October has been an incredibly busy month for us, with the aim to complete our fieldwork before the frost and snow set in. Fortunately, Mother Nature was on our side this fall which did provide some solace for the poor weather we experienced earlier this year. That being said, I cannot quite believe that Thanksgiving is over here (unlike the US where it is in November) and Christmas is merely a few weeks away. I am quite excited to go home for a few weeks and desperately hope that when I return to Winnipeg in January that it is not -52C like New Year’s eve last year! Temperatures like that are not attractive prospects to return to.

Despite being kept busy with fieldwork recently, I was lucky enough to be able to visit some more local ranches and one stop was Edie Creek Angus, a short drive east of Winnipeg where we were kindly hosted by the Bouw family. As the name suggests, the ranch raises Aberdeen Angus cattle (as well as sheep) and is a source of breeding stock for grass finishing beef operations. Unlike Ireland, finishing cattle on grass-based diets is not the standard industry practice here, with the vast majority of cattle finished on high grain diets in feedlots in the province of Alberta. These feedlots can have huge capacity, often numbering tens of thousands of cattle at any one site, with one example being a feedlot I visited earlier this year that was feeding 18,000 cattle at the time. I must admit, the concept of having so many cattle in confinement on a single operation is still, at times, hard to grasp and it is a credit to the producers that they are able to efficiently manage and maintain such large numbers particularly in our extremely harsh winters.

Speaking of large herds, this month I also had the good fortune to be able to visit Evergreen Land and Cattle Company, south of Winnipeg where the Krentz family run 6000 cattle at pasture during the grazing season. Again, coming from Ireland where herd sizes are so much smaller, the idea of a single ranch grazing that many cattle was a little hard to imagine. My first thought when I came here originally was think of all the fencing that would be necessary on these operations that are thousands of acres in size! A good horse comes in very handy when it comes to rounding up cattle and I have to say that is one of the most fun things I have done in my time here. Any activity that combines cattle and horses is not too shabby in my book.