Butcher House Meats is sourcing more beef from Osage Nation cattle, signaling a move away from sourcing beef through Val’s, a Tulsa-based distributor. Since 2021, when Butcher House Meats opened in response to food insecurity exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Osage seller has exclusively sourced their own sovereign bison.
“We have been sustaining BHM with bison from the Bison Preserve since BHM opened,” said Dr. Jann Hayman, ON Secretary of Natural Resources. “We only sell Osage Nation bison through the facility.”
Four years later, their beef sourcing is catching up.
The Hominy-based processing and retail facility is still “paying for itself,” according to Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear.
There is still room for financial growth, both in terms of a growing walk-in customer base, as well as initiatives to sell meat to local restaurants.
Before Butcher House Meats was able to provide the cattle for their own beef, they were still sourcing local, said Chelsea Hendricks, who is BHM’s program/quality control assistant. “That’s the only place we really order from,” Hendricks said of Val’s. “Because everything is pretty local. We like to try and keep it close to home.”
Pretty local was not local enough for some restaurants, such as the Dirty Laundry Saloon in Pawhuska, which opted not to sell Butcher House Meats because “the meat is from Tulsa,” said Erik Albarran Wick, one of the restaurant’s co-owners.
While the Dirty Laundry Saloon does serve Osage Nation produce via Harvest Land, they opted for the Drummond Ranch over Butcher House Meats. Bison, said Wick, is “too expensive” to make sense for the restaurant.
As of this spring, the situation is changing as the only BHM meat coming from Tulsa is chicken and pork. According to Hayman, that will not be a temporary scenario, either.
“We … have dates through the fall to process additional cattle from the feedlot,” said Hayman, who credits collaboration with the Otoe-Missouria Tribe in developing processes for cattle feedlots as one point of growth for BHM’s sovereign hyper-local beef sourcing.
These changes at BHM are fairly new, evidencing growth over the last few years. As of August 2024, Butcher House Meats was still relying on Val’s for regular beef orders. While there was some hamburger and “nicer cuts of beef” sourcing directly from the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), as well as “roasts and a limited quantity of steaks,” said Hayman, they were “still learning.”
After starting with $8 million in funding from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act in 2021, the four-year-long growth period at the 19,000-square-foot meat processing facility represents significant learning. The facility was designed and approved for cattle, bison, hogs and seasonal deer and they have processed all of these animals, Hayman said.
Cole McKinney, BHM plant manager, joined the processor in 2023 following work with Tyson Foods and holds a master’s degree in meat science from Oklahoma State University. By February 2024, McKinney was regularly hearing from customers that Butcher House Meats just sold “better meat.”
The primary obstacle they were facing at the time is that “the public still doesn’t realize that … we’re open to the public,” said Jill Hough, BHM’s retail coordinator.
As they have grown their cattle herd, the customer base has not reflected that growth, according to Hendricks. She both assists McKinney and performs quality control checks for U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) licensing and inspections. “It’s out of sight, out of mind,” she said of the relatively infrequent customers shopping at BHM. Some residents of Hominy do not even realize the building is there.
With the influx of cattle and bison processing days coming, “a sign might help, maybe a billboard,” said Hendricks. They are preparing to sell a great deal of sovereign-sourced bison and beef at their spring Memorial Day sale and the employees are excited and hoping for customers.
“We’ve been getting quite a bit of our own beef. We just recently got a bunch of them in and we’re supposed to be getting more,” said Hendricks, who referenced a calendar of dates with an influx of processing to begin on March 25 and continuing at high volumes through May.
The bison on the other hand, are wild animals and cannot be processed with the same ease. “The bison did not come in … because they were behaving stubbornly,” Hendricks said. “They’re pretty stubborn,” she said. Rescheduling bison processing is normal because of fire, weather and temperament, said Hayman. “Bison are wild animals and do not behave like cattle, so there are times where the bison movement prohibits gathering,” she said. “We simply coordinate with BHM and schedule a new date.”
The bison served at the March 30 Grayhorse Bison Feast was provided by the Osage Nation Bison Preserve, a conservation herd overseen by the Department of Natural Resources.
BHM meets industry challenges
While the bison industry is growing “both in size and popularity,” according to a 2024 article from the Journal of Animal Science, the industry has comparatively less infrastructure as well as less demand for bison, compared to beef. The USDA has begun purchasing bison from tribes, including the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, as part of the Food Distribution Program for Indian Reservations (FDPIR), which is part of continuing government food purchasing.
The cattle industry has been down by 19.3% from 1970 to 2017, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, but the Osage Nation has been making the business work for them. “Us having the cattle under DNR, we don’t charge for those cattle, it’s inter-departmental work. If they were buying animals from anywhere, then they’re going to have to increase their costs,” said Hayman.
Although BHM had to rely on Val’s while they were learning, they still managed to increase their revenues each year they were open. In a breakdown of monthly revenues and expenditures from Feb. 1, 2021, through Aug. 31, 2024, costs and budgets varied widely but mapped in yearly revenue and expenditures from 2021 to 2024. BHM increased revenues by 15 percent over the first year, then 65 percent in the following year and most recently, by 113 percent, from 2023 to 2024.
The growing revenues at BHM does not mean they will focus on profit, however. According to Assistant Principal Chief R.J. Walker, programs of the Osage Nation cannot do so. “When it gets down to it, constitutionally, the Executive Branch is not able to run for-profit businesses,” said Walker. The initiative to resource the Osage people with food security, however, is not a for-profit concern. All those funds can be used to feed the people and pay for Osage Nation costs, if they continue to increase their revenues.
In Chief Standing Bear’s office, there is a photograph of Osage bison he likes to look at. “In this business, you try to do your best every day, but there’s so many things that we can’t predict that we have to be ready for, and you’re always on alert.” During comments at a 2024 art gathering at Harvest Land, he said, “We haven’t had bison among us for 150 years … the last time we had a buffalo hunt, that was in the 1860s.
“That’s how long it’s been. And that whole culture we had involved with the buffalo is clear-well past. We have Buffalo Clan still, but we don’t have Buffalo Dances and we lost so much on our way from Missouri to Kansas to here, on that journey … We are getting to where we can sustain ourselves and that’s really difficult to do,” he said.
Standing Bear recalled the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, when all the slaughterhouses shut down and there was no meat for elders or children who rely on ON programs. “We were up and running from that nine months later,” he said. “We’re building this, but now, how do we sustain it? Because this stuff is expensive. Every community needs to do what we’re doing. You need to figure out what the right size is … Take care of yourself because whoever is going to be controlling the food and the prices, that is way too much power. You’ve got to take care of yourself. So, that’s what we’re doing.”
Butcher House Meats is located at 115 Eagle Ave. in Hominy and accepts EBT. They are open to all. Hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and 9 a.m. to noon on Saturday. The retail counter can also be reached by phone at (918) 287-0079 and by email at butcherhousemeats@osagenation-nsn.gov. BHM also offers a 10% discount to members of the Osage, Kaw, Quapaw, Ponca and Omaha tribes with valid identification.
