Customer Success Story - Sullivan Lake Charolais
Sullivan Lake Charolais has a history of being a family farm since the early 1960s, but didn't purchase their first purebred Charolais cows until 1978.
Located in central Alberta, Canada, about 20 minutes north of Red Deer, the ranch had to exit the purebred business in the latter part of the 1980s due to family issues. At the time, Sullivan Lake had approximately 150 purebred cows.
In 2002, a new generation of the family decided to enter the purebred business again, and under the management of Jack and Brandon Holdsworth, started purchasing purebred and Full French cattle from Rudiger Ranches, a founder of the Charolais breed in Canada. Key issues for the ranch at the time were selecting a bloodline and creating a breeding program, which is why they selected the Rudiger animals. The ranch actually started over by purchasing bare land near Red Deer and constructing new facilities, along with building a new herd.
To manage those goals, another key for Sullivan Lake Charolais was locating a management and record keeping system to allow tracking and monitoring. Searching the Internet, Jack found CattleMax software, felt it filled the bill, and the ranch purchased CattleMax 2006, upgrading to CattleMax CS in 2008, following its release.
Jack says his favorite feature of CattleMax is its ease of use and the support offered for the program. "Being in the technology field, we probably looked for things which most other users would not be aware of."
He owns Failsafe Canada, Inc., a business consulting and technology company actively involved in the agriculture carbon offset market.
He continues, "Many applications use proprietary databases - this was a non-starter for us. We knew we would need/want custom reporting and we are big on creating Key Performance Indicators, so we wanted to ensure we could get the information we wanted from the system. CattleMax gives us the flexibility we wanted."
The ranch uses a report created in CattleMax based on each dam's ear tag ID. The report lists all calves produced by that dam with the birth weight, calving ease, weaning weight, yearling weight and some EPDs for each calf.
"We then total those values and average them so we can sort the top producing cows based on any average for a specific trait," Jack says.
Before CattleMax, the ranch kept records manually, along with records from the Canadian Charolais Association.
Jack says, "We couldn't run our operation without CattleMax. We rely on it for our calving records, dates and pedigrees. We will soon begin holding our own sales and know the sales catalogue feature will be beneficial for us."
"You can't manage what you can't measure and CattleMax gives us that ability," Jack concludes.
Information on availability of Sullivan Lake Charolais cattle can be obtained by contacting Herd Manager Ron Prediger at 403-723-2773.
