Mike Waters is grateful for the support from friends and family that he’s received over the years – in many ways, the kindness of others helped to set the trajectory of his life.
“I came from the streets of Hamilton,” said the Hagersville resident, who owns Springvale Bison Farm with his wife, Michelle Waters.
Waters lived in foster care from the age of nine until he was about 12, when he went back to living with his mother and stepfather, but that didn’t last long.
“My parents were not good parents,” he said. “It happens.”
From the age of 14 to about 18, Waters lived on the streets and was a member of a gang before he was able to start building a more stable life for himself. At 23, Waters became a Christian, and about five years after that, “I felt a call in my heart from the Lord to start raising bison,” he said.
There was just one problem. “I knew nothing of farming at all,” Waters said.
At the time, he and his then-wife were living in an apartment in the city with their first child.
“I needed to find a farmer who could teach me to farm, who had an extra farm,” Waters said.
He was able to connect with Lloyd Ramsey, who had a dairy farm between Brantford and Ancaster.
“He started to teach me to farm, and a year later, we moved into a house that nobody had lived in for 60 years,” Waters said. “I knew nothing about carpentry, plumbing, electrical – nothing at all, because I was street smart. Luckily, I had enough friends that came and helped to put the house together.”
Ramsey’s property had two farms. Shortly after Waters and his family moved in, Ramsey switched from dairy to beef cattle, and Waters ran the operation for him, learning along the way. In the meantime, he rented the second farm. About two years after they moved in, Ramsey bought Waters his first five bison, which he raised on the second farm.
“That was the start of it,” Waters said.
The Waters family stayed on the Ramsey farm for about a decade. In that time, Waters got connected with Waterbrook Farm Camp, which did a lot of work with inner city kids. He was a regular speaker there for about 15 years when the owners told him they were looking to close the camp. Waters didn’t want to see that happen, so he bought the farm, moved there, and continued to operate the camp for another eight years before he ultimately decided it was time to shut it down.
“It was a good camp; we had a blast,” he said. The main problem was, it was hard to get enough volunteers who were both able to properly support the youth coming in and were sufficiently knowledgeable about the farm animals’ care.
Waters continued to farm bison throughout his stint as camp owner and operator.
At its peak, he’s had about 90 head of bison in the herd – though generally, he tries to keep it closer to 60. He sells the meat, babies, leather, hides, and heads – both skulls and mounted.
Waters said bison meat is growing in popularity because it’s high in iron and low in fat.
“Beef is 28 per cent fat, whereas bison is only 3 per cent,” Waters said. “There’s no gamey taste at all, because they’re grass fed.”
While he doesn’t run the farm camp anymore, Waters does still teach. He has a taxidermied adult bison and calf that he brings to educational events, where he talks about the animals and their role in history. In particular, he focuses on how Indigenous communities would utilize all the parts of the animal when they hunted them, and how while there used to be millions of bison across North America at the start of the 1800s, overhunting caused that number to dwindle to a few thousand by the early 1900s.
In the spirit of Ramsey who helped him get his start, Waters now also teaches others who want to get into bison farming or who are trying to make it work. The success rate is a bit of a mixed bag. “It’s not for everybody,” Waters said.
Like with any large farm animal, raising bison comes with plenty of challenges.
A big one is the amount of space they need.
“You need an acre per bison … they do a lot of grazing,” Waters said, adding that Springvale Bison Farm has to buy all the feed for its herd. Rising costs of hay and feed has made this financially taxing.
It’s also important to implement a parasite management routine at least twice a year, because bison are very susceptible to strongyles parasites, Waters said.
One of the biggest initial costs with raising bison is setting up adequate game fencing, because they can be hard to contain, Waters said. Bison can jump vertically about six feet (1.8 metres), and can run around 55 kilometres (35 miles) an hour at their top speed.
“When they get going, they’re like a locomotive; they will not stop,” Waters said.
That’s a fact he personally knows all too well.
In August 2022, there was a severe incident when Waters was trying to help load a bison.
“We were shipping him for meat … and he decided to ship me instead,” Waters said.
He was standing behind a gate that wasn’t latched when the bison charged. The bison hit the gate, which hit Waters, and he was flung about 15 feet (4.5 metres) into a hydro pole.
“When I woke up, I was screaming at (Michelle) to get off me, because I thought she was standing on my chest … I couldn’t breathe,” Waters said.
Michelle was actually standing over him, trying to prevent the bison from trampling him as she let it out of the pen.
“I told him to just shut up and lie there,” she said.
The injuries were brutal. Waters had 13 broken bones total, including in his back and three places in his shoulder. He had a flail chest injury, which according to the Mayo Clinic’s website, is two or more contiguous rib fractures with two or more breaks per rib.
With that injury in particular, Water said his medical team at Hamilton General Hospital told him and his family, “The mortality rate is quite high; usually you don’t live out of it.”
During his recovery, hospital staff did everything they could to prevent other potentially deadly hazards, such as infection, pneumonia, and blood clots. Surgeries had to be delayed until Waters was healed enough to risk it.
“I was pretty banged up,” Waters said.
Waters credits his faith as being pivotal to him not only surviving, but thriving.
“I’m a great reader of the scripture (of the Bible); they bring me great comfort,” he said, adding that in particular, he kept focusing on Romans 8:11: “And if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies …”
Initially, his medical team told him they expected it would be around half a year before he’d be able to walk again. However, he was up and moving within a few weeks, and was released from hospital after about five weeks.
“They called me the miracle man down there,” Waters said with a smile.
He emphasized how much he appreciated the dedication of the staff at the hospital.
“They were fabulous there,” he said. “They were phenomenal. I can’t credit them enough. And there was such a shortage of nurses, and yet they were at your beck and call all the time.”
Waters said his friends and family were also there for him throughout his recovery.
“My wife came down every night and gave me a sponge bath. I still question the steel wool and the bleach,” he joked.
While he was able to walk when he was released from hospital, Waters still needed to use wheelchair sometimes to get around. So, his children and some friends built a ramp for him.
“And then, they built safety cages in the bison pen, so that when I’m in there, I have a place that I can get into quick,” Waters added.
Two years after the incident, Waters said he’s not anxious going into the pens with the bison.
“It was just one of those fluke things,” he said.
That’s not to suggest that bison are completely safe to be around, though.
Waters and Michelle have both sustained injuries – though not nearly as severe – from working with the herd over the years.
While it may be counter intuitive, the biggest danger comes when the bison are friendly, they said.
Michelle explained, “If they’re shy of you, when you go to feed, they’ll kind of step away, but if they’re friendly, they’re like, ‘Give me the pail.’ They’re not necessarily trying to hurt you, but they know that you’ve got the pail of food, and they’re going to take it.”
She added that any time she’s seen a video online where people have been hurt when trying to get close to a bison, “It’s not a surprise attack; it’s that people didn’t read the signs.”
When a bison is shaking its head, and especially when it lifts its tail, those are some of the ways it’s communicating that it doesn’t want the humans near, she said.
As tempting as it might be, Waters said wryly, “Do not pet the fluffy cows,” adding, “They’re a wild animal, and you’ve always got to respect them.”