So I’m 21 born and raised in Tennessee and recently my curiosity is peaked in bison and raising cattle in general. I live in a very rural hilly area and my grandparents own a 90 acre valley that they used to have cows on when they first moved to the state. I’ll probably be building a house on this land soon and I’m the only one who takes care of it. We have some local bison farms about an hour away but it’s mostly just a few bison. I’m wanting to get into this one day potentially when I’m older, maybe towards my 30’s when I have more money established to put into this. I’ve raised other livestock such as chickens at my parents house and I have bees so I’m not new to raising animals but I’ve rarely been around cattle or let alone bison. Our area is also a heavy cattle area so the competition on cattle is high which is why I’d like to get into bison as I’d be the only one in the area, plus I’d like to restore more native animals to my property one day that are endangered or used to be native to the area. Another animal I’d love to reintroduce would be elk as they also used to be native but that’s not my focus right now.

(Picture of the property is included) I know cattle need 2 acres per cow so I’m guessing bison would be similar if not 3-4 acres as they are bigger. Currently most of the property is woods as the steep hills of the valley are wooded with there being roughly 20 acres of field in total with a giant field running down the valley and a few fields going up the west hill as it’s not as steep as the east one. We have a spring and a creek that runs down the valley that goes underground and comes out in a ravine on the north end of the property where the creek flows out of but it’s a deep ravine. There’s an old pond area I want to restore that comes out of the spring house so they can have a pond. There’s also old fence rows that have been replaced with rows of trees that I’d like to open up as they don’t look natural and it would open up the fields and general access to everything. There also used to be an old tobacco/cattle barn that has fallen in that I’d probably have to build a new barn for them.

If anyone has any bison experience I’d love to know any and all information or just any recommendations as I really have an interest in this and just anything unique and different in general. Also if I need to provide more info on the property I can as I just did a general summary. There’s also a valley on the east side of their property that is split with someone else I might look into buying and maybe keeping it as woods or making another field down the middle of it.