Travers before Simmental ~ Part One

Like his fathers before him, Travers was interested in obtaining the best cattle he could, and also like his fathers, those cattle were mostly Herefords. When Travers learned of a performance-testing program in the United States he considered it a tremendous idea whose time had come—to improve productivity through performance.

From the Beef Today Yearbook ’77, Fenton Webster¹ recalled:

Travers was always interested in performance testing, crossbreeding and AI. He really believed that was the coming thing, at a time when none of those ideas were popular or accepted by the cattlemen. Performance testing, to the cattlemen, was still something the college professors played with, and AI, they felt could never be used on the ranches. (BYT’77:78)

But then Travers was always an innovator. For his herd sire, he went looking for the best performing bull he could find and soon purchased (13 April 1964) a Hereford bull, HH Advance A-326, that was registered with the Performance Registry International as a high performance bull. HH became quite an awesome presence at the ranch in the 1960s.

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1. Fenton Webster was a fellow Mountain View Alberta rancher; became an investor and subsequent shareholder in SBL.