Cherokee Bison Farms

Owners

Leroy & Cindy Fricke

Location

Colby, WI

About Us

Chero­kee Bison Farms is a husband/​wife team-owned & oper­at­ed small farm in the north-cen­tral part of the state, Marathon Coun­ty. We’ve been mar­ried since 1980 and raised 3 daugh­ters on this farm. Ear­ly on we farmed with Leroy’s par­ents and lat­er tran­si­tioned from a 120-cow dairy herd to rais­ing bison after a barn fire in 1989. These days we are start­ing anoth­er phase of life, slow­ly down-siz­ing, cut­ting down the work­load and look­ing towards more time to spend with our 8 grand­kids and oth­er inter­ests. Our DCFM atten­dance is spo­radic but you can keep up with our mar­ket sched­ule and oth­er farm hap­pen­ings on our Face­book page. We attend the Mar­ket on the Square from open­ing in mid-April through Memo­r­i­al week­end. Then we return in Octo­ber, attend­ing usu­al­ly 2 mar­kets per month. We attend most Hol­i­day mar­kets at the Monona Ter­race through Christ­mas, weath­er per­mit­ting. We also attend sev­er­al of the Late Win­ter mar­kets when weath­er and work sched­ules allow. We post each week on Face­book with our mar­ket intentions.

About Our Products

We currently run roughly 100 head of grassfed Bison and offer all of the traditional meat cuts, burger, summer sausage, braunschweiger, snack sticks, jerky...; raise about 20 acres of sunflowers for our Cherokee Sun cold-pressed cooking oil;  harvest the maple syrup from a 650-tree sugarbush (all done the old-fashioned way!  Here you won't find any pipeline or evaporators, no reverse osmosis machines, no filtering through diatomaceous earth ... all collected by hand in bags, cooked in flat-pans over wood fires ... as natural as you can get)  In early spring we also harvest the wild leeks from that same woodland.  At times we have sunflower birdseed to offer and also eggs from our little flock of laying hens.  We are not certified organic, but you won't find our farm food products raised with anti-biotics, chemicals or hormones. There's no herbicides, pesticides and no commercial fertilizers ... our bison are grassfed, run on a rotational pasture system and even our chickens roam the grassy yards for most of each day.  :)

What We Offer

  • Bison
  • Chicken Eggs
  • Hides and leather
  • Leeks
  • Maple syrup
  • Ramps
  • Sunflower oil

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