Bull market.

• Author: Bronikowski, Lynn
• Position: D&L Meat Co. in Ovid, Colorado

Call 'em nuts.

Nine women gather each Tuesday and Wednesday at D&L Meat Co. in tiny Ovid, to uh, welt - to put it as delicately as possible, skin, slice, tenderize and batter the south side of a bull.

Yes, Rocky Mountain Oysters - swinging steaks or bull fries as they are more generically known - are turned out by the hundreds of thousands at the small meat processing plant Don and Linda Koester founded 23 years ago.

"We love it; it's fun; we like each other, and we're all buddies," said Peggy Reutzel, who's been working in what she calls the "nut room" at D&L for nine years. "Besides, we can take our frustrations out on men on these - just slice 'em up."

Two days a week, the women work briskly behind a glass window near the entrance to the D&L plant, standing around a table in rubber boots, lab coats and hairnets. For eight hours a day they prepare the oysters, bread them in cornmeal and place them in boxes where they are shipped out frozen. They work hard, most days filing 250 10-pound boxes.

But they also crack jokes about this thing they do for a living. When the bull session volume goes up, so does production, said Linda Koester. "As far as I know we're the biggest supplier of oysters in the country."

And who's going to argue with a company that contracts with 15 major food distributors to ship the delicacies to the East Coast, West Coast, Florida, Alaska and dozens of other states - not to mention the occasional inquiry from Japan?

"The Japanese got to buying them for an aphrodisiac," said Don Koester, an admitted workaholic at the plant, which also slaughters cattle, hogs and Lambs; makes specialty sausage; and smokes hams and bacon.

Last spring, the bottom line took a hit at D&L when the price of bull testicles hit a high of $2.90 a pound, about $1 more than usual. Koester said it was due to increased exports to Japan, causing a shortage in the midst of the cattle industry's Low cycle. D&L relies on brokers to truck in the frozen bull testicles. Does this make economic sense?

"Now I can get all I want, but the price is higher - about $2.39 a pound," he said. "There ain't that many people doing oysters, and we've now sold more oysters this year than last year. Some of that has to do with the fact that more people have heard of oysters and are willing to try them."

Still, the oysters stir squirms and curiosity from Coors Field's third deck, where D&L is the exclusive supplier to the Rocky's Mountain Oysters stand, to Europe, where...