Cattle on the Circle Y

By Michael Burgess

 Since the early days of the Circle Y we ran steers until they were two, three and four years of age fattened on the grass. They were then shipped to Winnipeg for sale. Some were shipped farther east to southern Ontario for final finishing on corn.

 As grain feeding became more prevalent we sold mostly yearlings and some two year olds to Ontario for grain finishing. These cattle made the trip east in cattle cars on the trains. Loaded in Big Beaver they traveled up thru Moose Jaw to Winnipeg thru northern Ontario to Toronto and down to the Chatham area. They would be unloaded for feed and water a couple of times but it was a long trip. We sold our yearling steers and heifers to the same buyer for forty years.

In the early 1990’s I wanted to make the change from running yearling cattle to running a cow herd. I started with some auction market heifers using long horn and Watusi bulls for their low birth weight as we were calving out close to one hundred head of heifers those first couple of years.

I made a strong commitment to the Black Angus breed in 1995 purchasing 45 purebred heifers from John Franks at the Short Grass Angus bull and heifers sale that spring.

I am trying to build a very thrifty fertile cow herd that thrives on the short dry grass of the rugged Big Muddy Badlands.

 My bull battery has included bulls from Dale Fellman of Jordan MT. They possessed the bloodlines of Basin Rainmaker, Basin Emulation and Home Run.  I have also used bulls from John Franks' Double J herd. I used sons of DDA Banjo 1B and DDA Fahren 51. I also used a son  of Alberta Traveler 416. As of late most of my bulls have come from Merit Cattle Company  of Radville Sk. Those bulls include sons of Ebon Hill Equalizer 117’97, Lukens 9440 Scotch Cap L463, Sitz Alliance 6595, TC Advantage and OCC Magnum 749M  I generally just raise a few bulls each year for my own use.    

We background our calves over the winter and have started to develop a market for our ranch raised heifers for replacements. We have ran our calves over on grass as well as sold them off in the spring depending on the drought outlook and market conditions.