Willow Springs Cattle Co. has a passion for elite show cattle
PRAIRIE GROVE, ARK. – It started out as a pretty simple concept for Eric Walker. He wanted to take his family’s passion for showing livestock and turn it into a family project.
But in the last 16 years, that passion project has turned into a business as well with the growth of the Willow Springs Cattle Company, which produces elite show livestock in Northwest Arkansas.
According to WSCC General Manager Cody Green, the company was founded on the Walker family’s love for not just showing livestock, but winning as well.
“His kids really had a passion for showing livestock as they were brought up,” said Green. “Eric, he grew up kind of showing cattle as well, but really it kind of started out as his kids being involved before 4H and FFA showing some livestock back in 2008 is when it would’ve started. It kind of grew from there as his kids gained interest in showing livestock very, very competitively at the national level.”
As the Walker’s success in showing grew, so did their aspirations for wanting to do more.
“It started with their show animals and they had a successful run as they were growing up, showing not only at the local level, but I mean multiple national champions,” Green explained.
“And that kind of turned into a breeding program as far as raising cattle. Raising show heifers and show cattle out of the cows is kind of how it started. And we tried to focus on and be very meticulous about our breeding program. So, utilizing today’s technology of artificial insemination and embryo transfer, we’ve been able to capitalize on some top-end genetics and multiply them things and by raising the best of the best from both sides, not only the cow side but as well the sire side as well.”
“We focus on raising heifers and females just because they’re a little more valuable and they could be used in a variety of ways going into other people’s breeding programs and helping them with their genetics,” Green said. “I’m not going to lie, I’d have a hard time selling bulls here in Northwest Arkansas. It just seems like everybody wants a herd bull for $2,500. In today’s economy, you would be losing money if you fed a bull for two years and put the money and the time into making him genetically superior and phenotypically superior, you would be losing money at $2,500. We like to focus on raising females, and by using embryo transfer, we can actually sort those embryos to where we just make heifer progeny. That way we know we put a heifer embryo into the cow. We know that that’s going to be a heifer calf.”
While they use a variety of different breeds, Willow Springs’s favorite is the Maine-Anjou.
“That was kind of our bread and butter and it still is. But as we’ve grown over the years, we’ve kind of had to be a little more diversified and add different breeds to our program just because when we go to selling show cattle, and it started out just selling cattle in Arkansas,” said Green. “It was hard when we had these kids that were buying cattle for their 4H or FFA projects, and if they’re all buying one breed and then showing against each other all in one breed, there’s only one champion for a breed. So as we grew and got more customers and whatnot. We kind of had to expand ourselves a little bit as far as offering some different breeds.”
Green, who was on the livestock judging team in college before coming to work at Willow Springs, says there are certain qualities to seek during the breeding process.
“The three priorities that we look for is they got to be sound in terms of their structure. That way they have more longevity as far as being good in terms of their structure and how they’re built in terms of their feet and their legs,” said Green. “That would be number one on my priority list. Number two is body volume and capacity, just how big body they are and how that correlates to real-life cattle that have bigger bodies. Then the other quality is another big thing. As far as cattle that are good in terms of milk production.”
Even though only 10 percent of their herd is sold through the market, Willow Springs has standards that must be met in that regard as well. Green describes it as trying to create a Super Bowl athlete every single time they have a calf born.
According to Green, 90 percent of their herd is strictly for breeding show livestock. That makes the effort they put into creating the ideal cattle paramount to the success of the company.
