2026 Red Deer County Bull Sale Report (and other bull sale season thoughts)
It was a cold spring day, with folks still digging out from a large dose of needed moisture, in the lead up to the multi-breed Red Deer County Bull sale on Saturday, March 14th at the Innisfail Auction Market. Now in our 16th year of consigning to this sale, it has steadily evolved and now includes a wide variety of Simmental, Angus, Hereford, and Charolais bulls on offer. Cattle markets continue to be very robust, and the optimism was matched by the impressive herd sire prospects up for auction.
With the multi-breed component now firmly embedded in the Red Deer County Bull Sale, it was the Red Simmentals turn to lead things off. Our good friends at Red Top brought another impressive string to town and their lead bulls started off the day to rousing success. When it was time to present the Flecks, one of our bulls, Lot 69: APLX Junior 35N stole the spotlight. This dark red, heavily pigmented, homo polled rascal showcased a really intriguing combination of strong maternal traits with a balanced performance profile. Junior’s arrival in the ring led to some very spirited bidding from notable purebred programs from across North America, with Semex Canada being the successful buyer for $31,000. Junior has promptly been renamed ‘Juror’ and has already made the trip to Ontario for collection. We are pretty excited to have our first ever pure ‘AI Sire’ and look forward to seeing the impact that Junior / Juror will have on the breed around the world!
For the balance of the APLX string, we had an absolutely incredible bang up day, with all six of our other bulls finding great homes. Lot 70 Jigsaw quickly found his way to Saskatchewan, where he has already been turned out to work at Double M Simmentals at Bellegarde. Lot 68 Jericho is strutting his stuff in the heifer pen at Diamond B at Breton, AB. As long time consignors to Equation, we look forward to seeing Jericho’s progeny in Red Deer in future years. New buyers of Applecross genetics included Ken Pengelly of Caroline (Jordan) and Wayne Megli from Carrot River, Saskatchewan (Tristan). We had a chance to visit with the fine folk at Valley’s Edge Farm prior to the sale, where they seemingly couldn’t decide on which of our two heavyweights – Judge or Tonka – would be the better fit for their program. In the end, they made it easy and simply bought both bulls! Wow! Awesome to have repeat customers return to select more Applecross genetics. In all, it was a great day to watch our bulls sell!
Overall, 96 bulls sold for a very impressive $12,847 average – another $1,000,000+ sale gross, containing an average that increased more than $3,000/head from 2025! There were high sellers from across the breeds on offers – making it another well-balanced, multi-breed sale. It is an awesome thing when smaller breeders can band together for an annual sale and see so much mutual success across the entire offering!
We would be remiss not to recognize Jay Good, Cody Copeland, Darren Paget, Glen Norton and the Transcon team for doing a tremendous job working the phones and managing the sale. I can’t imagine the life those 4 gents (and the auctioneers, and their office team) lead for the crazy two months that is bull sale season – travelling across the prairie provinces with often only a day between sales. Taking calls. Making calls. Offering advice. Dealing with bidders. And buyers. And sellers. It is certainly an occupation built only for some! We really appreciate the work they all put in for us on behalf of Applecross Cattle.
Some additional thoughts on Red Deer 2025 and this years’ bull sale season:
- Having AI companies active on sale day is something I haven’t noticed for quite some time, so Semex acquiring Junior/Juror brings back some memories. During their careers, my parents at Dora Lee were successful in having two bulls selected for AI – Dora Lee One 1D by CIAQ in 1994, and Dora Lee Jake in 1998
- Dora Lee One 1D was a Balist son, by SRN 2Y, a cow I remember extremely well (heck even Jeanne remembers One 1D!) One of our ‘founding four’ females that came from Dora Lee was our own SRN 2Y daughter in DLD 48R Lady Western who was sired by King Arthur. We still have a couple direct daughters of 48R and descendants that now run six generations deep! My memories of One 1D have got a little hazy over the years, but I seem to recall him being an incredibly long bull that was very heavily muscled for the time. The performance was offset by a fair bit of birthweight; however, for a number of years he was a popular pound producer, especially in Quebec
- I still remember the day when the legendary Bob Gordon stopped by the farm to pick out Dora Lee Jake in 1998. Dad was quite tickled by the visit and told stories about having Jake selected by Alta Genetics many times over the years. It was pretty cool for a small beef herd in Ontario to have a bull selected by an Alberta AI Stud. We have a small amount of frozen in reserve, and plan to continue to utilize Jake genetics!
- When I was growing up in Ontario, having a good selection of AI sires was a big deal. For smaller farms, more common in the east, it allowed us to tap outcross genetics, with door to door service from a travelling AI technician. If we called prior to 10am, they we would breed that evening, and then an evening booking allowed for next morning service. During the 90’s I would closely study the annual AI catalogue to see ‘what was new’ – and where we could potentially use the genetics. The wave of German imports offered at Alta (of which Balist was an early option), dramatically expanded our selection of Fleckvieh bulls available, and we could easily have it shipped to Ontario for use by the technicians there. I have some fond memories of those years and, probably not surprisingly, still have a few doses of a number of those bulls.
- Junior/Juror was from our ‘Zillow’ cow family. His maternal great grand dam Virginia Ms Zillow was purchased as the high selling fullblood at 2013 Cow-A-Rama for $5,750. Times were a little different 13 years ago! While now deceased, she founded our ‘W’s as we weren’t keen on coming up with Z names each spring. So Zillow begat Willow, who gave us Whitney and now Junior/Juror. Both Whitney and Willow gave us heifers this year, so we have Whisper from Whitney, and Willow gave us twins in Wanda and Wonder. And a sneak peak ‘one to watch’ for Shades may just be Wynonna who is a mildly impressive full sib to Whitney!
- We take pride in our cow families, and the Zillow family is the 12th of our 21 cow families that walk here to produce our sale high seller. We love having depth to our cow herd, and want to be known for more than just ‘one cow’. We rarely flush, so we want to ensure our cow herd has quality from top to bottom. As we like to try to acquire at least one new female each fall, there will be more cow families to come, but we are increasingly happy with the genetic diversity in our female lines.
- For the 5th year in a row, a homozygous polled bull has been our high seller. Similar to when we started selling hetero polled cattle, there is currently a robust demand for homozygous bulls. By the same token, we feel they have to be quality animals to sell well. Our lead (homozygous) bulls were ‘built right’ and attracted a lot of interest in the lead up to sale day.
- This year we probably had the most interest we have ever had in the lead up to the sale. And the fun thing is that virtually all of our visitors stepped out and purchased a different bull prior to our sale. And while I could definitely blame those decisions on my tour giving ability, the reality is that there are multiple sales per day in the weeks leading up to our Red Deer County Sale, which means buyers typically have plenty of options.
- It is only prudent for buyers to have multiple bulls of interest. In many ways, buying a bull can be similar to buying a vehicle (and cost practically just as much!) What does the bull look like up close? How about the cow family behind it? What happens if the bull goes higher than expected on sale day? There is danger in waiting on ‘one’ bull – so it only makes sense to have options
- Which leads to a question we’ve always found challenging to answer ‘how much is he going to bring?’ And that is a question I really struggle in answering. I was incredibly happy with the quality of bulls we had on offer. And I knew they were good. But at auctions, it always takes two bidders to move a price higher – and it is clearly evident that interest does not equal bids. Or at least being the successful buyer!
- To be clear, this isn’t a complaint – we had a whale of a day. Just a distinction. Interest isn’t necessarily a bid, and no one should feel guilty about deciding to go another direction. Buyers have choice – and there are a massive number of Fleckvieh bulls available for sale each spring.
- One of the topics I do want to dive in a little deeper is on our selection process for the bull pen. Thanks to massive bull calf crops the past 2 years, we whittled 30+ bulls down to about a dozen to winter, with 10 slated for the catalogue – and plan about the same numbers for Red Deer 2027. That is a lot of culling, and thought it may be of interest for insight into how we select what we consider our 12 most ‘marketable’ bulls at weaning time. Which may be different than our 12 ‘best’ bulls. ‘Best’ is such a subjective criteria as is ‘Marketable’ that a big read blog post is destined to be finished this spring!
- Probably the least surprising news is that for our own herd bull shopping, we decided to stay right here at home and retain APLX BamBam 45N. Named for last fall’s Blue Jays run and Bam Bam Barger, we kept coming back to BamBam as an option. A Battleborn son from BLL Hocus, who we acquired at Equation during Covid, he packs a little more punch in an incredibly attractive package. He is related to ~20% of our herd, but that still leaves plenty of breeding options. We look forward to an exciting 2027 calf crop!
For sixteen years now, it has been great to be part of the Red Deer County Bull Sale. Public auction is a great forum to get feedback on the program we are building at Applecross. We strive to produce top quality cattle, and every year provides the opportunity for feedback and ideas on what we could do differently. Some years we have the euphoria of a super high seller – other years, we don’t – but not a year goes by that we don’t learn how to do things a little better for next year. It is simply so important to continue to receive tips and advice on how to make improvements to our program.
With the bull sale now in the rear-view mirror, and breeding season underway, the breeding groups have finally been decided for the year as the excitement to incorporate new genetics competes with genetic combinations that have worked so well in the past. We look forward to the challenge of developing more, different and better genetics for future years.
Until Next Time,
Dennis
Applecross Cattle 