ROCKY VIEW COUNTY— Starting in February and lasting typically until the end of April ranchers will be working 24 hours a day seven days a week engaging in one of the most critical aspects of the cattle industry, calving season.
According to the Canadian Cattlemen's Association Canada produces about 1.55 million tonnes of beef a year, exporting $3.1 billion in beef worldwide to 62 countries. Alberta accounts for about 40 per cent of all beef produced in the country.
Calving season is a critical economic aspect of the cattle industry, but is also a longstanding tradition in the region and boasts a rich history in the Cochrane area.
John Simpson and his family have been in the area for 65 years at their ranch Simpson Ranching Limited in the Grand Valley.
Their calving season is already off to a unique start after a cow gave birth to triplets, an event that has never happened in the ranch's history. The odds of having a triplet are one in 400,000.
“I’d never even heard of it before,” Simpson said.
The mom, known as X 31, is a 10-year-old-cow who in her lifetime has produced 12 calves.
The triplets, two bull calves weighing in at 91 pounds and a heifer weighing in at 79 pounds, were produced by X 31 on her own with no assistance.
“She had 240 pounds of calf in her,” Simpson said with a laugh. “She looked big, but she didn’t look that big.”
The triplets come in the midst of a busy calving season on the Simpson Ranch. Last week alone they saw 237 calves enter the world.
Simpson's Ranch is a cow-calf operation and is home to about 1,000 head of Hereford cattle.
Calving typically begins around Valentine’s Day and finishes up around the start of April, Simpson said, lasting for a total of about 52 days,
“Our calves are born earlier, we ween our calves earlier, we sell our calves earlier,” Simpson said. “That’s the way you make money in the cattle business not to be doing it when everybody else is doing it.”
During calving season, the ranchers will be working non-stop looking after the cow-calf pairs.
It is a challenging industry, he said, and when calving season is in full swing everyone on the ranch needs to be ready because, “when a cow is ready to have her calf, she has her calf.”
“It’s a 24/7, 365-day job,” Simpson said. “There’s always somebody out in the field at all times.”
Simpson said he has a great crew and praised ranch manager Ron Elliott for getting a great team together that takes pride in their work.
There has been a disconnect between the general population and agriculture in the last two or three decades, Simpson said, and the average Canadian no longer knows where their food comes from.
A silver lining of the COVID-19 pandemic is it encouraging people to once again connect and understand where their food comes from.
Simpson created the Simpson Centre for Agricultural Food and Innovation in the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. He described it as an agricultural think tank designed to explore ways to connect the general public with producers.
The ultimate goal is to help the industry become more of a modern business.
“Agriculture has so much opportunity to help the Alberta economy,” Simpson said. “We got to do things right, do it the right way and try and get the rest of the world to appreciate what happens between that cow meeting up with the bull and that thing coming out of the retailers.”
Fifth-generation rancher Travis Eklund of WineGlass Ranch began the calving season in mid-March. The ranch has been family-owned and operated for more than 130 years.
The ranch has always started calving around March 15 and the season lasts about two months. During the calving season, Eklund and his family spend 24 hours a day working with the cow-calf pairs.
Each day brings new surprises and Eklund and his family are always out in the fields working with the cows raising premium Alberta beef.
“Calving is fun, we do a lot of things on horseback still and you get to get out and see a new calf having his first suck and running and jumping and hiding in the grass, but it’s a lot of work regardless of the year,” Eklund said.
Calving season on the ranch typically lasts about 70 days.
In an ideal world, the goal of the ranch is to have a hands-off calving operation— Outside of feeding, checking on and ear-tagging the calves.
“In a perfect world every cow would have a calf on her own, she would claim the calf, the calf would suck, everybody is healthy, everybody is happy. The only thing we have to do is tag the calves so that we know which calf belongs to which cow— That never happens,” Eklund said with a laugh.
The WineGlass Ranch has a large calving barn available for those cows who need a little help while birthing or need to be warmed up when it is cold outside. A large barnyard is also available in the case of a really bad storm that can hold around 300 cows.
Heifers, first-time moms, will need more help and require checking in more often than experienced cows. These cows are checked on every three to four hours.
“It’s their first time— They’re more prone to difficulties calving,” Eklund said.
While most of the cow-calf pairs thrive on their own, Eklund said, about five to 10 per cent of the cowherd takes about 40 to 50 per cent of his time on the ranch during calving season.
Depending on the year WineGlass Ranch can have more than 10 calves in the calving barn due to the cold, rejection from the mom or any other ordeal.
The ranch has seen two sets of twins this year so far. Twins are challenging because usually, the mom has the potential abandon one of the two calves. Eklund said they will work with the cow to bond to calves by placing them in the calving barn as soon as possible to ensure the cow looks after both calves.
“Twins are a blessing and a curse. Because if you have a set of twins then you have an extra calf in case something dies … The flip side is twins on a cow are a lot of work,” Eklund said.
This season has been going better than the last three or four years due to the warmer weather and limited snow.
“The weather plays a huge factor in calving,” Eklund said. “In years like this when it’s warm weather and no snow, it’s a lot easier on these calves.”
Snow brings with it the need to battle snowdrifts and more importantly affects the landscape of the farm.
“The hardest thing on the calves is the wind,” Eklund said. “It can be snowing and fairly cold and the calf is fine. But, if it’s a cold wind that just sucks the heat out of a calf, sometimes you’ll have to bring them and warm them up.
“It’s a lot of long days, long hours, seven days a week for 70 or 80 days,” Eklund said. “By the time the end of May rolls around everybody is tired and worn out, and if the weather is bad, it’s even worse.”
The hard work pays off when it comes time for auctions in October. Eklund said calf prices have been holding fairly flat over the last couple of years.
“It’s good because it hasn’t declined, but on the flip side it’s bad because it hasn’t increased either,” Eklund said. “If it stays flat, we’re reasonably happy with it because it could be worse.”
Located just south of Cochrane, Peter Hughes of the Edge-Hughes Cattle Company has seen 16 calves this season, so far. Hughes expects to calve just under 400 cows this year.
The ranch is operated by Hughes, Laurie Edge-Hughes and their family. The cow-calf operation has been at the ranch since 1887
It has always been a cow-calf operation and they recently made the move to begin calving in late March and mid-April.
“I prefer to miss most of the winter weather,” Hughes said. “Traditionally, my father-in-law used to start mid-February.”
The early winter timing proved to be a lot of work for the ranch crews and the cows, he said, so they decided to try moving calving to later in the year.
For the last two years, they have been calving starting in mid-April.
“When people decide to calf totally depends on their situation,” Hughes said. “We just backed it up to avoid March and February.”
The cows are born outside in the cleanest conditions possible, a part of this is relocating pairs when a cow is two or three days old to the new field.
On their busy days the ranch can see 12 or 15 calves born.
“We go out on horses and pick up pairs, so a cow with a two or three-day-old calf, and we move them through the rest of the group and out to a different field, as the babies are able to move," Hughes said, explaining cow-calf pairs are typically moved after a day or two.
He has has found the change in timing has encouraged growth in the calves and helped better prepare them for cattle auctions.
Most Canadians are about two generations removed from agriculture now, Hughes said, and it can be challenging to connect with the experience of raising food for the county.
Edge-Hughes Cattle Company is located beside Fireside, he said, and he often has people interested in learning more about the operation when the calves are out in the fields. The neighbours can also prove challenging though, because people do not always appreciate that the cows need their space.
He hopes the close connection to the ranch helps foster an appreciation in neighbours for the hard work and dedication that goes into raising cattle.
“I don’t leave the ranch during calving,” Hughes said with a chuckle. “Every day is different you never know what you’re going to see. But it’s exciting because you get to see the product of your labour.”
