A Corner of the Buffalo Commons
July 21st, 2010Located in the northwestern corner of what is commonly referred to as “Buffalo Commons,” New Rockford, ND serves as the center of the bison (aka ‘American buffalo) processing industry in America.
And I was there, overlooking the kill floor from my desk for one whole summer.
Well, actually, only five days a week from eight in the morning until five at night, then the rest of the time was mine. Or rather, for my second weekend job.
That first week in the office, the CEO of the company casually asked me what I had going on over the weekends. Telling him a quick list of things on my to do list for the summer (weddings, a few weekends home), he asked if I thought I could work on his ranch on the weekends.
For a guy driving an old Pontiac Le Mons (whose heater wouldn’t shut off…or when he did, the car would overheat…which leads me to ask, Le Mons, or lemons….) and trying to pay his way through university, extra money always perked my ears up.
Any free weekend, I was more than welcome to make the trek seventy miles to the north and work on the ranch, just north of Leeds. The jobs would vary, but for a farm kid living in a big city like New Rockford (population 1,400), any chance to make it out of the city and back onto a farm was a good one.
The pay was better than the office job too!
But this wasn’t just any ranch, this was a bison ranch. On the rolling lands of central North Dakota, in an era of depressed wheat prices, what better way to make a marginal farm pay for itself then through a specialty product like bison. It tasted better then beef, was healthier, and people paid a lot more money.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. On the one hand, I knew that most ranches, the work was pretty ordinary farm stuff, things that I had grown up with. Making hay, fixing fences, feeding the cattle in the yards, and occasionally working cattle.
On a bison ranch, I didn’t know quite what to expect. How do you rope a bison? What type of a fence would you need? What type of hay do they eat? What do you feed them? How in the heck would you work them?
The first Saturday, I showed up in my farm gear - jeans, pocket-tee, leather belt, and my steel toed work boots about 7:30am, getting geared up for the 8:00am start.
The boss, my weekday bosses partner showed up about 8:15am, moving pretty slow.
“Is it just us two today?” I asked.
“Naw, the rest will be along in a bit.” He said.
Sure enough, about 9am, the group of high school and college students came rolling in, not all too excited to start work on a nice Saturday…when they could be sleeping off the Friday night…
But start work we did. Like back home, we were going to make fence. But not exactly like back home.
Walking back to where we were going to build a corral, I was met by a stack of hacked off telephone poles, one inch solid steel sucker rod, and pails of metal clips.
One thing was very obvious, bison required a little sturdier fence then cattle. My experience of setting fence posts (though never this deep) and putting up rails (though never of solid steel) came in pretty handy that weekend as we slowly bolted, screwed, and manhandled the corral into being.

