Packwaukee, WI-- Like tribal hunters of centuries ago, bison rancher Georgia Derrick follows simple logic -- waste not, want not -- in turning buffalo hides, skulls and other byproducts into marketable items.
“It's just really important that we do what the Native Americans did, which is use everything from the animal,” says Derrick, who raises buffalo on a sprawling ranch in central Wisconsin.
In a barn workshop, she uses tanned hides to make hats, handbags, vests and coats, some with polished leather surfaces and others covered with springy, fluffy buffalo fur.
Her business is part of a growing segment of the bison industry. As meat sales rise 20 percent a year, companies are turning hides, skulls and woven buffalo fur into a niche industry of its own.
Ranchers who might make about $1,000 from a bison's meat can more than double their take by selling items made from other parts of the animal.
“When we started this business in 1994, well over half of the hides were discarded, left to rot,” said Tad Swanson, a vice president with shoemaker H.S. Trask & Co. in Bozeman, Mont.
Trask now buys bison hides by the thousands and makes about 80,000 pairs of shoes and boots from them a year. Most sales are through retail outlets such as Florsheim, Nordstrom and Dillard's. Others are through catalogs such as L.L. Bean. The shoes run about $140 a pair.
“The leather itself is softer to the touch and it kind of molds nicely to your feet,” said San Francisco architect Greg Warner, who owns a few pair.
Bison products also have become a cottage industry for craftspeople. Ruth Hoffman of Dallas uses the animal's fur -- known for its warmth, light weight and durability -- to produce knitwear such as mittens, hats, sweaters and coats, all in the natural brown color of bison.
Some items are made from only the soft downy fleece that grows beneath the buffalo's coarse outer hair. Others have a combination of both types of fur.
“It's comparable to a very nice cashmere,” she said. “I feel there's a very good market for it in the future.”
Larry Belitz of Hot Springs, S.D., takes the traditional approach to his work with bison products. The former schoolteacher studied tribal lore to find out how to hand-tan hides the way Indians once did.
His buffalo-skin teepees are on display at several museums, and he sells many other bison products, from leather goods to toy horses fashioned from a pair of hoof bones.
“We even sell the buffalo chips,” he said. “We don't advertise at all, it's word of mouth.”
That's the same way Derrick's business developed.
An experienced leather worker, she was making bison products in Denver before she and her husband, James Atten, were married in 1988. He had a bison herd on his Wisconsin farm, which has grown to 105 head, plus several dozen calves born this spring.
“More and more people wanted me to make things for them. I couldn't do it all,” she said. “I thought the demand is here ... maybe it's time to really develop this business and get some other people involved.”
In the past two years, she used a state farm-development grant of $28,070 to train workers and link up with Wisconsin buffalo farmers who could benefit from having byproducts used instead of wasted.
Derrick sells her bison products at a gift shop on her ranch and through a catalog. Her products include a trooper's hat for $125, an $85 flap-front purse and men's or women's vests for $475. Small buffalo-hide bags run as little as $12.
She declined to give sales figures for her BisonRidge Ranch and Leather Co. “We're an emerging business. Everything that we make goes right back into materials,” she said.
Such bison products are developing into a huge growth area for ranchers, said Sam Albrecht, executive director of the Denver-based National Bison Association.
The association, with 2,100 members, estimates that 20,000 bison went to slaughter in the United States in 1997.
It's a tiny fraction of the 135,000 beef cattle slaughtered daily, but the bison industry is growing 20 percent a year, Albrecht said.
By making use of byproducts, he said, “you add extra value to the bison itself, even when it's on the hoof, which is, in my mind at least, more respectful.”
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