Beaver River Bison Ranch
Pastured poultry deposit
Pastured poultry deposit
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Our pastured poultry are fed non-medicated chick starter for the first 3 weeks of their lives, then switched to grower/finisher ration and whatever treats they can scratch up from the grass and dirt. The way chickens were designed to eat.
$10 deposit per chicken, $20 deposit per turkey. Balance will be due at time of pickup/delivery. Chickens are $6lb and weigh around 7lbs each on average.
Turkeys are $5lb expected to have a final weight of 15-25lbs. This is our first year raising these, so we aren't super confident in weight estimates, weights will be confirmed after slaughter.
Chickens will be available for local pickup at the farm starting in late July, or will be delivered to your home at the same time as your bison meat if you are one of our bison customers. We don't have a stand alone delivery option figured out for poultry yet due to wanting to keep prices as reasonable as possible.
Free Delivery to your door (Alberta only), or pick-up at our ranch!
Free Delivery to your door (Alberta only), or pick-up at our ranch!
Delicious and Nutritious Bison
- high in protein, iron, zinc, and selenium
- high ratio of Omega 3 vs Omega 6
- pasture raised and finished
- same as our ancestors ate for thousands of years!
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Our Guarantee
If you aren't satisfied with your purchase, please contact us and allow us the opportunity to make it right.
We only want satisfied customers, so if we can't make that work, we'll give you your money back.
Bonus #1
Free freezer!
We originally offered a free freezer for people who bought a quarter share of bison, or if you didn't need a freezer, you could choose to take a discount of $250 instead. That promotion was more popular than we anticipated so we decided to keep it going and expand it.
We now offer a free freezer of an appropriate size for whichever bison share you purchase. Of course you are still welcome to take the discount if you prefer, discounts for no freezer range from $250 on the quarter share, up to $1000 on the whole bison.
Discounts you would like applied are confirmed after you have made your initial deposit and will be subtracted from your final invoice.
Bonus #2
Free delivery (in Alberta)!
When you buy your quarter bison, we will get in touch with you to let you know the approximate date we expect it to be ready to deliver to your door. Once our butcher confirms it is ready, we will contact you to make arrangements to personally drop it off to you.
Of course if you would prefer to pick it up, we would love to take that as an opportunity to show you the ranch.
How does it work?
When you place your deposit on a share of bison, you are actually buying that proportional share of oa live bison.
We currently only process bison in the fall/winter since that is when they are in their peak condition, and the temperatures are favorable to prevent any spoilage of meat between on-farm slaughter and dropping it off at the butcher.
Meat will be delivered on a first come, first served basis, unless you would prefer to wait for a later delivery for some reason. We will let you know approximately when we expect your meat will be ready shortly after you order. Expect minimum 4-5 weeks to allow for all of the steps including dry aging.
Once our butcher calls us to let us know that your meat is ready, we will get in contact with you to arrange a date and time when either we can drop it off to you, or you can pick it up at our ranch if you would prefer.
Spend the next year enjoying some of the healthiest red meat on the planet!
Continue to watch for our emails letting you know when we will be opening up for orders again, or better yet, place a deposit to guarantee your supply of healthy meat for next fall.
Frequently Asked Questions
Most farmers sell their bulk beef by the pound for "hanging weight", why don't you do that?
We value simplicity and transparency, which is why we list our maximum prices for each size share of bison. There are multiple discounts available that can reduce that price by a very significant amount.
Each of our deposit options lists in the description what is the most you will end paying if you want everything that is included. Final invoice will be sent after you have confirmed which if any discounts you would like to have applied.
We have created standardized weights to give us the flexibility to match up our orders to optimize the usage of whichever size bison we slaughter without the need to cause the uncertainty involved for customers when charging by weight.
Do I get the free freezer if I order a side or whole bison?
Yes! We recently upgraded that promotion to include the larger sizes as well. When you order your deposit we will contact you to confirm what you want included/discounted. If you decide you want the freezer included for one of the larger shares of bison we would be happy to send you one that will fit the bison share you ordered. We can even send you multiple small freezers if you prefer in case you ordered your large share of bison to share with another family or something.
Do you finish your bison on grass or grain?
Our bison are all grass-fed and finished, and fed hay in the winter.
What drugs or vaccines do you use on your bison?
We give our bison a dewormer in the late spring/early summer to prevent an excessive parasite load and the health problems that can result from that. That's it. We don't give our bison any vaccines. Antibiotics are only used in emergency situations. In our 3 years of raising bison, we have only needed to use antibiotics once. In 2022, when we needed to give 2 of our cows antibiotics to treat a bad case of pink-eye.
Do you use any artificial hormones on your bison?
None
Why do you feel it is so important to slaughter your bison right on the farm?
We try to raise our bison as close to wild as we can. They get scared and stressed by being handled and transported. By slaughtering our animals right on the farm, they never experience any fear or pain in the entire process. That is much better for them, and better for you too since it avoids stress hormones (cortisol, adrenaline) and lactic acid (when an animal is chased or struggles) in your meat.
Our Story
Our family is originally from Nova Scotia. We are a military family, so we have lived in several places over the years, mostly in the prairies.
We moved to Alberta in the summer of 2017, when the military posted us to Cold Lake for Matt to fly rescue helicopters. Our home we ended up buying had been the site of a deer farm in the 90s and had large game fences surrounding roughly 120 acres of our land. Originally we had no intentions of getting our own livestock, we had an arrangement with a local farmer who pastured his cows on our land in exchange for a little bit of cash and some beef.
In 2020, after the pandemic hit, many beef farmers got nervous about the impacts to processing capacity and so many toook whatever opportunity they could find to scale back thier herds. Our farmer let us know he wasn't going to be needing our pasture space any more. With that we started looking at the idea of getting livestock of our own, and eventually settled on bison.
In October 2020 we took delivery of our first 10 bison, 9 of which were pregnant. Since then we have been gradually growing our herd while learning how to manage our grass and improve the productivity of our land by rotational grazing. Now, in the fall of 2023, the first of our calves born here on the ranch in 2021, are finally ready to become some of the healthiest meat you can get anywhere.
With Matt set to retire from the military in 2024, after more than 25 years service, we look forward to continuing to grow our herd and sharing the health benefits of bison meat with our customers.