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