Welcome

We began our registered Angus program in 1981 with approximately 25 Angus cows, and it has grown to approximately 430-450 bred cows on the ranch each fall. It has been our longtime philosophy to cull approximately 100 bred animals each year. We are reaching the point where it is becoming difficult to identify this many animals that aren’t making the grade. Even with the high standards we impose, the task of culling is difficult. We keep the vast majority of our yearling heifers, breed and calve them, and thus are more able to accurately evaluate and cull them with a calf at their side in the fall.

With a commercial cattleman’s mentality of functional maternal traits and efficiently weaning heavy weights, we are continually striving to better the “functionality” of our females. We demand timely breed-back, good udders, good dispositions, easy-keeping cows that wean a good calf. Cows are fed grass or grass/alfalfa hay when necessary and are kept on a quality mineral program. We have a strict herd health program, as well as basically never keeping open cows or heifers. We enter into most calving seasons with approximately 330 to 340 bred animals, after our fall culling, with the objective of about 300 pairs. They are bred to start calving about February 7th. We then cut off calving around April 1st of each season, and sell any animals which have not yet calved. In recent years, we have reached our 300+ pair objective by March 20th. We are proud of our more than 30 Pathfinder cows in the most recent American Angus Association report, which reflects the fertility and do-ability of our cow herd.

Our yearling heifers are artificially inseminated to high accuracy, low birth weight sires and then cleaned up with a similarly bred bull.

Our coming with second and third calf cows are pasture bred to high quality, generally maternally traited bulls. We have found that our herd bulls have a greater influence on the future females in our herd than even our AI sires. We make every effort to buy the best possible sires we can afford with a particular eye to their maternal influence and how they might nick with our cattle.

Once a cow makes it through the three years of the continuous and rigorous culling mentioned above, she goes into our elite, mature cow herd. Generally at this stage (cows coming with 4th calf) we have between 15 - 30 cows of that age group left from the 130-160 females we started with 4 1⁄2 years earlier. Here the strict culling process continues. These cows are once again AI bred to the top, high-accuracy, well-proven sires of the breed. Sires are selected for individual bloodlines which we feel will best complement our cows, still with a strong eye to maternal traits and do-ability in our environment.

Periodically, over the years, we have purchased what we believe to be high-quality genetics (embryos, bred heifers, and bred cows) and integrated them into our herd. Almost without exception, the majority of them wash out of our program. We try not be influenced by dollars spent, pedigrees, and hype, and prefer to let Mother Nature and the no-nonsense nature of our program decide which animals belong with us. It has been an expensive endeavor over past years, but one that is now beginning to bear fruit with the growing amount of functional qualities of the cows in our herd.

We currently sell approximately 100 registered yearling bulls and 30 registered yearling heifers, selling as commercials, each April, with Friday, April 18, 2008, being this year’s date.

Our bred cows are sold by private treaty or special cow sales in our area.

We, at Beaver Creek Ranches, Double W Angus are happy to make our operations and cow herd available for your inspection at any time and welcome your interest and inquiries.

Pete & Lucy Widener