Bud Williams Stockmanship and Livestock Marketing

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Contact

Bud Williams Stockmanship
Eunice Williams
883 E 505th Road
Aldrich, MO 65601
417-719-4910
eunice@stockmanship.com
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Who are Bud and Eunice Williams?

Bud Williams was born in 1932 on a farm in Southern Oregon, where he was raised with a variety of farm animals including work horses, dairy and beef cattle, sheep, and hogs. After we married in 1952, we worked on cattle and sheep ranches in Northern California. Bud’s reputation as a “trouble shooter” evolved from being a good neighbor and “bringing in the ones that got away.” From this early beginning, stock dogs were a very important part of our lives, and they enabled us to do many things we couldn’t have done without them.

The main qualifications enabling him to perfect his method of handling livestock are his great powers of observation and pure stubbornness. He has always said, “No cow is going to get away from me, she doesn’t live long enough.” He was also able to rotationally graze without fences by taking any type of livestock (including weaned calves) onto unfenced ranges and teach them to stay as a herd.

After our daughters left home, Bud and I started traveling in earnest, only taking jobs that were difficult and interesting. We had excellent results working both beef and dairy cattle, sheep, goats, elk, fallow deer, reindeer, bison, hogs, and ….

We gathered wild reindeer above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and wild cattle in Old Mexico and the Aleutian Islands and implemented remarkable increases in production in dairy herds as well.

In 1989, after much urging from people he had helped through the years, we began actively teaching his Stockmanship methods to a larger number of people in the hope his unique methods of working livestock would not die with him.

For the eleven years ending in 2000, we headquartered at Vee Tee Feeders Ltd. near Lloydminster, Alberta. This is one of the most northern feedlots on the continent. Since the bulk of the incoming cattle were freshly weaned calves and the weather conditions were far from ideal, Bud felt the information he gathered there had special significance.

In April of 2002 we started teaching Bud’s unique livestock marketing methods which he had developed through the years, used at Vee Tee Feeders, and put into a program to teach others.

The revolutionary stockmanship we taught was named one of the Top Ten Innovations (right up there with barbed wire, antibiotics, and refrigeration) in the beef industry by Beef Producer in 2011, and in the September 2013 issue of Beef, we were named one of the top fifty industry leaders.

Bud died of pancreatic cancer November 25, 2012.  I continue to update our website and sell materials to spread the word about Bud and his livestock handling and marketing techniques.

The Bud Box

Many people in the livestock industry have heard of or used a “Bud Box.” This term was coined in the early 1970s by Rich Hunt near Eureka, California to describe the box Bud designed for bringing cattle to the working chute. For more information about building and using a Bud Box, click here.

It’s all Documented!

Since Bud’s illness and death in 2012, I have had a compulsion to be sure all of the information possible about him and his method of working animals is made available to the folks who are interested.

Bud helped me get his livestock marketing and stockmanship information ready for publication. We now sell two different video packages of Bud Williams Stockmanship and a 340-page book Proper Livestock Marketing to fully document both those subjects.

For several years I had wanted to make Bud’s video of starting a colt available to the public, but he didn’t want to have to argue with the horse trainers. We did put together a video, and Bud gave copies to individuals we met along the way who he thought would get some good out of it. After his death I started selling this video.

Next on the list was pulling together our autobiography Smile and Mean it. This 630 page hard-cover book with photos covers our adventures from our early lives in southern Oregon to working cattle and reindeer in Alaska to a feedlot in Canada and teaching in Australia. This isn’t a manual on stockmanship, marketing, or working stock dogs, but it does mention all those subjects and more.

The last thing I think might be of value to people is the information I have about stock dogs. Again, this was a subject Bud knew would irritate the trial dog people, and he didn’t want to be bothered with them. For friends, Bud narrated over video of working stock dogs on cattle, sheep, and reindeer, and we gave it to interested people who asked about his techniques. To make Stock Dogs: Partners and Friends, I did a little editing work on that video and feel that, combined with a book I pulled together combining the information on this website along with other letters and writings to add further explanation, the reader/viewer will get a complete picture of Bud’s unique methods of working stock dogs.

If you’d like to buy any of these items, click here for more information.

Moving Forward

We have carefully provided succession of all these materials to the next generation and the one after that to make sure the books, videos, and websites remain available for years to come!

We hope you enjoy them and learn and grow.

Sincerely,