MPR: A passion for elk

A passion for elk
By Mary Losure, Minnesota Public Radio
July 18, 2001

Almost everyone has a hobby or two. Occasionally, people's hobbies grow into consuming passions. That's what happened to Mark Mattison after he bought his first elk.

Farmers and ranchers now raise a total of around 135,000 elk nationwide, more than double the number five years ago. So many people have gotten into the business that prices have collapsed. Mark Mattison says bred cows now sell for about $1,500, compared to the mid-'90s when they went for as much as $20,00, if you could find one whose owner was willing to part with it.
(MPR Photo/Mary Losure)

MARK MATTISON'S ELK HABIT began small. "About 1984, I started out with one bull. I just did it for the fun of it," he says. "The DNR (Department of Natural Resources) came out and said I couldn't have one for a pet and I had to start raising them. So I bought a couple cows, and now we're up to 450 head."

In autumn, Mattison likes to listen to the bull elks' calls, which carry for miles across the rolling Wisconsin countryside. They sound like a distant bugle player, often startling local deer hunters. "Bow hunters that are miles away, they just can't get over that. In the early morning, they can hear that. And it's just beautiful," he says.

Mattison now has so many elk, he's hired a full-time range manager, Doug Ray, to oversee what's grown into the Lone Rock Elk Ranch. On a tour of the spread, Mattison drives his pickup under the elk horns mounted high above the entrance to his driveway, past an elk crossing sign, and down the road to the first of several locations where the animals graze in neat pens surrounded by eight-foot-tall woven-wire fencing. He figures he's fenced off around 200 acres, and plans to add more.

Mattison slows the pickup by a cluster of elk bulls, each with a full set of antlers. They stand proud, a bit out of place against a backdrop of storybook-pretty Wisconsin farmland dotted with red barns and blue silos. Dairy or beef cows would look right at home grazing here, but Mattison never had any intention to raise cows the way his father and his uncle did.

Instead he went into the construction business. He had time to go on vacation, and opportunities to hunt elk in Montana, Arizona, British Columbia, and Colorado. "I just like to be around them. I love the look of the horns," he says.

He's let these few bulls grow their antlers out, but most have them sawed off in late winter when the horn is soft, fast growing, and covered with velvety fur. The antlers are frozen and ground up for medicines, largely joint remedies. The horn sells mostly in the Asian market, but elk farmers are also trying to build domestic demand for it. Mattison says he takes two capsules a day to give him energy, and gives them to his dog to help with his arthritis. His wife Kim sells the pills down at the local nursing home, where they're quite popular.

Aside from the horns, most of Mattison's business is selling breeding stock. Farmers raise elk not only for their antlers, but for their meat, which is low in cholesterol. And farmers can sell a prize bull elks to shooting farms in Montana and other western states, where hunters will pay thousands of dollars to bag a single animal.

But like any farm enterprise, the better it looks, the more people get into it. Farmers and ranchers now raise a total of around 135,000 elk nationwide, more than double the number five years ago. So many people have gotten into the business that prices have collapsed. Mattison says bred cows now sell for about $1,500, compared to the mid-'90s when they went for as much as $20,00, if you could find one whose owner was willing to part with it. Like a lot of farmers back then, Mattison hoped prices would stay at that level.

"It was a pretty nice way to make a living. When the market was, say, $8,000, or $10,000 an animal, you sell 10 animals, that's $100,000 a year," he says. "That was kind of my goal. I was hoping it would have stayed like that and a guy could have just stayed home and raised elk."

In the meantime, he's running a road construction firm with his brother-in-law. Right now they're working on a job in a congested area of Minneapolis near the Metrodome, more than an hour to the west of here, but it's clear that Mattison's real interest is here at home.

He cruises his pickup to another pasture farther down the road, where mother elk with this year's calves, their coats still spotted like fawns, graze in the tall grass. Every once in awhile, one makes a faint squeak like a far-off door hinge. Mandy, a tame elk who Mattison's family raised on a bottle when her mother rejected her, puts her moist black nose through the fence.

"She loves people," Mattison says quietly. "She'd much rather be with humans than with other elk." Mandy still misses living up by the house, he says. "Matter of fact, if she's in the pen by the road, when you leave, she'll run the whole fence line. Looks like she's racing with the pickup."

The elk farm is not quite breaking even, but Mattison thinks it will soon, and in any case, he's in it for the long term. And he says even if elk weren't worth five cents he'd still keep a few of them around.

Another few months, and the bugling will begin.

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