As environmental consultants, Patrick and Rebecca Ries of Marengo work on projects around the country. A few years ago, their work took them to the same South Dakota bison ranch where Kevin Costner filmed his Academy Award-winning movie “Dances With Wolves.”
They couldn’t help but be impressed by the sight of hundreds of bison–taller, stronger and wilder animals than beef cattle–grazing over the ranch’s rolling plain. They also got an idea: meat.
High-protein, low-fat, native-to-America meat.
Thus was born Bluestem Bison and its slogan, “The original American red meat.”
“We were two professionals frustrated with city life who really wanted to be in the country,” Rebecca Ries said by way of explaining their venture into the bison business and an earlier beef cattle operation. The Bluestem name comes from a prairie grass that bison love to eat. Coincidentally, it is also the Illinois state grass.
Although the Rieses’ main line of work continues to be environmental consulting, Bluestem Bison meats is becoming a profitable sideline business. Butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants in Crystal Lake, Elmhurst, Harvard, Hinsdale, Huntley, Marengo, Rockford and Union sell their meats.
The Rieses also sell bison meat, as well as bison hides and skulls, from a dairy barn milkhouse on their property that they have converted to a small store.
“The retail business has been good,” Patrick Ries said. “We sell the better cuts to individuals and burgers to restaurants.”
According to McHenry County Farm Bureau Manager Larry Harris, the Bluestem Bison herd of 40 animals is probably the largest commercial bison herd ever in McHenry County. In Illinois, there are 54 commercial bison herds, according to a spokesman at the Denver-based National Bison Association.
“There aren’t many people around here who have been in the bison business,” Harris said. “Some others in the county have raised a few bison over the years, but not to the extent the Rieses are doing. It’s still a rare animal compared to beef cattle.”
Millions of bison–or buffalo, as they are also called–once roamed America’s plains. Plains Indians hunted bison and used the meat for food, the hides for clothing and shelter, and the bones for tools and utensils.
The destruction of the prairies and slaughter of bison by settlers in the 19th Century nearly drove the massive animals to extinction. Laws were instituted to protect the bison, and private ranchers began breeding them, so that the North American bison now numbers about 250,000, according to Sam Albrecht, executive director of the National Bison Association. Of those, about 20,000 annually are butchered for meat.
Contrast that with beef cattle–about 100,000 are slaughtered in the United States each week–and it becomes easy to see that bison meat takes barely a bite out of beef sales. Yet bison meat recently has come into such demand that good cuts sell for about three times the price of beef.
“Outdoorsmen like to eat bison,” Patrick Ries said. “It’s also very low in fat and cholesterol, so some cardiologists have been recommending it to patients as a substitute for beef. And gourmets also like it.”
According to information published by the United States Department of Agriculture, bison meat has barely half the calories and about one-tenth the saturated fat of beef. Bison meat also has less fat and fewer calories than pork or chicken, and it provides more iron and protein. So the health-conscious as well as the gustatorially adventurous have been gobbling it up.
At Donley’s Old West Steakhouse and Buffet in Union, chef Michael Rynne recently added Bluestem Bison burgers to the restaurant’s menu. The restaurant is next to Donley’s Wild West Town, a re-creation of a late-1800s frontier town that includes an Old West museum and a Wild West show with mock gunfights, rope tricks and other cowboy action.
“Buffalo burgers go with our Western theme,” Rynne said. “We’re selling about one buffalo burger for every two beef burgers, which I think is good. We’re forecasting real strong sales in the summer, which is our peak time.”
Rynne said the restaurant charges $5.95 for a Bluestem Bison burger, $1 more than for a regular beef burger.
“I like to eat the buffalo burgers. They’re very good,” Rynne said. “They have a stronger flavor than beef. I wouldn’t call it pungent, but they definitely have more flavor than beef.”
The restaurant grills its buffalo burgers over an open pit, which can be a tricky way to cook them, since they have almost no fat.
“The burgers cook fast,” Rynne said. “You need to use a lower temperature and watch out so you don’t dry out the meat. But there’s no shrinkage. It looks like a person is getting a bigger portion with a buffalo burger, because a beef burger shrinks more.”
Bluestem Bison burgers are also growing in popularity at Drago’s Water Tower Grille in Huntley.
“We have good beef burgers here, but I eat only the buffalo, because it’s that good, and some of our customers are the same way,” said Sherry Hanses, a part owner with Drago Zgrabljic. “Buffalo meat is much better than beef, and it’s not gamy. Some customers are afraid to try the buffalo burgers, but the ones who do try them say they’re wonderful. Most people who try them order them again.”
The restaurant charges $6.95 for its buffalo burgers, $1 more than for its beef burgers.
Most bison may be ranch-raised, but they are still almost wild animals. An 8-foot-high electrified fence with 8,000 volts coursing through the wires rings a large portion of the Ries farm to keep the animals from breaking out.
A bull bison can easily weigh more than one ton, as much as a steer. But bison are taller, easily 6 feet at the shoulder. They are more athletic, able to outrun horses over short stretches. And they are more ornery.
The Rieses were reminded of that while doing research before buying their first bison. They decided to speak to the herdsman at Fermilab in Batavia, where a herd of bison roam, and learned he had only recently returned to work after six months on disability.
“He had been speared by one of the bison,” Rebecca Ries said. “We thought, `Ooh, that’s scary stuff.’ He had been working with them for years, so he knew how to handle them, yet he still got hurt.”
Earlier this year, while riding a horse on his property, Patrick Ries had to beat a hasty retreat when one of the bison bulls started charging at him from across a field.
“These are not domesticated animals,” he said. “You have to be more careful with them than with cattle.”
Male and female bison have massive heads with two curved horns, powerful front quarters and slimmer hindquarters. In the fall and winter, they develop thick coats that protect them from the elements.
The Rieses have a big red barn on their property, but the animals don’t need it.
“Wind, cold, snow don’t bother them, which makes sense, since they evolved here,” Patrick Ries said. “They hardly notice bad weather.”
Spring blizzards that last year killed tens of thousands of beef cattle in the Plains States, where most of the nation’s bison are raised, killed fewer than one dozen bison, according to the National Bison Association’s Albrecht.
The Rieses said they learned the hard way the pitfalls of raising farm animals. They started in the meat business in 1991, after selling a five-acre farm in Lockport and buying 40 acres on Miller Road outside Marengo. They put about 30 beef cattle on the farm and soon started losing money, the result of high feed costs and depressed beef prices.
“That project turned into a money pit real quickly,” Patrick Ries said. “We were always in the red.”
But they enjoyed raising large animals and decided to see what the profit prospects were from bison. They soon realized that with the high prices being paid for bison–live animals as well as meat–they could make money. So in 1995 they sold their beef cattle and bought eight pregnant bison cows, a couple of other cows, a few calves and a bull. The herd has grown from there.
When Bluestem Bison gets an order, the Rieses load an animal onto a truck and send it for processing to Lake Geneva Packing, a meat packing firm outside Lake Geneva, Wis. They pick up the meat in refrigerated trucks and make their deliveries.
The Rieses say raising bison is much easier than raising beef.
“With beef, there were many nights when we’d be outside giving a calf a bottle because the mother didn’t know how to nurse,” Rebecca Ries said. “That doesn’t happen with the bison. They still have the know-how.”
Bison also seem more resistant to certain diseases than beef cattle and receive no hormones to enhance growth.
The Rieses spend about a half-hour each morning and again each evening riding through the pastures to check that the animals look healthy and have water and feed. Depending on the time of year and the lushness of the grass, they may supplement the bisons’ diet with grains and hay one, two or three times a week.
The animals tend to spend a few days in one corner of the pasture before moving to another. So the Rieses also regularly move a portable water barrel to keep it near the animals, as well as to ensure that they don’t trample grass by going to the same spot each day for water.
When the Rieses started their bison operation, they marketed the prime cuts to upscale restaurants. Experience has steered them away from that course.
“There were two problems with that strategy,” Rebecca Ries said. “First, even the upscale restaurants don’t want to pay. They want the meat really cheap. And all they want is the best cuts, like tenderloins. But out of 500 pounds of meat that an animal produces, you get only 10 pounds or so of tenderloin.
“What we found is that we were having no trouble selling the good cuts through our retail business. So we reversed our focus and decided that we were not going to try to push the upscale restaurants. Instead, we would look for more burger places and keep our good steaks and so forth here and also for meat markets. We sell a lot to meat markets.”
One of them is Wayne’s Country Meats in Marengo, where owner Rodger Brandt sells ground bison and steaks. Ground bison is $4.46 a pound; readymade patties sell for $4.73 a pound.
Tenderloins, rump roasts and other cuts are more pricey, ranging from 2 1/2 to 3 times the price for comparable cuts of beef.
“I sell about 15 pounds of ground buffalo a week and some steaks or other cuts,” Brandt said. “It’s expensive, but the meat is excellent. For a special meal or for someone who needs to cut down on fat and cholesterol, it’s a good choice.”
At the store the Rieses operate on their property, they have about two dozen regular customers from the area as well as the occasional traveler who stumbles on the place. After bison are slaughtered, their hides are sent away to be processed and are sold for $1,000 apiece for use as rugs. Bison skulls are sold for decorative purposes for $200 each.
For the present, the Rieses continue to count on the environmental consulting business for their primary livelihood as the bison business methodically grows.
“This is a product where you can easily outsell your supply,” Patrick Ries said. “There’s no sign of the demand slowing down any time soon.”
HERE’S THE BEEF
You can taste Bluestem Bison burgers at Donley’s Old West Steakhouse and Buffet, U.S. Highway 20 and South Union Road, Union; and at Drago’s Water Tower Grille, on Illinois Highway 47, Huntley.
Or you can visit the shop: Bluestem Bison, 2717 Miller Rd., Marengo; 815-568-9300.
Here are some other spots where you can get Bluestem Bison burgers, steaks, filets and other cuts of meat:
Kalck’s Butcher Shop, 71 E. Woodstock St., Crystal Lake.
Kramer’s, 16 Grant Square, Hinsdale.
Logli’s Supermarkets, 6410 E. State St., Rockford.
Otto’s, 125 Addison St., Elmhurst.
Sullivan’s Super Value Foods, 1299 S. Division St., Harvard.
Wayne’s Meat Market, 114 S. State St., Marengo.
