ADMIRAL, Sask. – Myron Wigness could sit and stare at his bison grazing and frolicking in the pasture for hours.
“It’s very therapeutic,” he said. “They’re an impressive animal to watch.”
That appeal extends to the amateur photographers who stop to take pictures of the herd on the Wigness family farm on Highway 13 near Admiral.
Myron, with brother Kurt and Kurt’s son Merek, keep a 300-head bison herd there, with others housed on a friend’s farm south of Saskatoon.
Both Myron of Calgary and Merek of Saskatoon work off-farm in full-time careers.
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They say the business arrangement works well because the animals largely take care of their own needs. The pair returns to Admiral to help Kurt with weaning or shoring up fencing when required.
Bison are indigenous to the Prairies and the climate, so they require only limited shelter or bedding, said Merek. They eat snow and fare better in severe weather than cattle since they tend to lie at the top of a hill facing the storm.
“Mother Nature is probably the best biotechnologist there is,” said Merek, a plant molecular biology technician for Agriculture Canada.
Myron said bison essentially do their own haying, feeding and fertilizing, and they calve easily.
“You don’t need to babysit them like cattle,” he said. “At calving, you might as well go golfing.”
While bison females do not reproduce until age three, they can produce six to 12 more calves than a cow over their reproductive lifespan.
Bison graze year round, do not overeat or bloat and are less susceptible to scours due to their grazing diet, Merek said.
Myron, a livestock handling equipment salesman and designer, said understanding they are wild animals is key to choosing the appropriate handling system.
“The quieter you can work them, the better off you are,” he said, recommending sheeted panels and closed-in squeeze chutes.
The less handling, the better, he added.
Myron believes bison fare better than cattle in branding, likely because of their hair.
“It doesn’t seem to bother them and they calm down quickly afterwards,” he said.
In the paddocks, several bulls service the herd as opposed to single sire operations in cattle.
The Wigness family made the switch to bison from purebred cattle in 1997. Kurt monitored the emerging bison industry while attending cattle shows in the United States and spent much time selecting his first animals based on good health and potential carcass weight.
He serves on the Saskatchewan Bison Association board, which has worked to improve the marketing of bison in recent years.
“It’s important to look outside of our farm. It’s important to have the big picture,” said Kurt, who relies on his hired man Jeruel Hagen to manage the herd when business takes him away.
He estimated there are 350,000 head of bison in Canada and 500,000 in the United States.
Kurt sources animals from various farms to make a semi-trailer load for shipment to a slaughter plant in the United States. He also helps others get into the business by finding animals for their operations.
When the border was closed during BSE, Kurt said the business culled animals to cut feeding costs and offered direct farm sales. A series of good grass years also helped, added Myron.
They keep costs low by choosing to buy feed locally rather than pay for the machinery to grow their own.
Current sales for bison are strong in Europe and the U.S., and meat prices are now higher than for beef.
The profile of bison has been raised by the involvement of media mogul Ted Turner, who operates a chain of restaurants specializing in bison called Ted’s Montana Grill.
The Wignesses say increased slaughter facilities in Canada for bison and a reopening of the border to breeding stock will strengthen prospects for bison producers in North America, who have the market cornered.
That’s a nice change from traditional agriculture, where commodities prices are kept low by competition from growers in other countries, said Kurt.
“Ordinary agriculture scares me. This is quite exciting being in a new thing in agriculture,” he said.
