Teddy Roosevelt would have agreed. In 1887 he cofounded the Boone and Crockett Club in the interest of, among other things, creating preserves for bison. Eighteen years later, in 1905, he also cofounded the American Bison Society, with the stated interest of raising public awareness about bison and their benefits. Today, arguably America’s most famous Southerner and private environmentalist, Ted Turner, is a huge bison fan. Beginning in the 1990s, Turner decided to specifically ranch bison instead of cattle on his properties, which now blanket about two million acres. Since 2002, he’s also opened more than fifty Ted’s Montana Grill restaurants around the United States, where bison short ribs, bison burgers, and bison meat loaf are prominent on the menu.

Sipes, too, has prospered from bison. He has one full-time store on-site, and his staffers are fixtures at fourteen weekly farmer’s markets in the Washington, D.C., area, where he sells the seven bison he processes each week. And he always sells out. Cuts of Cibola Farms bison are also advertised in some of Washington’s tonier restaurants. “But this isn’t really about money,” Sipes says, glancing back toward the dark mass of livestock on his farm’s far hillside. “It’s about making bison the center of this farm.”

At Cibola Farms, Sipes practices rotational grazing across his roughly three hundred acres, with the bison always getting first crack at fresh pasture, followed by stocks of goats or heritage-breed Tamworth hogs, then chickens, turkeys, geese, and other poultry, which clean the grasses and leave droppings to fertilize. After the birds, each pasture is allowed to recharge naturally, and all Cibola Farms bison are free of growth hormones and antibiotics (Sipes uses garlic powder when parasites crop up).

But having farmed bison for more than a decade now, Sipes also understands that he’s not really the boss. “They do their own thing,” he says. “If you don’t provide them enough water, they’ll find water on their own. If they see a pasture that looks good to them, they’ll go there, no matter what’s in their way. I’ve got five-foot fences with a strand of smooth tensile wire set a foot above that. But if a bison wants to, it’ll just jump the fence, believe it or not. Sometimes the younger ones go through the fence.” Sipes pauses and smiles. “That’s one thing you learn pretty quickly,” he adds. “You don’t control bison; you sort of come to agreements with them. It’s that wildness thing about them again, which…well, that’s something I really like.”

To order bison steaks, jerky, and more, visit cibolafarms.com.