Cattle Raised in Canada

Welcome to the Cattleman’s Corner. I’m Brian Hale, sitting in for the late Howard Hale, as we continue his legacy of speaking with cattlemen and women from around the globe.

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Here’s our co-host David Woodruff with our guest Dylan Biggs from Alberta, Canada.

I suffered from what a lot of people have suffered from, I think, over the years with breeding programs is you end up making them too complicated. It becomes a challenge to keep everything where it’s at, and I’m not opposed necessarily to crossbreeding at all. In fact, I think that’s the ideal thing.

I mean, from an efficiency standpoint, you’d be best off with two lines of cattle that ideally were fixed by virtue of line breeding and then crossing them, but the majority of our cattle are Angus, red Angus, and mostly black, and we have had registered Angus cattle since the mid-80s. You sell very little seed stock then? Very little. I sell a little bit to neighbors.

We lease out a few bulls. When we started the meat program, it became a lot easier in terms of saying, well, these cattle aren’t going to make breeding stock, so we should add value to them some other way, and that was the motivation for our meat program. It’s not a get-rich-quick program, and we had to figure out when my dear wife and I were starting, and our family in the 90s, we had to figure out how we could both stay home, and we thought, well, we’d try and add value to what we were producing, and so that’s when we started direct marketing.

That’s it for today’s Cattleman’s Corner. Thanks again for listening, and may God bless. I’m Brian Hale.