By Donovan Webster | Dec 09/Jan 10 | 

Wild and Woolly

Why a growing number of farmers and environmentalists are leading the charge to bring back the American bison.

It’s afternoon. late summer. and on a hillside at Cibola Farms outside Culpeper, Virginia, Mike Sipes watches his brownish-black herd of approximately two hundred bison move slowly across the grass, as silent as a cloud shadow. “That’s one of the most amazing things about ’em,” he says. “Compared with cattle, bison are so darned quiet.”

Sipes, a friendly, straight-ahead farmer of forty-three, has been raising bison for eleven years now. “Sometimes,” he says, “you don’t even realize they’re nearby. Once I was working in a pasture, and a bull came up behind me, hooked my left leg with his horns, and threw me…he tore my trousers, ripped them almost off me. One second I was working, the next, whoa, I was on the ground twenty feet from where I’d been standing.”

But for Sipes and a fast-growing number of livestock growers these days, such incidents are far outweighed by the value of bison, both to the environment and in the marketplace. From a tattered remnant U.S. herd of about a thousand bison in 1900, the population has grown to nearly five hundred thousand, with one of the fastest-growing sectors of this population explosion coming in the American Southeast, where their lower environmental impact has been embraced by a newer, greener stripe of farmer.

“Bison evolved with the North American ecosystem,” says Jim Matheson, assistant director of the National Bison Association. “They roam naturally, selecting only the most nutritious grasses, usually native species. Further, they will not eat grasses below the growth crown, allowing for regeneration.” Despite being heavier on the hoof than cattle, Matheson adds, bison don’t tear up pastureland as much, since they move constantly and the construction of their hooves actually helps grasses to spread and germinate. And because bison are grazers instead of browsers, they don’t strip trees and shrubs. They also don’t typically wallow in rivers and streams, meaning waterways aren’t degraded by their presence.

But bison aren’t just better for the environment; they’re better for us, too. Bison meat is lower in calories and cholesterol than similar cuts of beef. It’s also naturally lean. According to the USDA, a typical bison sample has a quarter the fat of beef and approximately a third the fat of a skinless chicken breast.

Sipes pauses to wipe the sweat from his forehead. As we’ve been talking, he’s been doing a little farm maintenance, using a blowtorch to mend holes in a large yellow water tank whose plastic side recently survived its own bison encounter. “Bison haven’t been messed with much by human breeding practices. It makes them a little wilder, yeah…” he says, nodding at the battered tank. “But even that’s worth it. Having them around is just good for the world.”