Our Story
My wife Allison & I (Arvid) live on our family Ranch which was bought by my grandfather John Devos, in 1920. He started a herd of pure breed Herefords which was carried on by my dad, Felix Devos, and then me.
Allison & I were married in 1968. We bought a half section of the farm, and our herd of cattle consisted of four. We had three children; Cindy in 1969, Cory in 1971 and Colleen in 1973. We built up our herd of cattle to 50 cows and our farm to 900 acres of grain land, however, when finances were not great in 1983 we sold all the machinery, cattle and assets that we had to in order to keep our land.
Knowing that we needed to have an income off the ranch, we started a construction business and in eight years we became debt free. My love for the ranch life pulled me back. We started to turn our ranch into an environmentally green ranch. We started out by sowing grass for pasture and hay, then we bough some cattle. We continued doing this until we had 780 acres of green land and 400 head of cattle. We also contracted feeder cattle to Alberta feed lots, back grounding our own calves.
All of our hay land and pastures have no chemicals; we use only naturally composted organic material for fertilizer. We have rotational grazing paddocks, with riparian areas, and clean water piped to each from the yard well. In partnership with Habitat Heritage, we protect the creek and natural springs from the cattle.
Our cattle are only fed natural diets. The feeder cattle are fed a daily mixture consisting of barley, minerals, & vitamins A, D, E, zinc, potassium & salt. The cows, calves, and feeders are fed a diet consisting of alfalfa, grass hay, green feed, corn straw, barley and wheat straw.
Our children are all living on their own. My eldest daughter Cindy is the owner of Hair and Tanning Source in Stonewall. My son Cory owns his own ranch adjacent to mine and also owns & operates Cory's Custom Bale Picking. My youngest daughter Colleen is an Account Coordinator for Pollard Banknote in Winnipeg.
We have six grandchildren, five boys and one girl, and my hope is that someday one of them will be the 5th generation to run the ranch.
Since May 12, 2003, the day of BSE, we struggled to get good prices for our cattle. There was no market for the breed of heifers we had, so we had to keep them and calf them out. Our herd increased greatly, and with no cattle being sold, we found ourselves in another potential financial disaster. We made a decision to build a meat shop. I also wanted to build an abattoir but the regulations made it too expensive to proceed with that. We converted one of the bays of our three car garage into a cutting floor and cooler. We were Manitoba inspected on May 17, 2004. Since then we have been working hard to expand our business. We currently deliver to eight stores and five restaurants in our local area. We have discovered that we will not sell nearly enough beef for what we have in our area so are expanding into larger areas such as Winnipeg, Brandon, and Portage la Prairie.
