessarily not turn away business, but we just we always have a long wait list and I do very little traditional sales and marketing because we’ve just we’ve got these amazing customers. We’ve got this amazing customer base. It’s very loyal. I mean, at the end of the day, I always say, it’s like we could have you know, the prettiest bison, the most beautiful mountains, cute kids, great storytelling, but if the meat tastes like shit, no one’s gonna buy from us, right, Like, you buy a quarter bison, eighty five pounds of bison meat and you eat your way through it. At the end of that when you reorder, Like, to me, that’s a great sign that they’re like that was worth them going to do it again, yep. And so so basically our meat animals are essentially all of our two year olds and then open cows and that that that that’s it.

01:10:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, got it?

01:10:03
Speaker 1: How many how many calves will the cow is a cow, good for it, or you haven’t hit that.

01:10:08
Speaker 2: You haven’t hit it yet.

01:10:09
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, we haven’t hit it hit right, But I mean when we so when we started it. So our bison arrived January twenty nineteen. We bought all of them from these two awesome ranches just west a showdo along the Rocky mountain front. And you know, and and so some of those cows are now like fifteen sixteen years old, still having a calf every spring, red back July and August and doing It’s it’s unbelievable.

01:10:38
Speaker 2: What about twins.

01:10:40
Speaker 3: We’ve had a few cases. We’ve had a few sets of twins. It’s rare, you know, in our case. Yes, I’ve always been nervous because you hear these stories the way mom picks one ye, and I’ve watched with a close eye, and to my knowledge, all of our twins have made it like the way like when the when the when they first start calving, like right now, like I was out there last night and we’ve got you know, there are a couple of calves born yesterday. It’s very obvious to tell whose calf is with which mom. Like the moms are amazing, Like those calves are like under their chin. But through the summer, once you’ve got you know, fifty sixty calves running around and they’re feeling a little bolder and they’re running, you.

01:11:20
Speaker 2: Can’t keep track of who’s who.

01:11:21
Speaker 3: Ye, But to my knowledge, like I watched those twins very closely early on and then at some point just never noticed and never found a dead calf.

01:11:31
Speaker 2: So do you let them self wean? Oh?

01:11:34
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, so that’s a great You never have to you never have to pull them off. Yeah. It’s like, so like, because you’re only selling two year olds.

01:11:41
Speaker 3: Well, the main thing is we’re just we’re not We run it as one herd year round, and so there’s lots of things we do that are like not traditional. But I look at it and I’m like, weaning, weaning stressful. The science is clear that the longer that calf, whether it’s an elk calf, a black angus, or a prong horn, like, the longer that that calf or a fawn and a prong horn, the longer that animals on mom, the healthier that animal is going to be for the rest.

01:12:09
Speaker 2: Of its life.

01:12:10
Speaker 3: And so I was like, and then weaning is stressful. It’s time intensive, labor intensive, for you. Yeah, and so I was like, why would we wean? So we don’t wean it all. We just we let mom take care of that. And we’re not selling live animals. We run it as one herd. So yeah, so we don’t we don’t wean at all. We just let mom do it.

01:12:29
Speaker 1: When you go out to field harvest, one, do you know who, like, because you got numbers and you’re watching the whole.

01:12:35
Speaker 3: Thing occasionally but very rare. So typically it’s like if I’m driving out there in August, like in August, I know I’m going to field harvest a two year old bull and it’s the first two year old bull that provides me with the perfect shot. And the perfect shot is.

01:13:00
Speaker 1: Because you don’t know who’s like, you don’t like you’re not genetically testing them, you don’t know what bowl is.

01:13:07
Speaker 3: Doing what Yeah, yeah, no, just totally, So I just drive out and and and so the perfect shot is a bull that’s like standing kind of on an angle like broadside, looking at me ten to fifteen yards away, head up, and then I aim an inch above the eyes and it’s just I mean, when I pull the trigger, it’s lights out. Like people always say, they’re like oh, man, you know I love your ranch because you know, the bison only have one bad day. And I’m like, oh no, no, I’m like, no bad day. I’m like, they’re literally standing there, like yesterday, this bull he’s standing there, grass in his mouth, next to his buddy, looking at me. They know me, they know the truck just kind of like, you know, chewing his chewing his grass, and then it’s just instant outer space and so yeah. So but and then if I have a group of two year old bulls, I’ll look him over and see like who’s the most developed, yeah, and pick him out. But it’s funny. I’ve had multiple times where let’s just say, you know, number four twenty six, I’m like about to shoot him, and then he moves and then three twenty two walks in. I’m like, oh, I guess I’ll take you, and then boom, and then I’ll be out a couple of days later, and four twenty six I’ll walk by. I was like, man, you have no idea, like you came that close.

01:14:24
Speaker 2: So yeah, and then you’re you gut them yourself. Yeah.

01:14:28
Speaker 3: So my process is so if I’m just doing one drive out, boom drop it, and well i says to back up.

01:14:38
Speaker 2: So, part of our thing.

01:14:41
Speaker 3: Is connecting people to where their food comes from and demystifying the death process involved in food production and consumption, because most places, you know, the death part, it’s locked in the basement, pad locked, poured over with concrete. And in our case, I always I talk about how like, in our case, the death is beautiful. You know, It’s like death is essential to life. And we’re all killing shit, whether it’s for what we eat, what we drive, what we wear, the phones in our pockets, like, we’re all killing stuff. It’s just whether you’re aware of it or not. And in our in our case, that bison like yesterday, conceived on the ranch, born on the ranch, lived his whole life on the ranch, standing there with his buddy grass in his mouth.

01:15:27
Speaker 2: Lights out.

01:15:27
Speaker 3: I mean, it’s as good as it gets. And I lost my train of thought.

01:15:34
Speaker 2: What was well? What was I asking about? Yeah, you’re asking about.

01:15:39
Speaker 3: You’ve gutting yourself myself? Yeah, so bison drop. Oh. So part of it’s connecting people to where their food comes from. So when I drive out yesterday, I take a picture of the herd and then boom drop the bison. And then I take a picture of a dead bison on the ground, never anything bloody or gory, and make very like I, you know, but but very clearly like that’s a dead bison. And then I lift it up with the bale bed, which is a flat bed on the back of a pickup that has two arms that can go out. It’s built for feeding round bails, but it’s And then I take two six foot toe straps and put one around the front legs, one around the hind legs. I lift it up and slid its throat to bleed it, and then I drive and then drive it to a different pasture, cut the head off and save the tongue in the cheeks.

01:16:29
Speaker 1: And then I got, well, you gave me some of those cheeks one time too, Yeah, yeah, Or you.

01:16:32
Speaker 2: Gave me a tongue the other day.

01:16:33
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:16:33
Speaker 2: You know what I did with that? That one, I just boiled down. Yeah.

01:16:38
Speaker 1: I put it in a slow cooker, Okay, so I can slip the skin on it. Sometimes I’ll smoke and whatever, but I just did that so I can slip the skin and then cut it and fried it like like spam. Oh oh my god, it’s good man. I was crisp in it. I’m bolted, so it’s crispy but soft in the middle.

01:16:53
Speaker 3: I’m embarrassed. I’ve never cooked the only tongue of ours that I’ve had you, I gave you a few extra tongues, and as a just kindness of your heart, you cooked a couple for us, and you smoked him and cured him and you were like, just slice it thin and oil with some pan. And our kids like they’ve grown up eaten heart like when I could. Like, our dog had an injury a couple of years ago and I was cooking him some bison heart to like boost morale, and my kids were like, came.

01:17:28
Speaker 2: In the kitchen. They’re like, are you cooking bison heart? And they just start grabbing at it.

01:17:31
Speaker 3: I’m like, you assholes, Like that’s for ed. So they’re like very adventurous eaters. But I was like, tongue, maybe that’ll weird them out. And so I said, hey, guy, having bison steak, And I sliced it and I’ll never one of them said they took like two bites and they go, Dad, this is meat candy, And then the other one said can we eat this every night? It was like anyways, so yeah, save the tongue in the cheeks and then I gut it and I save heart liver kidney hanging tender, get it back on the truck drive to Amsterdam. They skin it and they cut the tail off, so the it’s the tongue, cheeks, heart liver kidneys hanging tender and you hand that over hand that over that goes on like an organ tree. Ye, and then they and then they they skin it, dry, age it, cut it, wrap it, et cetera.

01:18:22
Speaker 2: And they and then the hide goes to you sell the hide.

01:18:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we have a guy that we work with in between three forks in Butte, and he’s like he’s a hide guy, Like he builds boats, tpees, lodges, all sorts of things. And so he’ll he’ll either meet me at Amsterdam and buy the hide like fresh when it’s skinned, or I’ll throw it in a bag, put in the freezer and he’ll pick it up later. And then occasionally we get a tanned one back and we’ll sell that as a blanket, but they’re kind of far in few between.

01:18:56
Speaker 2: Then we get back got it.

01:18:57
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I don’t know if you ever heard just putt at the fulsome kill site yep.

01:19:04
Speaker 2: The ice age. Yeah, you know, it’s an ice age buffalo kill site. Yep.

01:19:08
Speaker 1: In that bone bed, there’s no I thought it was interesting. In that bone bed there are no.

01:19:13
Speaker 3: Tailbones, huh, because they did.

01:19:17
Speaker 2: To haul them away with the hides. Yeah.

01:19:18
Speaker 3: No, that the tails you know, it’s it’s like a shank. You gotta slow cook it in liquid for a long time. But it’s the flavors like ye insane and it’s a good handle for dragging the hide around exactly.

01:19:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, So they do that, they cut the thing off that the hide goes to get tanned.

01:19:34
Speaker 2: Yep.

01:19:35
Speaker 1: And then and then you have but then you have dudes that have ordered the stuff.

01:19:40
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:19:40
Speaker 1: So yeah, who ships that out? You got you ship it out?

01:19:43
Speaker 2: We do it yeah.

01:19:43
Speaker 3: So so so so we sell by the quarter half whole buffalo. We sell one hundred direct to consumer. I’d say half our customers are in Montana, half all over the country. So yesterday, so we have one employee and Davidson, amazing person, huge meat eater fan. He worked two days a week for us and he’s in charge of like the whole fulfillment process. So the way it works is somebody goes on our website. They put a deposit down for a quarter and a half or a hole and then oh yeah, to go full circle. When it’s at Amsterdam skinned and they cut it down the backbone, I take a picture of that, and then the day after the field harvest, I’ll send those pictures to our customers. It say, you know, hey, Steve, I field harvested your bison yesterday morning on the ranch. Beautiful spring morning, blah blah blah. Few photos attached, and then there’s the herd on the ground. And so it’s just like they you know, sometimes people don’t reply, but most people love.

01:20:45
Speaker 1: It so they can see it. Come they can see it. It’s like connecting them.

01:20:49
Speaker 3: You know, it’s like this is the animal you’ll be eating, and you know, we’re just all about transparency and connecting people to the process, and so so yeah, they skin it dry agent Amsterdam’s amazing, just great butchers, and then they ultimately, you know, it’s beautifully packaged, wrapped, frozen, labeled, boxed. Ethan goes and picks it up and if it’s local person, he delivers it and then for people around the country, we ship on Monday for Wednesday arrival and he takes care of all of it and he does a really great job with it.

01:21:24
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:21:25
Speaker 3: So it’s yeah, so like yesterday he shipped where did he ship yesterday? Oh, got shipped one to San Francisco and then one to Minneapolis.

01:21:39
Speaker 2: So yeah, we’ve got it.

01:21:40
Speaker 3: And that was a whole I mean, yeah, a whole nother learning curve was like learning how to you know, boxes, insulation, dry ice ups and you’ll you know, you have three kids, you’ll appreciate, you know, I mean one as a first generation rancher. Like the only way this works is keeping our costs down. So people often think we’re much bigger than we are. Like it’s like I do almost everything and then Ethan helps out and then we work with Amsterdam. So early on we shipped, I shipped. We didn’t have any employees. I shipped everything out of our house and I’d like, I’d go get the meat and dry ice from Safeway in the boxes and get everything ready. And I remember this one time out uh, and we charge like on a quarter. We charged by the amount of meat you get back, Okay, And so I was like packaging the meat and I turned grab something and then I turn around and my daughter is sitting in the box. I’m like, I joked the way I wasn’t concerned about shipping Greta to like, you know, Chicago. But my concern was like the next morning having coffee and being like, what’s that under the couch and there’s like four ribbuys that she stashed. So we were like, we need office space. But anyway, so we just we’ve we’ve learned, and now we’ve got it, you know, dialed with great boxes, insulation made out of recycled paper, dry ice, and and then the only thing is like in the heart of winter, if we’ve got a blizzard coming.

01:23:14
Speaker 2: We’ll just we won’t ship. We just just we won’t run the risk of having it having something spoiled.

01:23:18
Speaker 1: Yeah, So how like how confident are you now that you’ve got it, Like, do you know what I mean, do you still worry that the whole thing is gonna collapse? Or do you feel like you got it you got to like figure it out where you’re comfortable or is anxiety high?

01:23:38
Speaker 3: That’s a great question. It’s I’d say a lot of both. Like when we started it, I mean I vividly remember that first year. I would literally be like I’d get an email I’d be like, hey, Sarah, we got an email, like like literally, or I get a voice I’m like, man, that’s pretty cool somebody called me. Now, just keeping up with the emails and voicemails is almost impossible. So we’re in a different place, but I still like we are not dancing in the end zone, like you’re still you gotta you know both from a like I guess to answer your question, it’s like there’s two parts, right, there’s the customer business sales side, and I’ll never relax on that, like you know, you just I mean what you know, businesses fail, like you lose your customer. So I’m just like I preach it all the time, like we just we really strive for excellence, like from the moment someone places in order to when that meat shows up on their doorstep, like we just we really provide like an amazing customer experience all the way through and then we try to provide them with the best red meat they’ll ever taste. So I feel good about it, like we’ve got we’ve amazing momentum, great customers, more people finding us, but I never take that for granted. And then on the ranching side, we’ve I’ve made plenty of mistakes, learned a lot from it, and uh, it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s way more dialed. But you’re still dealing with bison. So there’s you know, there’s still some low grade anxiety, particularly this time of year, just like they get grass crazy where they’re like green grass, green grass, Where do I find green grass? And but I’d say from where I was eight years ago, it’s you know, more like a two out of ten, where like you know, early on it was it was I was nervous.

01:25:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, that anxiety takes a long It takes a long time to dissipate, even when the risk goes away.

01:25:51
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:25:52
Speaker 1: I remember when when I was trying to when I was like set my mind to being a writer, you know, yeah, yeah, intense crippling, intense anxiety about how to make it work and then.

01:26:05
Speaker 2: It works.

01:26:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you still sleep with one eye open. Oh man, No, I know, I like for all the years you sleep with one eye open, You’re just so.

01:26:15
Speaker 3: Like, no, it grips you. I mean early on, like am I going to fail?

01:26:21
Speaker 2: Oh? Big time?

01:26:22
Speaker 3: And that was yeah, that was like that summer of twenty eighteen, what really did it? Because again people thought we were totally nuts, but it was like we could see it and I’d put so much work into it, and it was just one of those things where I was like, uh, if we don’t like we might, we might horrifically crash and burn. But we gotta, we gotta try it because if we don’t, I’ll regret it forever. And I and what really did it for me is I was like, I’d like, I’d rather go for it and fail than never have tried. And that’s what got us over the hump to jump off the cliff. But yeah, man, that that anxiety I’ve I’ve had it so bad. Where like it was a few it was four years ago, and when it was that when those bulls took off one of the other, when they came back, one of them, he got a taste for the North Bridges and he just started going. And there was there was a time where he he took off for eight days, nobody saw him.

01:27:28
Speaker 2: I didn’t get a single.

01:27:28
Speaker 3: Phone, and I laughed, like at one point I was like, you can only have an acute stress response for so long. So like like by day five, I was like, I don’t know how this is gonna end. Like somebody’s gonna call me from White Sulfur or like Manhattan, Montana. But like at this point, I have no idea. And then eight days later he came back. But I but like when that was going on, I remember saying to Sarah, I’m like, I think, I’m I think I think I’m losing control of this whole thing. I think this whole thing is about to blow up, because I was I was just convinced that like he’s going he’s gonna teach others to start going the neighbor We’re gonna lose the neighbors, rightfully, so they’re gonna be like what that you know this is you can’t do this? So yeah, that anxiety and I think you just you know, it’s like a muscle. You you train it and get used to it, and it’s just kind of the volume turns down and and then each time you go through an event like that and come out the other side of it, you’re like, okay, like that worked out, Okay.

01:28:32
Speaker 1: But do you do you ever when when that’s happened to you, do you call your neighbors?

01:28:38
Speaker 2: Yes?

01:28:41
Speaker 3: Uh, it depends if it’s like if it’s quick, and I think he’s gonna come back. I don’t, but on that one, that one I let the neighbors know. And our neighbors are just they’re just great, like they they just the thing that one of the many things I love about ranchers, they have like some of the best senses of humor. Like I just think you have to because you’re dealing with animals and weather and all this shit that’s outside of your control. And if you don’t find humor in it, you’ll just go you’ll go nuts. And I remember this, this one neighbor, my one neighbor, Rick, who’s a great rancher, great guy. This like mud season out there, as you know, it’s just it’s real, and it’s like the mud. The mud is the hardest part of the job. Like it’s demoralizing. It just beats you up. You get stuck. And this one day I was just in like I was struggling with the mud. I was just pissed off. And Rick drove by, rolls his window down dead pan, looks at me, and it’s like, find any mud, And it turned my whole day around. I laughed my ass off, and so and so no our neighbors and so that one bowl it was a neighbor that texted me and said, your bowl’s back.

01:29:56
Speaker 2: Oh really yeah, And I was like.

01:29:58
Speaker 3: I’m like I’m on it, and so.

01:30:00
Speaker 1: Do you have any like if that happens, you just do you have to just go shoot him or can you get him back in?

01:30:06
Speaker 3: So early on, so those ones fortunately came back, and then that guy, that guy, he became like a legend, like at Amsterdam. They they I would you know, they knew my I told him my SOB story many times. And they’re they’re the best. Like so normally, you know, I have I have dates and times on the calendar, so like yesterday it’s like, all right, Monday, April twentieth, Matt’s bringing us two bison at two o’clock.

01:30:36
Speaker 2: Yep.

01:30:37
Speaker 3: And they’re very ritt they’re they’re they’re fairly rigid about that. I mean, they work with us, like they give us a lot of flexibility. But you can’t just call him on a Tuesday morning and be like, yeah, I’m bringing one in there. They have their schedule. And with that one, they said, Matt, whenever you can kill him, you kill him, and you just bring him here seven o’clock at night, doesn’t matter.

01:30:58
Speaker 2: We’ll take care of you get it figured out.

01:31:00
Speaker 3: And and I remember we were all the whole herd was on one side of the dirt road. And one night we’re eating dinner and I look out the window and there’s this one buffalo walking on the other side of the road.

01:31:13
Speaker 2: And I was like, son of a bitch.

01:31:16
Speaker 3: I was like, otta get in the truck, and we drove over and we just watched him, and he just he literally like walked to the ranch and took off for three more days. And then and then last year Memorial Day, that bolt took off and he was in When I got there, he was in with a neighbor’s cows.

01:31:39
Speaker 2: And the neighbor was not happy.

01:31:42
Speaker 3: And nor would I have been if I was in issues and that that talk about anxiety. I was that my there’s two two neighboring ranchers looking at me on a Sunday morning, and they were like, what are you gonna do? And my like my stress I was. I could barely think, and I was like, I’m gonna kill it. Say I’ll be back, and I sprinted home, grabbed my rifle, sprinted back, hopped in my neighbor’s side by side, and we drove out and fortunately he walked right towards us, dropped him, and then everything shifted like next thing, you know, they’re taking pictures smiling, laughing, and I felt like and I feel like that bought, you know again, just more kind of street cred in the community of like one of Matt’s bulls got out, but he was here in six minutes and that thing was on the ground.

01:32:35
Speaker 1: So on the flip side, have you ever looked out your window and saw that there’s a domestic cow?

01:32:40
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, and then same thing. I’ll text him, and then our neighbors were like, so apologiz, oh yeah, we’ll come get it. So uh and yeah, I’ve uh and yeah. So it’s it’s, it’s it’s you know, it took a little while to get there, but we’re in a good, good spot, you know with the neighbors.

01:32:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, good man. Yeah, yeah, Well I appreciate you coming on and talk about it.

01:33:00
Speaker 2: Oh man, this is awesome. So but if dudes want to order something from you, like there’s a line.

01:33:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s it’s not.

01:33:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:33:06
Speaker 3: We so I field harvest year round. I mean I mean right now, you know, every Monday or every other Monday, so I always you know, I just get I’m sensitive to. Like, if someone placed an order today and you know, I wasn’t field harvesting regularly and they didn’t get their meat for three months, they’d be like, dude, what’s the deal?

01:33:27
Speaker 2: But what does your do?

01:33:29
Speaker 1: You does your site tell people when to expect it?

01:33:31
Speaker 3: No, But when they place an order, I get the deposit, I see the email come through, and I email them the next day and I say, based on our weight list in my field harvest schedule, I expect to field harvest your bison this week. And that way they’re like, oh, okay, good, I’ve heard from Matt he’s gonna field harvest it in three weeks. So the weight list is never you know, like if someone placed the order today, I would definitely be able to field harvest in the next month.

01:33:56
Speaker 1: Okay, So I’m always trying by weight list. Mean, it’s not like like your ship twenty four hours later or something like that.

01:34:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, it’s it’s it’s they place an order and then they wait a few weeks for me to kill it, and then a couple of weeks for it to be dry aged and cut and wrapped, and then they get it. So yeah, you just basically suit. We try to super simple. I mean, we ultimately consider ourselves an e commerce company.

01:34:17
Speaker 1: Mm hm.

01:34:17
Speaker 3: You come to our website Northbridge Bison dot com and our options are there, place your deposit, I email you and what and I guess. Lastly, what’s been super cool again because we try to really provide that customer experience is I have multiple customers who I would consider good friends at this point, never met them in person, but like, they email me articles, I email them stuff, they send me cooking photos. So it’s been, it’s been. It’s been fun getting to know our customers.

01:34:45
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, if you want to see if you guys want to see MAT’s place, go what well, I can’t remember what the name of that video?

01:34:51
Speaker 2: Oh, Phil, what’d you find out about hangar stakes?

01:34:53
Speaker 3: Yeah?

01:34:53
Speaker 5: I was gonna hop in here really quick. It helps, Uh. It facilitates the contraction of the diaphragm during breathing and other throats to okay.

01:35:02
Speaker 1: Good to know, Okay, yeah, yeah, he’d be fine, he’d be finding out he’d just be breathing. He’d have a labored breathing. Yeah yeah.

01:35:13
Speaker 2: Facility hit me with it again. Facilitates the breed.

01:35:16
Speaker 5: It’s a part of it’s depending on the animal, but that that it’s called the legs of the diaphragm or the kruer I guess is the Latin Latin term, but it’s it has to do with like the spinal cord and the diaphragm and some esophagus function.

01:35:30
Speaker 1: H huh there, going straight from film, All right, why did I even want?

01:35:35
Speaker 2: Why did I bring that up? No idea. We just knew that we had to cover off on it.

01:35:39
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, we because we didn’t neither one of us knew what the hanging tender actually did.

01:35:43
Speaker 2: And then the other thing, Phil, can you find out the name?

01:35:45
Speaker 1: Do you mind looking up the name of that video we filmed Matts when we cut the when we cut the bison up with the stone tools, the Clovis.

01:35:51
Speaker 5: Tool, it’s called Butchering of Bison with Clovis points and tools.

01:35:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that was filmed.

01:35:56
Speaker 6: That’s kind of when we main and we knew each other, but that’s not when we mainly connected can connected to met So if you go watch go to YouTube and watch that video, type in like meat eater, bison, Clovise points or something, you’ll find it.

01:36:09
Speaker 2: And that’s kind of a little bit of a glimpse at your place exactly. Yeah.

01:36:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, And that was a cool day. That was That was such an awesome.

01:36:15
Speaker 1: Day when I was eating my u some parts of that, some of the steaks and stuff we had on that, and we had a lot of ground too.

01:36:21
Speaker 2: But I remember a couple of times I hit little stone flakes. Oh did you Yeah?

01:36:24
Speaker 1: Oh cool, just a little bit little stone flake.

01:36:26
Speaker 2: That’s awesome. That’s part of the experience.

01:36:28
Speaker 1: I love it.

01:36:29
Speaker 2: Oh, that’s great. That’s great.

01:36:31
Speaker 1: All right, man, thanks for coming on. Good luck and good luck keep doing your business.

01:36:34
Speaker 2: Man.

01:36:34
Speaker 1: It’s been cool to It’s been fun to know you and eat some of your stuff and go out there and see it all.

01:36:40
Speaker 3: No, I appreciate it. I so appreciate what you all do here at Meat Eater, and I love partner with you guys. So it’s been a lot of fun for me too.

01:36:48
Speaker 1: I like that, like you got like that good American elbow grease. Man, let’s just in there doing it, you know, absolutely figuring stuff out.

01:36:54
Speaker 2: So I appreciate it. Thank you, Thanks coming on. Cool