Belle Creek Stock Farm

04/04/2026

Marching into April….

March is supposed to be our “break” from calving….a break that never happened this year. Although calving was slower in March. There was always another new calf that was popping out every couple days to keep us on our toes.

After wrapping up our early group, we sat almost to the exact 50/50 split of heifers to steers.
We started having a few calves in the late group, when we weren’t expecting them, so we were busy hauling the odd pair in from the pasture, into the yard to take better care. This led to us bringing the whole group into the yard so we can monitor, and take better care of the calves. As of right now, the late group is calving in feedlot pens, with us hoping to kick them out to pasture to calve sooner than later once more snow melts.

Other than calving fun, we got 5 yearling bulls this year, like I showed in the last mid March update. We have got them all delivered, and they are settling well with the mature bulls. We like getting them at least 7-14 days prior to bulls going out with cows, so they can work out any differences with other bulls prior to being with the cows.

Ever since we have put more emphasis on getting quality bulls, and more of our top choices instead of our 5th or 6th bull choice, our calf crop has done better and better each year. And this group of bulls is no different. We’re super happy with the ones we got and can’t wait to use them.

We also sorted off our final replacement heifer pen. We will be breeding 82 heifers this year. We think this replacement heifer pen is the best one we’ve had in a long time. Weight range was from 862 (a may 5 born heifer) to 1168 (a January 29 born heifer) pounds. We got them all vet checked and all are ready for breeding!

As April is here, bulls will get turned out, calving will continue, and swearing at how mucky the yard and corrals are will continue. We’ll sort the early group into 3-5 groups so we can select which bulls go with which cows. That will take place next week, with bulls going out on the 13th. Happy calving to all calving, and we can’t wait for warmer weather coming soon!

03/18/2026

Nice pen of blacks here.

Belle Creek Stock Farms - 765 # March Delivery Heifers - 160 Head (Belleview, MB) - TEAM Auction Sales

03/16/2026

Mid March Update.

We got our herd bulls semen tested, and with great results, everything passed except one that needs to be retested in a couple weeks, but the vet is confident he will pass then! This was a big day as breeding is coming up in less than a month!!

We also have purchased five yearling bulls this year. We needed to purchase so many as our last two years, the purchases we made never got to breed for one reason or another, causing this year to be a bigger buy year. In saying that, we are over the moon happy with the bulls we have bought.

Ever since we have put more effort in getting better bulls every year, it has reflected big time in our herd, with that being the calves, and the heifers we have kept within the herd. These 5 bulls were bought for specific reasons on why we think they will better our herd going forward and we can’t wait to see what they can do.

Would like to take the time to thank the owners of the bulls for giving us the opportunity to bid and purchase these bulls:
Horner Cattle Company
Maple Lake Stock Farms
Bar O Farms
More Bros Simmentals

Below are some pictures of our 5 year old bulls (they were most photogenic), as well as pictures of the new bulls we have purchased. Videos of the bulls will be posted in the comments

03/04/2026

As expected, February was calving cows, and more calving cows.

February felt like it flew by, but the long hours of dealing with calves and poor sleep, checking throughout the night will do that I suppose. Overall calving has gone quite well, a few head scratcher situations but that’s cattle for you.

As of right now we are sitting at 48% heifers. Our biggest calving day was 15 in one day. We’ve only had 3 sets of twins. Only 3 crazy cows that weren’t bluffing. Had to help pull 9 calves. No vet trips or C-sections(fingers crossed it stays that way in the late group) And hoards of fun that we’ll plan on doing it all again next year!

There’s only a handful left to calve in the early group, with the last official day being yesterday, March 3, these calves hopefully will come anytime. The trend of smaller birthweight calves continued throughout the whole calving season in that group, except one calf that weighed 135 pounds at birth out of a big cow we call moustache, but this created less assisted births than years prior.

In the feedlot, we sold our two pens of steers at Heartland in Virden at the end of February and they sold great. This leaves us three pens of heifers still. With one of them being a pen of replacement heifers. This is one of our best replacement pens we have had in the last few years. A couple of photos are shown of some of them in this post This has us very excited. We will also be looking at selling some of them as we definitely do not need to keep the full 110 that fill the pen.

As March is upon us, this brings bull sales. We are in the market for a few bulls this year due to a few that have been culled out for different reasons. Other than that, this is our “off” month of calving, so we will be prepping to be ready for our April 1 herd to start while also probably start moving some more hay around while the ground is froze and catch up on a bit of sleep!
Happy March!

Also in the coming week I’ll be posting videos of walking through the pens like I did last year!

02/02/2026

Building a tarp shed and calving cows, because what else does one do in January when it’s -45.

Calving begun on January 9th with a surprise early calf. Even though it was quite premature. It pulled through and is doing well. Our official start date was the 20th. And to date we have around 65 calves on the ground. Our biggest 24 hour day has been 10 calves.

As it sits right now. We are around 55% heifers and 45% steers. Which straightened out as the first 40 calves we were 66% heifers. Other things we’ve noticed has been birthweights are lower this year. Wondering if diet is part of the reasoning, but no complaints here not having to deal with too many big dumb calves that won’t stand. With the extra housing in the tarp shed, we feel we have saved a lot more ears compared to last year, and we have had no casualties due to the extreme cold that we went through.

If we ever ask you to help build a tarp shed in the dead cold of winter, throw a snowball at our face. We are super happy it’s up, usable and functioning, but that made some very long, cold days. Cold fingers and toes during the time consuming jobs. Big thank you to the few that came and helped us put it up. I definitely know that some of our help won’t be coming close to this farm if we get another idea like that in the winter.

We’ve been using our barn, which holds more heat for fresh babies, and ones that are calving. We can monitor them on cameras and have the warmer temperature in there to keep them well and not chilled when they are still wet and damp. Pending how fast the calves come, we kick pairs into the tarp shed. This gives them extra nights inside, outside of the elements, and has proven to give the calves more life and energy compared to being thrown out in the cold sooner. So we are very happy so far with the outcome of the shed.

As February is here, calving is still the main thing going on. And it will be for the foreseeable future. We wish good luck to all that are calving as well, and wish you all be safe and good health.

01/02/2026

2025 onto 2026.

What a year. We look forward to learning from the last 12 months and improving certain practices going forward to better ourselves and the farm!

Our “work” started in 2025 on January 9, this is when the first calf was born. A little blue heifer out of a little framed blue bred heifer. And after that, the year went by quick! Calving went well, 2025 we were fortunate to add 80 great cows to our calving pens in the early group of Randy’s. The old saying of “if your out checking 20, you may as well be checking 100” was said a lot! We kept the death rate quite low this year, although we battled a bit with naval infections we were able to stay on top of them for the most part. Lessons learned for this year! Calving always seems to go in a blur, getting dressed every 2-3 hours to go check outside will do that apparently! We were super happy with all the calves, and after the early group, our nice “break” in march felt short and into the April Calvers we went. These ones always seem to do really well and very very little problems. (Hope I’m not jinxing it). From January 9, our last calf was born on May 16! Only a short 4.5 months!!

Right after calving we’ve already started seeding, this year we had a combination of wheat, barley, canola, soybeans and silage corn in. Seeding went as smooth as seeding usually does, a break down or two to make you stressed never fails! But also lets you take a step back and take a deep breath and sometimes catch up on some short sleep. Which isn’t all bad.

Next it went into getting pairs to pasture, we alway wait to do this until after seeding, it just works best for us and our schedules.

Haying went as smooth as the rains would let it. We started earlier than usual this year just to finish the same time we usually do. This was due to a 2-3 week break because of rains if memory serves me right. This was the first year we never had any break downs on the baler. What an accomplishment for the old girl! We put up just over 7 quarters of native hay/marsh hay this year, as we don’t have any tame or alfalfa yet (it’s in the works).

Combining came along and it went as smooth as haying. Because of the long break of rain that downgraded some grain in September. The plus side, we have cows that will always eat it. Yields were nothing to keep up to at the local coffee shop table. But they did alright and we have new game plans on how to improve them in coming years (weather dependent of course).

After combining the process of weaning, processing, preg checking and the daily winter chores for the feedlot of our own and bought calves had begun.

2025 we were also blessed with another little one, Waylon William Cliffe on August 20. Another great addition to our family.

We look forward to 2026 and hope to have a safe, healthy and plentiful year. We look forward to taking some time away from the farm for a refresh, some long houred days, lots of days to celebrate and be together for and last but not least, the days that make us proud and happy for the work we do day in and day out!

We wish you a Happy New Year, and wish nothing but the best in 2026!

Cheers!

12/27/2025

Join us in wishing the Boss Man a Happy Birthday today!

Can’t wait for the next 40 years of us farming together! Thank you for all you do!

DarcyLaurie Campion

11/06/2025

October is gone an we’ve jumped right into November.

October seemed to fly by, and when I try to look back on October, I didn’t take to many photos to refresh my memory on how the month went!

What I do know, we finished harvest in the middle October. This was a big sigh of relief and major check off the to do list. Overall we are ok with the results of this years crop. Hopefully next year we take a step forward again. Also our corn was silaged in October. Considering the hard frosts, it still managed to be silage at 60% ish. Rooke Farms chopped it again this year.

As for the cow side of things. We had brought all pairs closer and closer to home as the month went on as we had our preg check on October 31. We are super happy with how preg checking went. We were under 6% total open. While also have just over 20 cows from the late group jump two cycles into the early group. With ones that fell from the early to the late group, we will have roughly the same amount of numbers in each group as last year. Thankful for the help we had, as we were able to get preg checking done in around 4 hours.

We weaned and sold our early group steers in the middle of October. This year we sent them to Whitewood Auction Mart, and this year as the first time we have dealt there. We are very pleased with their service and definitely will look at taking more calves there in the future. We were planning on weaning the rest of the calves after preg checking but with the slight rain prior, the pens were getting sticky and slimy so we pushed it off till this upcoming Saturday.

So we took the Time to tear out more old windbreaks in the feedlot and replaced them with drillstem wind breaks. More sturdy and hopefully last longer!

In November we hope to get the calves settled and healthy in the feedlot pens, while also bringing in some extra calves to feed this winter. The bales still sit in the hay fields, so this will need to be a job that gets tackled hopefully sooner than later. Hope everyone has a safe and successful weaning and preg checking this fall, and here’s to a good November.

10/01/2025

Summers over….

September was occupied by finishing up haying, the start of harvest, a long rain delay, then harvest again!

Although haying is done, we still have about 1100 bales left to row, grandpa was spending some time picking bales, but once the rain hit, we had to quit so we don’t leave ruts.

As for harvest, we’ve done a bit of each crop it seems and got a bit left of each as well. The wheat we have been a bit disappointed in, the rain delay definitely did not help the quality. The barley a cow or calf will love. And our canola we are quite pleased with. Corn is yet to be chopped.

As for the cattle side, they are doing great, all are still on pasture, although some groups are very good at showing us when the battery’s on the fencers die. We brought our early group steer pairs out of the bush pasture to get them closer to home. We have those steers booked into Whitewood Auction Mart for the middle of October. The rest of the calves won’t be weaned till later October. We also have preg checking booked for all the cows on October 31! We are very happy with how all the groups of calves are growing and the condition the cows are holding.

For October we will keep plugging away at combining, it takes top priority! As for the jobs after, there are many, but manure spreading, building some corals, rowing some bales are some of them.

Hope everyone has a safe and efficient end to harvest, and let me be the one to remind you, snow is close…

09/03/2025

How can it be September already?

It can because we’ve had 8 months of the year pass by already! But what a quick summer that felt!

August was filled with haying, and checking cows and calves! And looking back at it, that is literally all the month consisted of!

Haying has been going relatively very smooth. With the odd weather break, that seems to be the only thing that disrupted us. We have some real good hay put up, and will have some good native hay and good marsh hay for sale in the coming weeks. Everything we want cut has been cut and have about 15 acres left to bale and we will call it a haying season!

Cows and calves have been doing very well! The animals have been staying nice and healthy, and haven’t had many troubles at all health wise. Calves are still growing like weeds and makes for great trips checking them, seeing the calves the way they look!

With September here, we are waiting patiently to begin harvest. If all goes well weather wise, it will start in the next few days. We are very excited to tie into our crops. Some definitely look better than others, but overall we are quite happy with how things look. Also with September we’ll be busy picking and rowing bales before the dreaded S word (snow) rolls around.

Hope everyone has a safe and plentiful harvest!

08/05/2025

July!

July started bright and early with haying! We’ve just been able to put 3 quarters of hay up in July. This mainly is due to the long period of a rain every second day it seemed. The first three quarters are definitely not record breaking, but the lowest one so far has been 1.4 bale an acre. As August rolls we have another 3+ quarter of our thicker grass to do. So here’s to hoping some good weather sticks around!

On the crop side we were busy fungiciding! We sprayed most of our cereals with fungicide and got the plane to fungicide all our canola acres. After having the small showers or heavy fog so often, we are very glad we did it. Towards the end of the month, we got nailed with hail. The damage seemed to be very spotty, but the soybeans took the biggest hit of our crops, with also a bit of damage in one field of canola, and leaves shredded in the corn. Cereals seemed to handle it the best. The damage definitely could’ve been a lot better ending, but it also could’ve been a lot worse.

On the cow side, calves are growing like weeds! Very happy with the calves from the late group, they seem to be impressing us everytime we check them. But also the early group calves are packing the pounds on! Bulls will need pulled this week and that will finish off our two cycles for the late group!

As August has arrived, haying is a top priority, while also keeping cows on plenty of grass. While also in the back of the mind start thinking of harvest already! Summer seems to be disappearing fast, but it’s been good and productive so far! Hope everyone enjoys the rest of summer!