Monday, January 24, 2011

Plains Giants Have Foothold on Tables

The nation’s buffalo ranchers have no catchy marketing slogan about what’s for dinner, and no big trade association budget to pay for making one up. What they have these days are people like Joe and Matt Gould, an ambitious father-and-son team from western Kansas who branched out after 100 years of traditional cattle ranching by their family, and bought their first buffalo herd last year. The Goulds, with 40 animals as a start, made their first delivery of buffalo meat, also known as bison, to friends here in Denver last week. They are opening a themed restaurant on the Kansas-Colorado border supplied by the ranch, and planning bison hunts for tourist-visitors. “People want the high omega-3s,” which are healthy fats, said Joe Gould, 61, as he scribbled notes at a mentoring session for buffalo-ranching newcomers at the National Bison Association’s winter conference at a hotel here last week. With prices and American consumption of buffalo at all-time highs — though still minuscule in volume compared with beef, chicken or pork — a new chapter is clearly beginning for one of the oldest animal-human relationships on the continent, dating back millennia before the first Europeans arrived.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You don't have to eat buffalo to get high Omega 3 from meat. Try grass fed beef.