High Country Ranching

One thing we’ve learned as we’ve traveled across the Heartland – no matter what the crop, or where it’s grown, innovation is the key for success. And sometimes that means breaking away from the herd – in this case, the cattle herd!

Dave Whittlesey has raised elk and bison for more than twenty years.-most recently a total of 250 animals on his High Wire Ranch in southwestern Colorado. Dave says elk and bison make good partners in the pasture, “They have complimentary feeding habits. The elk feed on fine forage. While the bison prefer rougher vegetation.”

The area around Dave’s ranch is known as the Colorado Redlands Mesa. It’s basically cattle country—cattle ranches all around. So, one might wonder then, why would a rancher take his 320 acres and raise elk and buffalo? According to Dave Whittlesey, the answer is simple.”We definitely do less management then the most people with cattle do. For instance, calving is never a problem. My neighbor here keeps 550-600 head of mother cows, beef cows; he’s out there every night for two months. And every once in a while, because they’re having trouble having babies. Our animals are born in May. Once the blizzards are over. And June, and just very rarely do we have a calving problem.”
 
Dave used to lay carpet for a living. His wife Sue is a semi-retired certified public accountant. Ranching of any kind can be difficult, but Dave says the relative ease of raising Elk and Bison has left more time to raise their children—a daughter in high school and a son away at college. Sue agrees, “We spend a lot of time with our children and we do a lot of things together as a group. We’re able to do a little bit more traveling than say a dairy farmer who’s having to milk twice a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”

Plus Dave says managing an elk ranch has proven more profitable then cattle. “With elk you have more products then you do with cattle.” Sue points to frozen elk meat in the ranch’s meat lockers,  “Well, we have all kinds of steaks here. This is an elk loin steak—it’s like a New York or a rib eye. It’s pretty thick. It’s two steaks you see.”

Both elk and bison meat are specialty meats. They cost more to buy than beef, but Dave and Sue point to studies showing elk meat to be high in protein and lower in fat and cholesterol. Then there are the antlers. It’s called elk “velvet.” The outside of the antler is stripped off and sold as dog chews. Dave says the antlers are a renewable resource. “This is the elk antler here. This is the elk velvet. This is the outside of the antler that’s been stripped off after it’s been removed from the animals. We harvest the antler in the spring while it’s still in its growth phase, about sixty days of growth. We cut the whole antler off, and then we freeze dry it down and make it into that elk velvet.”

Dave’s dogs chew on the rawhide-like velvet strips. The antlers themselves get ground into powder which is used for nutritional supplements. Tapping into the markets for meat, supplements, pet treats and decorative skulls: the Whittleseys say they’ve become successful by design, not by accident:
           
Dave says, “One of the things I’ve learned about farming and ranching is that you need diversity. You can’t just have one thing. The guy that’s a cattle rancher—when the cattle market goes sour he’s in trouble but if you got another something you raise then you have the opportunity to keep going and that’s been our plan and that’s why we raise both bison and elk here.”

Elk Information
Female elk can weigh more than 500 pounds. At birth, an elk baby can weigh 35 pounds and gain two pounds a day in their first weeks. Livestock accounts for the majority of Colorado’s agricultural income. And Colorado ranchers raise not only Cattle, Bison and Elk, but Ostriches, Llamas, goats and Emus.