SUNDRE, Alta. – Peter Wenkoff was first attracted to bison because he wanted lean meat to control his cholesterol levels.
As a pilot, he needs the all clear on his annual physical to maintain his licence, and bison meat became part of a healthy eating program.
“Once I started producing my own (meat), it was hard to go back,” he said.
His bison ranch is now a large outdoor laboratory.
“It has been 10 years to figure out what I should be doing and to learn how to raise the animals naturally,” he said. “My ambition is to prove you can get good bison meat.”
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He sells live animals for slaughter and also runs a freezer meat program on the ranch website.
He said it is challenging to convince some people to try bison because many of them have complained in the past about a lack of consistency and poor quality.
“A lot of people had their first opportunity to taste bison and they never ate any after that,” he said.
Wenkoff, who lives in Airdrie, Alta., with his wife Maria de Lurdes, raises a small herd of Woods and Plains bison on rented land near Sundre.
During the summer, he flies water bombers to help fight forest fires. A few years ago he joined a Canadian team to fight fires in Greece.
As a result, he is often away from home and needs livestock that requires next to no maintenance.
While he may not be there everyday, he still wants to control meat quality from pasture to abattoir.
Work begins in the pasture, where the bison are raised without antibiotics or other chemicals. They receive salt blocks with selenium, have free access to water and graze knee deep in grass. A simple handling system and corral stands in a corner of the pasture for minimum-contact procedures such as ear tagging.
Shipping bison is stressful for the animals and the transporters. With careful handling and understanding of the animals, he hopes to prevent transport bruising and other injuries that can affect meat quality.
A mobile abattoir, which kills animals on the farm, is one possibility to prevent stress and transportation injuries. However, after working with the provincial government last year on a pilot project with a portable slaughter facility, he believes more work needs to be done to make it feasible.
Marketing method
Wenkoff sells his bison as free-range, grass-fed animals when they are 18 months old. At that point, they are lean and the muscle still contains omega fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid.
He said the best meat production comes from a skilled butcher who knows how to handle the animals and process the meat at the right moisture and temperature level.
He prefers 25 days of aging and has the meat vacuum sealed and immediately frozen for freshness. Freezer shipping packs cost a little more, but a courier can deliver the orders sooner so the product arrives in peak condition within two days.
Like many bison producers, he faced poor market prices because of a drought in 2002 and a BSE-induced trade embargo in 2003.
He saw large herds dispersed and valuable animals sold for $100.
“When I heard about it (BSE’s discovery in Canada in 2003), I thought the bison were going to skyrocket because everybody was going to get out of beef,” he said.
However, he soon realized producers who had spent years developing beef programs were not likely to abandon the business.
It became a struggle to make a profit in a production system that takes so long to finish an animal for the commercial meat market, but Wenkoff said he and others persisted because they believe in the product. Markets have since regained interest, he added.
The Canadian Bison Association’s first census in 1996 found 45,000 bison on 745 farms. The most recent census in 2006 reported 195,728 animals on 1,898 farms in nearly every province. The highest population was more than 97,000 head on 869 Alberta farms.
The number of bison slaughtered in federally and provincially inspected establishments increased to 25,613 in 2006 from 11,168 head in 2001.
