A young farmer gets his hand licked before showing his calf at the Hereford Bull Show on the first day of the annual Calgary Bull Sale in the Stampede Agricultural Building, on March 4, 2015.
Ninety bulls are here, getting their hair done. The purebred Herefords – the brownish-red ones with curly white faces – are at the 115th Calgary Bull Sale, where looks and genetics matter. Their owners are washing and blow-drying the animals' hair, trimming it just right and fluffing the bottoms of their tails.
Norm Parrent has been part of this showcase since 1975, a witness to the show and sale's decline. He reckons about 1,000 bulls were up for grabs in '75 and Americans would buy truckloads of them. But now the sale is the smallest it has ever been, despite record-breaking cattle prices. Mad cow disease 10 years ago closed the border and American buyers never returned after the ban lifted. Technology has hurt the show, too: Buyers don't have to come in person, they can browse online at any time. Meanwhile, mad cow also drove away a generation of Canadian ranchers, undermining the industry.
But there is hope for the sale's rebound, largely in the form of the weak Canadian dollar.
"We are adamant about keeping this thing going," Mr. Parrent says while sipping a Lucky Lager after parading bulls through the show ring Wednesday.
"We'll build this thing back up."Mr. Parrent's JoNomn Hereford Ranch produces relatively short bulls, with flat, rather than arching, backs. He relies more on experience than statistics such as birth weight when breeding seedstock bulls. The Calgary Bull Sale, he says, tests his strategy – and gives him a chance to buy bulls that are perhaps better than his.
"It is about economics for us. It is a place for us to compare our program against other breeders and their programs," says Mr. Parrent, from Clyde, Alta. "We come here to win, but if we get beat we have to take a good look at what beat us."
He estimates the bulls will go for an average of $6,500 each at Thursday's sale, up from about $5,000 last year.
While American buyers were once key to the Calgary Bull Sale, export bans imposed in the wake of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, forced them away a decade ago. A few cases of mad cow have been discovered recently in Canada, but Mr. Parrent expects the borders to stay open. The number of cases is small right now, he argues, and the North American cattle industry is more integrated.
The Calgary sale needs to lure back its American customers or risk shrinking further. "We have to remarket Calgary to the North American market," the 63-year-old Mr. Parrent says.
The weak Canadian dollar and high livestock prices should help this campaign. And the sale's proponents believe the Canadian cattle industry's demographics are swinging back in their favour.
Doug Finseth of Bar Pipe Hereford Ranch has been coming to this sale since he was 18. He is 62 now and says that even just a few years ago he was one of the younger ranchers at the show.
The past 10 years have been tough in the cattle industry, forcing older ranchers to pack it in and younger ranchers to stay away.
"The young guys are coming back now because of the good prices," he says. "And they can make a living off their ranches again."
The average age of people at the Calgary Bull Show, he says, is dropping. He can no longer claim to be one of the young guys.
But neither clever marketing nor more youthful generations can counter the sale's technological challenge. Buyers and sellers do not have to attend premier sales to find each other. Buyers can sift through bull data – birth weights, lineage, quality of offspring and more – online.
Missing this sale does not mean missing out on desirable livestock. Indeed, only a few dozen people came to the show Wednesday. Calgary Bull Sale officials do not know how many potential buyers will be at Thursday's sale, which is also broadcast online.
To stay healthy, the Calgary Bull Sale needs more people such as Sarah Nixdorff of SNS Herefords. She and her twin sister are 20, and along with other family members, meticulously groomed their seven bulls in hopes of winning ribbons at Wednesday's showcase and top dollar at Thursday's sale.
Their family has been coming to the sale for 30 years and "has had a lot of success in the show ring and the sale," Ms. Nixdorff says. "We've won this whole show before."
Carrie Tait