STEVE TOLMIE has turned a vision into a reality by breeding bison on his 125-hectare Dubbo district property.
After deciding he wanted to move away from breeding traditional beef cattle, Mr Tolmie established Sandy Valley Bison in 2006 and has been building up his herd ever since.
Wanting to breed something a bit unusual, Mr Tolmie said he chose the great, thunderous beasts because he had travelled extensively in the US and always liked them.
He also found it was a very marketable product, with every part of a bison having some purpose.
About five years ago, Mr Tolmie introduced his first bison, one bull and two steers, from the Western Plains Zoo in Dubbo, and then four females from Ashley and Deanne Brown’s Beetoomba Bison, Corryong, Victoria.
Since starting out with just seven bison, Mr Tolmie has been breeding the beasts using his own bulls - broken up into three breeding groups - and now runs 38 head, including cows, calves and bulls.
Mr Tolmie hoped to breed numbers up to about 60.
"This number would mean I could make a viable living and would have enough to be able to market to select local restaurants."
While it might seem like an unusual enterprise, with less than 500 bison in Australia, Mr Tolmie said there was a good market for the meat and other by-products domestically.
"There is basically a market for every single part of a bison, including the skin for rawhide, bones for making native American artefacts, fibre for clothing, insulation and art, obviously meat and bleached mounted skulls."
Mr Tolmie said the bison fibre was extremely sought after, with the coarse guard hairs averaging 59-microns and the fine down hairs ranging in diameter from 12- to 29-microns.
"The water retention of bison fibre is higher than that of greasy sheep wool and has no lanolin."
As he was still building up numbers Mr Tolmie was still focusing on the breeding rather than the markets at the moment.
Once he had enough numbers, Mr Tolmie would send the steers to the abattoirs and would then package the meat to sell to restaurants.
"If there was any surplus meat we could also value-add by processing the meat into jerky or summer sausage."
Mr Tolmie said currently he leased his bison calves to cutting horse trainers for a two-year period.
"The calves and yearlings are sought after by the cutting horse industry to help educate their horses because bison are very fast and agile and can change direction very quickly," he said.
Once they are about two-years-old they get too big for cutting, so Mr Tolmie gets them back and then puts them onto natural pasture for three to four months.
As bison were wild creatures and not domesticated in any way, they were very susceptible to weather conditions and thus average about three calves every five years.
The bulls were left running with the females, however, the females naturally came into season in February (when the climate suited them) which meant calves were born from October to December - basically when they knew there would be abundant feed available.
The largest land mammal native to North America, bison males can weigh more than 1000 kilograms and stand at about 1.8 metres high at the shoulder, compared with females which stand about 1.5m and weigh from 350kg to 600kg.
With only five bison breeders in the country, Mr Tolmie is pushing to establish a bison association so they could form an alliance rather than tackle industry issues individually.
Mr Tolmie said the big beasts would always be wild animals, but their mystique and free nature was what he enjoyed.
