ROXBORO, NC – “It takes a special person to raise buffalo,” said Jack Pleasant. “You need a calm temperament.”
Pleasant, who together with his wife Sandy operates Sunset Ridge Buffalo Farm, North Carolina’s second largest buffalo herd with up to 100 animals, was standing near the chute at his farm’s working facility. The sidewalls of the corral are seven feet tall.
“I’ve seen animals with both front feet on the top of the guardrail,” he recalled. “When you’ve been around buffalo long enough to see in their eye that they want to jump or do something,” he continued, you can try one of two things. “You can try to stop ’em or get out of the way.
“I’ve found that getting out of the way is the smarter decision.”
The Pleasants’ farm, located in Person County, has been in Jack’s family since 1797. Prior to Pleasant’s stewardship, one side of the farm was a dairy and the other side was dedicated to tobacco and row crops.
As a child, Pleasant periodically helped both with the dairy and in the fields. He’ll never forget rising at three in the morning to help take mules to the tobacco fields for the workers who would start picking tobacco at seven.
It was also as a child that Pleasant first encountered buffalo. It was 1964 and he was traveling to New Mexico to backpack the Philmont Scout Ranch.
“Our bus driver chided us on the PA system all the way back to North Carolina about how we had eaten trail food for 11 days and he was back at the hotel eating buffalo steaks at our expense,” Pleasant recalled. “I often thought about buffalo after that.”
Thirty years later, he took his son backpacking at the ranch and saw buffalo in person again. In 1997, he and Sandy started seriously studying the ins and outs of raising buffalo, and two years later he decided to take the plunge. It took two years to develop the infrastructure, including building eight strands of high-tensile fence five and a half feet tall. The farm received its first animals in 2001.
After receiving his first group of animals – six heifers and two bull calves – Pleasant “learned about how buffaloes determine their pecking order.” The larger bull drank first, then let the females drink in the order he wanted them to, then the smaller bull drank last.
Female buffalo first calve at age three, and can reproduce until 20 years old or older. Pleasant has a number of 20-plus-year-old cows in his herd.
Their herd is primarily spring calving, though there have been years where drought during the breeding season caused a delay in breeding and consequently calving.
Buffalo are highly sensitive to being handled, which doesn’t bode well for AI. Pleasant cited studies which measured AI conception rates for buffalo as being under 15%.
Because it’s not easy to find a vet trained in buffaloes, Pleasant has learned to perform pregnancy checks and routine treatments himself with a few helps he has trained. Buffalo are easy calvers.
Jack Pleasant breaks ice from the one of the waterers at his buffalo farm during recent cold winter weather. Photo by Karl H. Kazaks
Buffalo raised in the eastern U.S. don’t get as large as buffalo in the West. (The bulls at Sunset Ridge top out at around 1,900 lbs.) One reason for the difference in size is the impact of parasites on buffalo in the East. Pleasant treats his herd three to four times per year with subcutaneous injections or drench to control parasites.
He thinks the stress from repeated handling, as well as the impact from the parasites themselves, are contributing factors to the smaller animal size of Eastern buffalo.
What’s more, fescue toxicosis also appears to affect buffalo. There are management solutions, however, as Pleasant highlighted: “They do enjoy grazing on annual grasses and perennial warm season grasses.” The herd at Sunset Ridge is only fed grass, whether standing or given out as hay.
The American buffalo has two subspecies – the Plains buffalo, which is about six feet tall, and the Wood buffalo, which reaches seven feet. There is also a smaller European buffalo, known as Wisent, which gets to five feet tall. Pleasant has mostly Plains buffalo, with a few Wood buffalo, but no Wisent.
It typically takes about 30 months from calving for a buffalo to be ready for harvest. It’s not easy to find a butcher, however. The processor Sunset Ridge uses, for examples, is not taking on any new buffalo producers.
When it’s time to round up his herd, Pleasant will use two tractors with gates fixed to the front to guide the buffalo to the first part of the holding facility, a round pen. The round pen leads to an alleyway which leads to a series of pens, which are connected to more alleyways which lead to the main chute.
The Pleasants sell their buffalo meat through a variety of outlets, but primarily at the Durham and Carrboro farmers markets. “I’ve connected with a lot of great customers over the years,” Pleasant said.
They sell ground buffalo in four-, five- and seven-ounce patties and one pound bricks. They also sell stew meat, five different types of sausages, roasts, briskets, London broil, bones, organ meat, two flavors of jerky and six flavors of meat sticks.
Pleasant enjoys educating people about buffalo. His operation is on the Piedmont Farm Tour. Last year approximately 400 visitors came to his farm on the days of the tour. While there, they learned not only about buffalo, but also that the farm hosts events. In particular, there is a farm lake with a gazebo on a peninsula. Many a successful wedding and event has occurred at the location.
Jack and Sandy were honored to be invited to the ceremony in Washington, D.C., in 2016 when the bison became the National Mammal. The Secretary of the Interior stated on that occasion that “buffalo are what the early settlers and Native Americans saw and bison is what the government requires on the meat label.” (Bison is the scientifically correct terminology.)
Over the years, Pleasant has also learned about the history of buffalo in North Carolina. In 1728, when Colonel Byrd was surveying the line between North Carolina and Virginia, he reported seeing a small herd of buffalo in the Hyco Creek bottoms, in the plain which today is part of Hyco Lake.
The last known wild buffalo in North Carolina was killed near Asheville in 1795.
While not all of Pleasant’s customers may know that, they do know they can get good-tasting, high-quality, highly nutritious buffalo meat from Sunset Ridge Buffalo Farm.
by Karl H. Kazaks
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