ONLINE BULL SALE

RACEHORSE STYLE BIDDING WITH DLMS FARM GATE

Bidding Opens: Thursday, March 9 at 9:00 am CST

Sale Closes with Extended Bidding: Friday, March 10 at 7:00 pm CST

Welcome to our 8th Annual Bull Sale! 2023 marks the third year for us to use the online sale format with DLMS Farm Gate. We’ve been really happy with how the Farm Gate sale works and have received a lot of positive feedback from our customers, so we’re sticking with it! As always, we welcome and encourage you to come down and see the bulls in person prior to sale day, and I’m always happy to tour you through the cow herd to show you the cow families backing any bulls that might interest you. Sometimes getting away to tour bulls is just not possible, and we understand that. That’s why we try to do a very good job of giving you complete details on the bulls in the catalogue. In addition to our catalogue, we do our best to video our bulls from every angle so you can get a good idea of what the bull looks like and how he moves. I am always just a phone call, email or text message away to answer questions as well. No one knows my bulls better than I do, so if you’re looking for some assistance in working through the offering, I’m always happy to help.

Our 2023 offering is the largest set of bulls on offer to date. We continue to work towards bigger numbers for our sale as our goal is to provide an offering of 40-50 quality bulls each year, but quality will never be compromised just for the sake of reaching a number target. The 29 bulls in this catalogue are deserving of your appraisal. We hope you like what you see. There are a half dozen heifer safe options and a nice selection of power and easier calving cow bulls to choose from.

Thankfully, 2022 was a much better year than 2021. We were flooded for the entire spring, which made spring feeding and breeding, seeding and pasture turn out very stressful. The cattle were turned out into pastures on June 1 that had several inches of standing water laying across most of the acres. The water in most areas was ankle deep on the cattle, and some paddocks were off limits due to being completely submerged. It wasn’t until later in June when that water finally absorbed into the ground and I was able to drive a truck amongst the cows to do pasture checks. As frustrating as the excess moisture was, the sting of culling a chunk of the herd and the stresses we felt from lack of feed due to the 2021 drought were still very fresh in our minds, so we tolerated the wet conditions as best we could knowing that we were in a much better position to be wet with a lot of grass for the cattle to eat rather than bone dry with no grass and swarmed by hoards of grasshoppers. With the grass being very water logged last summer, the bull’s weaning weights are down from normal years, but that seems to be par for the course with most people we’ve talked to over the past year. We went into winter with our dugouts fully charged and thankfully, we have had a very good winter thus far, so our fingers are crossed for 2023 to finally give us the equilibrium year we’re hoping for!

Life has been very different for Dustin and I over the last year. Our now 19 month old son keeps us on our toes and makes it much more challenging to get “out of routine” things done, such as picturing or videoing bulls, standard calving season chores, or even just giving “mama” some quiet time to sit down and get this sale catalogue put together! We are thankful that my parents live just a few miles away and they are a huge help with watching Layne when Dustin and I need a day to get some big tasks completed or caught up on life. Layne keeps us smiling and laughing though, no doubt about that! He loves to be outside and is tractor crazy. He enjoys being in the calving barn and has zero fear of the cattle, but he still seems to like tractors more. He can accurately imitate the sounds that all of our farm animals make (you should hear his donkey impersonation!) and he enjoys playing with his toy tractors while making tractor sounds. We have a very cute little farm boy on our hands and we wouldn’t want it any other way.

With that said though, this January has been very chaotic for me trying to juggle managing the growing cattle program and a young family. Dustin and I have been brainstorming some new ideas to implement for next year. It’s time to find a way to streamline what we do so that I’m not being run flat out every January trying to calve cows, prep for this bull sale, and still somehow find time to raise my family. Stay tuned for some new announcements as we move further into 2023.

And to wrap up this year’s welcome, I’ve saved the most exciting part for last! 2022 ended up being an enormous investment year for Rainbow River Simmentals. After hunting for a new herd bull for several years, I finally found the bull that checked off every box on my criteria list. In March, we made an enormous investment into R Plus Mandate 1044J, purchasing him for $160,000. Mandate’s first calves are on the ground now and they have exceeded our extremely high expectations so far. They have come small, early, fast and easy, and their vigour is outstanding! I am excited to watch those calves develop over the next year as I expect them to be curve benders like Mandate. I cannot wait to present a large selection of Mandate’s sons in our 2024 bull sale! In addition to buying Mandate, three very respected breeders in the Simmental breed dispersed their herds at the end of 2022. We invested heavily into a number of top donors, cows and heifers from each program. Many of those females will be flushed this spring and in future years to build on my goal of supplying some of the best Simmental cattle in the industry. We are proud of the new cattle we have selected and as such, we have featured our new and exciting herd sires and donor females on pages 11 to 15 of this catalogue.

All the best to you in 2023 and thanks for your interest in our program!

Cheers, Jennilee

DUSTIN, JENNILEE & LAYNE STEWART

Box 244, Fisher Branch, Manitoba Home: 204-372-6031

Jen’s Cell: 204-761-6644

Email: rainbowriversimmentals@gmail.com www.rainbowriversimmentals.com

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