I'll tell you what - if you don't make changes on these web sites about every 6 months or so, nobody will know what the hell you are doing.
Almost 20 years of concentrating on genetically engineering this cow herd is definitely showing up this spring out on the ranch. I am talking about the Welsh Blacks mostly as you will have to link over to Darcy and Candace's web site at
www.purecountry.ca to see how our Galloway herd is doing. Darcy has all of our Galloway cattle on a lease and is moving ahead with that herd and his own very large herd of Galloway seed stock as well.
As for the Ponoka Welsh Black cows, we are well into calving season with 80% of our 100 calves on the ground in the first month. I'll have to knock on wood as we are still batting 100% with two losses and two sets of live "heifer calf" twins so far. Two awesome little cows had these twin heifers so we just made our future female prospects quadruple almost over night. I have put up some new pictures of our current herd bulls that we change up regularly to keep our customers moving ahead just like us. The Cam Alta Victor Lee bull has turned out to be an incredible grass finished specimen. He is a frame 4 bull at 5 years of age and weighs a whopping 1900 pounds. Do you realize how thick a bull that only measures 53 inches at the hip has to be to weigh 1900 pounds? And he did this without a pound of grain for his entire life. With his first calves hitting the ground on our ranch this year, we are confident that we made the right choice to use this bull hard last summer and he will be back on a group of cows this summer again.
The other bull that really worked well for us this year is the 46S bull that brought the high price at our sale this spring going to the Jim and Rusti Blanke herd at Regina. We used this powerful bull on our heifers last year due to my faith in his dam to bring her calving ease along with the power of the 40P bull that is his sire. 46S was one of the best gaining bulls on the completely forage ration at Lakeland College last fall and showed the kind of testicular development that we have been working to move up. I can honestly say that I did not seen one of the 11 heifers calve yet this year and we had to move the bull to a different group of cows after he caught these first 11 to pick up where another bull could not cut it. I am so happy that we had to do this as we will be getting a larger number of calves from 46S due to this switch.
We finally got three red bull calves (so far) from the Red Patriarch Bull so watch for these crackers to hit the sale in about 20 months from now. I measured and weighed Red Patriarch this spring as well and he would be a frame 41/2 with just over 2000 pounds on his frame after a winter diet of just hay.
As far as the beef front goes, more changes as well. Most of the feeder cattle I bought last year lost us money in the conventional market where the packers lapped up the gravy from the prime carcasses we raised. We could not find any markets for most of the cattle and sold them conventionally to Lakeside Packers. This spring however, we purchased a share in the Canadian Celtic Cattle Company phenomena. I call it a phenomena as this company has not only survived, but thrived in the past few years and is looking at further expansion this year. The second , "Second to None" meat shop was opened in March of this year and a third is already in the works. Further franchising is in the plans and I do not only intend to supply cattle and kick in some cash, but plan to go to work for Paul and Wally and the gang this summer. The biggest challenge we face in expansion is the availability of people, so I am going to offer some time for sales and anything else they want me to do to help.
I will end this edition by thanking all of our Bull buyers at another successful bull sale this past February and look forward to showing you what we have to offer next year.
Have a great summer everyone.
Randy
26T
66T
