Cattle feedlot’s roots go back generations

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Taber Times

By Heather Cameron
Taber Times
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Shipwheel Cattle Feeders is located four miles north of Taber on Highway 36 and 1.25 miles east on Township Road 104.

“Shipwheel Cattle Feeders is a custom feedlot, which means that I feed cattle that are my own, but I also offer a service of taking care of other people’s cattle,” said Andrea Stroeve-Sawa, the fourth generation of the Holtman family to manage Shipwheel Cattle Feeders Ltd. “In our feedlot, we can have anywhere from six to 15 different customers with different groups of cattle at different weights with different goals, so we feed them. It’s kind of like a glorified daycare, but for cattle and they stay 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Stroeve-Sawa says that Shipwheel Cattle Feeders has 5,500 head at any given time, but will typically empty out quite a bit in the summer and then fill back up in the fall when all of the cattle come off of the grass because ranchers don’t have a lot to feed them in the wintertime.

“The great thing about feed labs is we can feed them really efficiently and very accurately because we have a lot of technology that helps us do that,” said Stroeve-Sawa. 

Shipwheel Cattle Feeders, Stroeve-Sawa says, also produces about 10,000 tonnes of compost for neighboring farmers that grow some really high value crops, and so that’s a way that the business can help them grow their crops with maybe not so much synthetic chemicals or adding compost adds a lot of biology to the soil, so that’s really helpful. 

Shipwheel Cattle Feeders, Stroeve-Sawa says, also grazes between 500 and 700 yearlings on grassland, and has bees and honey that produces honey, and they also have chickens on pasture that are pasture raised to produce eggs so the business can sell the eggs. In addition to that, Stroeve-Sawa says, there is a no-till garden, and an orchard where fruit is raised, a worm casting compost.

Stroeve-Sawa says that Shipwheel Cattle Feeders also has a store called The Green Mercantile that has only been open for about two years.

“The Green Mercantile is our on-farm store, and that’s where we sell our own shipwheel raised beef, our honey, and our eggs, and then we have 36 other local entrepreneurs that are Canadian that bring in everything from earrings to barbecue sauces and candles,” said Stroeve-Sawa. “The only caveat is when I accept somebody into the store as a vendor is that they produce this item on their own, like it’s an entrepreneurial thing. It’s not a big company that’s doing it. We try to really support local vendors. My big thing with the whole Green Mercantile is I really wanted a place where you could spend your money and you knew that it was affecting a person and it was affecting a small business and it was keeping your money within the local economy. I myself even shop on Amazon, but I really wanted to be a place where people could come and know that they’re spending their money and it’s staying here. That was really important to me.”

The story of Shipwheel Cattle Feeders, Stroeve-Sawa says, actually began with her great-grandfather, Albert Green (changed from Damgren), who was the eldest of three sons. 

“When Albert was 12, he overheard his parents talking in the middle of the night about how they couldn’t afford to feed the family and how someone was gonna have to go out and work so that they could afford to feed their family,” said Stroeve-Sawa. “He actually left in the middle of the night and left a note on the table telling his parents that he was going out to find work and he would be in America, and he would send money home as soon as he could.  He took it upon himself to leave in the middle of the night and board a ship named the Romeo. It came across from Sweden to Hull, Quebec. He  went down into Michigan and worked down in there, and then he worked his way across into Western Canada and eventually settled kind of around Kipp and then down into Scandia. Then, he had another place kind of down over by Manyberries. And so by the early 1900’s, he had saved up enough money to buy his own livestock, and he found some livestock that he wanted. It was cattle and sheep and horses and they had a cattle brand on them that he really wanted, and the brand was the shipwheel. In those days, in order to get the brand, you had to purchase all of the livestock with that brand to own the brand. And so he had saved up enough money and he went and bought all the livestock with that brand and that became Albert Green’s brand. That was the beginning of the ship wheel ranching and that went to my great-grandfather and then to my dad and now to me. The shipwheel brand is one of the only single iron brands that are around, and it can only be passed to family members. My dad took over in 1973 and then I started here. I’ve been here for 10 years managing it. It’s something that I am very honored to be able to operate.”

Currently, Stroeve-Sawa says, she represents the National Cattle Feeders Association on the Canadian Roundtable for Sustainable Beef Council and works through there promoting the cattle feeding industry and really working with the whole supply chain on raising sustainable Canadian beef. 

“I also do a little bit of public speaking, and that is how I just tell our story and talk about agriculture and what we’re doing on a daily basis and, and how we affect the environment and the people, and the animals,” said Stroeve-Sawa. “A lot of what I do is try and promote my legacy of producing beef and what I’m doing here. Whether my kids take this place over or not isn’t really the most important thing to me. I hope what they learn from me is the ability to regenerate land and build things up and make things better. And whether that’s within agriculture or whether it’s in any other discipline that they decide to go in that makes them happy, that’s what I hope it is. I hope it the ability to build up rather than degrade and destroy. I think that’s just because that’s how my parents approached it for me. It was never an expectation or an obligation that I work on the farm or that I take over the farm. It was always, “you need to do what you’re passionate about and what makes you feel good.”

Stroeve-Sawa says that although she has an Agricultural degree that she got from Lethbridge College that helped set her up for success, most of what she has learned comes from being ‘boots on the ground’ and learning from a lot of different people within the Agriculture industry. The learning, Stroeve-Sawa, has involved having the business win awards including ‘Planet Of Plenty Award’ in July 2021.

“It’s a Canada-wide award and it’s awarded by Alltech and it’s to reward producers for continuing to contribute to a planet of plenty,” said Stroeve-Sawa. “And so what that basically means is contributing to a sustainable world of agriculture,” 

More information about Shipwheel Cattle Feeders’ accomplishment with the Planet of Plenty Award can be found at: https://go.alltech.com/planet-of-plenty-ca-shipwheel-cattle-feeders. 

Stroeve-Sawa says that Shipwheel Cattle Feeders has a website: https://shipwheelcattlefeeders.ca/, a Facebook page: Shipwheel Cattle Feeders Ltd., X: https://x.com/shipwheelcattle, and an Instagram Page: https://www.instagram.com/shipwheelcattle. The business, Stroeve-Sawa says, can also be contacted at 403-223-4333.

The Green Mercantile, Stroeve-Sawa says, also has a website: https://greenmercantile.ca/, a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/greenmercantile73, and an Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/green_mercantile/. The store, Stroeve-Sawa says, can also be contacted at 403-223-4333 or greenmercantile73@gmail.com.