Lauren Justice
It’s 2 a.m. at Cherokee Bison Farms. A full moon hangs high over rural Cherokee, just outside of Colby in central Wisconsin. The night sky is awash in stars, and the air is calm. Even the crickets have gone to bed. The moon provides just enough light to see the dark outline of the buffalo herd lying down in the pasture. A few of the giant creatures stand guard but are motionless, as if they have dozed off as well.
As for Leroy and Cindy Fricke, they’ve already been awake for nearly an hour. It’s Saturday, after all. The husband and wife own and operate Cherokee Bison Farms, a longtime vendor at the Dane County Farmers’ Market.
“When you grow up on a farm, complaining about waking up early doesn’t get you very far,” says Leroy.
There’s no sleeping in Sunday morning, either, says Cindy. “Nope. We have church in the morning. We’re used to it by now.”
Neither of them drinks coffee, which may explain the lack of frenzied activity inside the Fricke home. The truck was loaded the night before, and only a few last-minute details need attention now. Cindy checks pre-orders one last time. Leroy unplugs the freezer, stocked with bison meat for the upcoming market, that sits in the cabin of the truck. The routine is a familiar one, despite the early hour. The couple has made the three-hour drive down to Madison hundreds of times.
At 2:20 a.m., they back the old Dodge out of the garage and head south to market once again. Any later and they risk losing their coveted spot at the corner of North Pinckney and East Mifflin streets.
Leroy and Cindy have been selling buffalo meat at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, the largest producers-only farmers’ market in the nation, since 1992. The market has played a major role in their success; the Frickes sell around 75% of their bison meat there. Bison is the correct name for the animal, but it’s commonly referred to as buffalo.
Since they joined the market, they’ve added maple syrup (tapped on the farm and made the old-fashioned way) as well as sunflower oil to their stand. Cindy and Leroy are also founding vendors at the winter Dane County market, located at the Madison Senior Center, which has been around since 2003. For many years, Cindy helped govern the vendor-run market as a member of the board.
The couple also did some “cattle flipping,” raising Holstein bull calves then selling them to other farmers for some extra income.
The husband-and-wife team embody the family farmers that were once the norm in rural Wisconsin. The hours are long, the work is endless and the future is often uncertain. But the Frickes are proof that in an era in which small farms are disappearing from America’s Dairyland, it’s possible to earn an honest living off the land.
How the American buffalo got mixed up in this noble pursuit still amazes Cindy and Leroy Fricke.
Bison meat is often touted as healthier than other red meat. Nutritionists say it has lower cholesterol and fat content than beef. “It tastes great. It’s leaner than beef. And I’m selling it,” quips Leroy on why people should buy bison steaks, burgers and sausages. When grass-fed — as the buffalo at Cherokee Bison Farms are — omega-3s in the meat are as high as in a serving of salmon. But it’s the dense meat’s sweet, rich flavor that ultimately attracts customers, says Leroy. “I don’t think it’s the health benefits so much. Maybe that’s what gets people interested at first. They want flavor. It has to taste good or they won’t buy it.”
For most of their 24 years at the Dane County Farmers’ Market, Cindy and Leroy have been the only bison meat vendor. And they have built a loyal base of customers. “They like that they are buying direct from us,” says Cindy. “It’s all-natural; we don’t use hormones, antibiotics or feed additives. We give the bison some hay and silage in the dead of winter, but besides that, they pretty much take care of themselves.”
At various times, Cherokee Bison Farms has supplied prime cuts and burger meat to L’Etoile, Dotty Dumpling’s Dowry, chef Dan Fox (of Heritage Tavern) and the now-defunct Dog Eat Dog and the Dry Bean Saloon. “We sold to Dotty’s for years and years. Then its bison demand just took off, and we couldn’t and didn’t really want to keep up,” says Cindy.
The Madison Club is now the only restaurant the Frickes regularly supply with bison meat. The couple prefers the market, says Leroy. “We like the customer contact and having pleased customers that come back.”
3:30 a.m.
A fog is rising on the back country roads as Leroy and Cindy wend their way towards Interstate 39. Sunrise is still two hours away, and they’re not quite halfway to Madison yet. Leroy is behind the wheel. Cindy is trying to catch a few winks. As they round a bend, a large doe darts in front of the truck, forcing Leroy to hit the brakes and swerve. The deer finishes her crossing unscathed.
For over two decades, Leroy and Cindy have rarely missed a market. “We took off to attend our daughters’ weddings and that’s about it,” says Cindy. They’ve braved torrential downpours, snowstorms, a blown transmission, a busted fuel pump and a myriad of other unexpected calamities on the weekly drive down to Madison.
“That’s why it’s always better to get here early,” says Leroy. “You never know what might happen.”
Cherokee Bison Farms is classified as a daily vendor at the market. Unlike permanent vendors, who are guaranteed a spot on the Capitol Square, daily vendors have to show up the day of the market and then are given a slot based on seniority.
“We are so far up the line, we always get the same spot. We’ve had it for 15 years,” says Cindy.
The current system for spots is far more orderly than when Cherokee Bison Farms first joined the market.
“The daily vendors used to have to line up, and whoever got there first got to pick their spot,” says Leroy. “We’d leave here at nine o’clock at night, get down to Madison around midnight. You’d see [vendors] with sleeping bags on the street.”
“We had a van with a bunk in the back. We’d put the girls in there and sleep until six in the morning,” says Cindy. “Then it was a mad dash around the Square to find a spot.”
Even though they lived within a few miles of each other, the couple didn’t meet until they were teenagers.
“Until she dated a friend of mine,” Leroy says.
“Who was that?” asks Cindy. Leroy whispers a name into her ear. “He was a friend of yours?” she exclaims.
When Cindy steps away, Leroy fondly recalls his courtship. “I had to drop her off at the very end of her driveway or her old man would have grounded her for six months.”
They were married in 1980, not long after Cindy finished high school. Soon they were raising three daughters on Leroy’s family’s farm. Alongside his father, Edward Jr., they milked 120 cows three times a day. Running a small Wisconsin dairy farm seemed to be in the cards for Leroy and Cindy, too. But a fateful Thanksgiving night in 1988 put the family on a new path.
“We had dinner, went to bed...then, oh my goodness, the barn was on fire,” Cindy says. “We lost a lot of animals that night. We had to put everybody down a week later because of smoke inhalation. It was devastating.”
The dairy industry is still strong in Marathon County, but a lot has changed since Leroy and Cindy were kids. “Bigger farms, fewer farmers,” says Leroy. Collapsed barns and farmhouses in various states of abandonment are a common sight around Cherokee. The average herd size for a family dairy farmer used to be around 30, says Leroy. “Now the small farms have closer to 100 milking cows. It just goes up from there. The big operations have over a thousand head.”
Not sure what to do next, the Frickes took a year off to decide their future. “We knew we wanted to stay on the farm. But Leroy’s dad was getting older, and we didn’t know if we wanted to invest in milking again,” says Cindy. But, accustomed to the Wisconsin dairy mindset, they wondered how they could even stay on the farm without milking cows.
While researching other agricultural opportunities, the Frickes met Dr. Kenneth Throlson of North Dakota. Throlson, a veterinarian by trade, is a pioneer of the buffalo business. He started raising bison for meat in the 1960s, a practice virtually unheard of at the time. “We fell in love with the animals. They are intelligent. They’re awesome to look at. It just seemed right,” says Cindy.
The Frickes made the bold decision to start a bison ranch. In 1989, they brought 100 calves to their farm and introduced buffalo to the area. “The neighbors thought we had lost our minds,” says Cindy. “‘How you ever going to make a living off those things?’ they asked us. They didn’t think there was enough people to eat the meat to actually support a family and farm.” In fact, she says, “The neighbors are still skeptical.”
A few years after the Frickes started raising bison, they were having difficulty finding places to sell the meat. While reading the local farm paper, Leroy saw a picture of someone selling vegetables at a market in Madison. “About 20 phone calls later, I was talking to market manager Mary Carpenter, and the rest is history.”
5:01 a.m.
Cindy and Leroy arrive on the Capitol Square in good time this morning, nearly an hour before they are allowed to start setting up their stand. It’s a beautiful day, and the weather promises to be sunny, but not too hot. At 6 a.m., Leroy begins unloading the truck, and Cindy starts setting up the stand.
She fills the table with bottles of maple syrup and sunflower oil, then sets out some bison jerky. Leroy pulls the meat out of the freezer, then lifts the freezer out of the truck and plugs it in. “They charge us for electricity too,” says Leroy as he replaces the meat. Soon their white tent is up and Cindy hangs the sign listing which cuts they have in stock this morning.
The couple work in tandem setting up the stand. The choreography comes from years of practice. By 6:15, a regular customer is already chatting with Leroy, and the market is officially underway.
Leroy Fricke is now a veteran in the small world of bison farming, but milking cows is what runs in his blood. Cherokee is five miles east of Colby, where Joseph Steinwand developed the specialty cheese named for the township in 1885. Leroy’s roots in the area stretch back even further. “My father milked cows. His father milked cows. Everybody used to milk cows around here,” says Leroy.
The original Fricke homestead — granted to Leroy’s great-grandfather, Erhardt Fricke, in 1878 — is just across the road from Cherokee Bison Farms. A section of Marathon County’s Cherokee Park once belonged to Leroy’s grandfather, Edward Fricke Sr., who built a dance hall on the land that was used for parties, weddings and a monthly community meeting that featured a popular local talent show. “Cherokee used to have a grocery store and a tavern,” says Leroy. “But those were gone before my time.”
Lauren Justice
Cindy Fricke (formerly Firnstahl) grew up just three miles away from the Fricke clan. Her grandparents operated a grocery store near Colby and bottled milk for a time. Her father, Paul Firnstahl, was a planning engineer for the Packaging Corporation of America. “He was what you’d call a gentleman farmer,” Cindy says. “He always rented out his land for others to farm on.”
They did have horses on the farm, which Cindy showed on the open circuit and through 4-H. This fostered a lifelong love of working with animals. Her most recent “pets” are 15 chickens. It’s never easy for Cindy to see the bison taken away to the family-run meat processing plant for harvesting. But it’s a fact of life.
“In as many years as we’ve been doing this, it’s still hard for me to look at the animals in the trailer when they are on their way to slaughter,” says Cindy. “Uh. Just don’t look.”
9:45 a.m.
The biggest surge of customers at the market usually occurs right before 10 a.m., says Cindy. “It’s actually better when we’re swamped. It goes by fast, and it keeps you energized. When you sit there and twiddle your thumbs you get tired. Then you get bored and grumpy.”
The market is now teeming with people, and the pace around the Square has slowed to a crawl. Cindy greets a regular customer and grabs his order from the freezer. Leroy is talking about the resurgence of wild bison at Yellowstone National Park with another market-goer. “Leroy will talk buffalo all day long if you let him.” says Cindy.
One Madison couple, who had stopped by the farm earlier in the week to check out the bison herd, drops off an armful of cherry wood to thank the Frickes for their hospitality. “You’re welcome back anytime,” says Leroy.
It was a big lifestyle change, switching from milking cows to raising bison, Cindy says: “When you’re in dairy, you take care of your animals and your farms. Someone else does the marketing. They pick up the milk, and away it goes.”
Joining the market meant that they had to “get sociable,” says Cindy. “We had to talk to people. Explain what we were doing and tell them why they should buy bison meat. We never had to do stuff like that before.”
Bison are also not your ordinary farm animals. “They look kind of big and dopey, but bison can clear a six-foot fence without touching it,” says Cindy.
They can also be dangerous. “Last summer, Leroy was attacked by one of the big breeder bulls,” Cindy relates. “He charged the four-wheeler Leroy was on, flipped it. Started pummeling it. Leroy got pinned under the four-wheeler but somehow he didn’t get hurt. That’s only happened once — but we’ve all been chased.”
The Frickes have had plenty of reminders that a buffalo herd is decidedly more wild than a herd of cattle. “They want to be a herd, and they don’t want to be separated. The trick to get them to do what you want is to make them think they are in charge,” says Leroy.
The story of the American buffalo is a sad one. Sixty million once roamed the rich grasslands known as the great bison belt, an enormous stretch of the western plains that ran from Alaska all the way to the Mexican border. Plains Indians relied on buffalo for food. They used their hides for clothing and to make shelters. When Europeans started to arrive, buffalo hides — not meat — became a prized trading commodity.
It all started to go downhill for the bison after white settlers began populating the west in the 19th century. As prey goes, bison are an easy target. A herd will circle around a buffalo that’s injured or dead. This might have prevented wolves, mountain lions or bears from landing a meal, but it just made it easier for hunters to kill buffalo en masse.
“When the fur market got flooded, they used to just take the tongues. Tongues were considered a delicacy. They left the rest [of the carcass] to rot,” says Leroy.
In 1889, the last shipment of buffalo hides was shipped back East. By then, it’s estimated that the bison population totaled less than a thousand, with as few as 85 still free-ranging in the wild. President Theodore Roosevelt was so alarmed that the American bison would soon be extinct that he rushed to North Dakota to personally shoot a legendary buffalo before the species disappeared altogether.
Bison weren’t killed just for their hides and tongues. Following the Civil War, the federal government stepped up efforts to contain the Native Americans in the West. The tribes that resisted were ultimately not beaten by the U.S. Cavalry, but by the systematic slaughter of the bison.
“The easiest way to control the Indians was to eliminate their food supply,” says Leroy. “So the government let it happen.”
“Real nice, huh?” says Cindy.
Lauren Justice
1:45 p.m.
After eight hours, it’s time to pack it all up and head home. “We had a good morning. Lots of customers were stocking up because we won’t be back at the market until October,” says Leroy.
During the couple’s summer break from the market, Leroy will continue with his part-time job off the farm. He started looking for one in 2014, when the beef market took a dive and he and Cindy decided to sell their Holstein calf operation. “I know the market,” says Leroy. “Somebody was going to take a bath on that, and I sure didn’t want it to be us.”
Leroy now drives for H.G. Meigs, a paving and asphalt company. “It’s a seasonal job. In between, I farm,” says Leroy. The job also provides health insurance, a huge perk.
Cindy is enjoying slowing things down a bit at the farm. “We have eight grandkids. I want to be the kind of grandma where my girls can call and I come right over. I already babysit two days a week for my daughter in Wausau. I love it.”
At one point, more than 300 bison roamed at Cherokee, a huge herd by Wisconsin standards. They slaughtered about three animals every other week then, but have scaled back the last few years, in part because of Leroy’s new gig. The herd is now under 100 head, and they harvest around 10 to 15 animals a year.
By 2 p.m., the Frickes have the truck packed and are ready to go. Even when the Frickes return to the market in the fall, they likely won’t come every Saturday, as in years prior. “It helps,” says Cindy, “when you know you don’t have product in the freezer.”
