Riffle Farms
Liz and Jimmie Riffle with their son Jamon next to the sign at the entrance of their farm..
Photos by David Kirk
Where the buffalo roam in W. Va.
By David Kirk Liz Riffle and her husband Jimmie didn’ t fancy themselves farmers more than a decade ago. Back then, they were navy nurses.
Now they own a 60-acre plot of farmland in Preston County on Saltlick Road in Terra Alta, West Virginia. The area has plenty of farms and cattle, but the Riffles wanted to be different— they wanted to raise bison.
In 2011, that idea was a far-off dream for Liz. She worked in Maryland as a nurse in the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. Now that hospital bears the much more familiar name, Walter Reed.
Liz and Jimmie met working at the center and fell for each other amid their stressful work. It wasn’ t long before they were itching for plans to settle down and live their civilian lives.
“ We knew Jimmie was going to retire soon, I was already out of my military contract, so we wanted to make a plan,” Liz said.“ I grew up raising horses in New Hampshire, so I wanted a horse farm. But he said,‘ We can have horses, but why don’ t we have something that makes some money too?’”
Meat was the money maker they settled on. Plenty of farms raise cows and pigs, but they wanted something a little more exotic.
In their time in active duty, Liz and Jimmie did a lot of traveling together and found themselves out west in the heart of buffalo country. At every restaurant, they found bison steak, bison burgers and bison short ribs on the menus.
“ I said,‘ OK, where are they getting all this bison?’” Liz recalled.
Obviously, people weren’ t going into Yellowstone and hunting the animals in the wild. It turned out the meat was being sourced from local farms. So, the Riffles figured, why can’ t we have that in West Virginia?
While Liz is from New England, Jimmie grew up in Grafton, just a short trek down U. S. Route 50 from Terra Alta. In 2018, the two found some farmland for sale and all they needed to do was get some bison.
What might sound like a tall task led Liz to a welcoming community of bison farmers. Across the East Coast, Liz found farms raising buffalo tucked in just about every state from Maine to Florida.
The first members of their herd came from Ohio, then some from Kentucky then
12 � DESTINATIONS � JUNE’ 25