The Medicine River Luing herd belongs to Iain and Rowena Aitken. Iain emigrated to Canada in 2000 from southwest Scotland where his family farmed beef cattle and sheep for eight generations. After moving to Alberta, Iain met his future wife, Rowena (from Edmonton) who now assists Iain on their section (640 acres) of land west of Rimbey, in central Alberta.

We consider ourselves to be in the grass business first and the cattle business second!

Our management practises aim to capture as much free sunlight, heat units and water as possible through forage. We then harvest this with our cattle who convert it into a saleable product - beef.

When we purchased the land it was a mix of cropland, seeded pasture and a treed riparian area bordering the Medicine River. The cropland has all been sown back to grass as we try to restore fertility and depleted organic matter to the soil. We operate a "Management Intensive Grazing" system to conserve water and maximise quantity and utilisation of the grass. This grazing system relies on moving cattle onto a fresh pasture nearly every day at a high stocking density. The fields will then have anywhere between 21 days and a year to rest, depending on the pasture and time of year, before cows re-graze them. We utilise both permanent and temporary electric fences and surface water pipelines/portable troughs to create the large number of pastures we need for this system. With this system we can produce two or three times as much grass as conventional set-stock ranching would produce off the same acres.

We aim to graze cattle for eight months of the year utilising "banked" grass to extend the grazing season well beyond the short five month growing season. The dry climate allows surplus late summer grass to be stored (banked) as standing hay until needed. We bank some fields and keep them right through until April for calving on with very little deterioration of quality. We buy in additional forage, usually from our neighbouring Hutterite colony, to feed the herd through the winter months. A major factor in us operating this system is that it minimises our investment in expensive machinery.