http://www.northstarlivestock.com/

Northstar Livestock, 1465 B Line, Southampton, ON (2025)

03/24/2025

Jason starting a young horse under saddle at the Ontario Equine Expo this past weekend.

03/20/2025

STORY TIME -
Hope

We had a long hard winter a few years ago. It started early and stayed late. The snow was up over the fence tops so we couldn’t let most of the horses out for exercise because they couldn’t get through the deep snow, or if they did happen to they could walk right over the fences without even knowing they were there. From there we went to ice and then to mud. It was bitter cold as well to go along with all the snow. A friend of ours said it was so cold that he would go out to throw his horses their hay and that he would be back in the house by the stove before the hay hit the ground. I was blowing snow two and three times a day to keep open so we could get around and in or out our lane and I couldn’t help but feel I was going to freeze every time I got on that tractor. The real icing on the cake was when the water pipes to our barns froze. We were three months with no running water to the barns. We had to run hoses from the house to the barns to water 50 horses. After watering we had to unhook and drain all the hoses and haul them into the basement (or otherwise they’d freeze too). I guess it’s human nature to crab about the weather even though I don’t think anyone really wants to hear about it anyway. But it sometimes seems like you have to crab to someone.

We were talking about the rough winter and I was reminded of another bad winter we endured in PEI. It was extremely cold and windy with heavy snowfall and we would often have a big snow drift built up between the house and the barn. Sometimes it was so deep that we had a job to get to the barn to do chores. It seemed that that winter would last forever. Everyone had cabin fever and was kind of depressed. One day all that changed. The wind stopped blowing, and the sun came out and was strong enough to melt a little snow. It shone in our kitchen windows and warmed the room right up. It was sure great to see that sun but that wasn’t all. A big box of oranges and grapefruit arrived from Florida, sent to us by my mother and dad who had gone to Florida on a holiday to escape some of the winter - it was a real treat. And when we called for the mail after lunch, low and behold, there was the new spring seed catalog showing off all the vegetables and flowers. We knew that winter wasn’t over by a long shot but between those three things that day it changed our whole attitude and outlook on life. We felt that Spring was going to come after all and that we could survive the rest of the winter. There was new hope it the air and it was a great day.

03/18/2025

Our grand daughter (Bill & Brenda), niece (Jason & Adam) featured in the 2025 Prince Edward Island Federation of Agriculture calendar.

03/10/2025

There are just a couple spots left in the liberty clinic that Jason will be teaching at Angel Rock Farm (near Ottawa) this coming weekend.

03/08/2025

People always used to tell Dad 'you should write a book' because he has so many stories. Well, he did that a few years ago and it's posted on the farm site. One of the stories is posted below -

STORY TIME -

Little Horses

We had heard about a ranch horse competition in Texas and my son Jason and I decided to go and see if we could buy some good ranch horses. Texas was supposed to be the quarter horse capital of the world but actually I think it’s more the cutting horse capital (cutting is a competition where a horse and rider separate a single cattlebeast from a group of cattle and keep it from returning to the herd). Many of the Texans felt a small horse was a quick horse and have bred for these quick little horses for cutting. When we got to the competition we were quite disappointed in their stock, they weren’t big solid ranch horses but little cutting horses that weren’t good enough for the cutting competitions.

In the actual ranch competition the rider was to rope a calf and they were to drag that calf twenty or twenty five feet. That isn’t very far but these little horses would be straining to pull the calf that distance and the riders’ would be hanging off the far side of their horses’ to try to counterbalance the weight of the calves. These little horses would be wore out after dragging one calf. I thought ‘that’s great, if you had two hundred calves to brand you would have to have two hundred of these little horses to get it done providing the calves weren’t standing any farther away than twenty or twenty five feet from the branding crew’.

Another part of the competition was that the horse and rider had to chase the calf down the arena fence and then turn it back on the fence and then do this again going the other way but if a calf didn’t want to turn these little horses couldn’t make them. If they beat the calf to the end of the arena and got ahead of it the calf would turn because the arena wall would force them to.

I said to Jase that I wasn’t much interested in these little horses and he said that he was thinking along the same lines so we decided to leave. We felt bad about going because the people that put on the competition had treated us really well and they were the type of people that a person likes to do business with but we just had no use for that type of horse.

The following week we were in Montana and I mentioned to a rancher there about all these small horses in Texas and he said, “We had one of those old boys up here with his little horse. He went to work a snuffy bull and he sat so low on his little horse that he was about eye to eye with that bull and he sure wasn’t long coming back for a bigger horse.”

Anyway, we left the competition and thought we’d go to a breeding facility near New Orleans, Louisiana to see if we could buy a young stallion sired by a horse that they owned that we admired. They had good big horses there but these were racing bred quarter horses and they weren’t very interested in selling us a c**t when they found out that we weren’t going to race him. The state of Louisiana has a good incentive program for breeding race horses. If a horse wins down there the breeder gets extra money under their program even if they don’t own the horse anymore and if they sold a c**t to us for breeding purposes they wouldn’t be getting any of these extra cheques in the mail. It was an interesting place and even though we didn’t get our c**t we were glad that we had gone. We then turned around and headed for home (about 150 miles northwest of Toronto).

On the way we stopped for the night and when we came out of the hotel in the morning there was a case of beer sitting beside our trailer. Someone must have been packing their car and forgot to put it in. Jason picked it up and put it in the trailer and didn’t think anymore about it. When we got to the Canadian border the Customs officer asked us where we had been and we said, “Texas.” The conversation then went something like this – what was the purpose of our trip - to buy horses, how many horses did we buy - none, why - they weren’t what we wanted, open your trailer please. We opened the trailer and there sat the case of beer. She then asked, “How much other alcohol did you purchase?” and we said, “None” and that, “actually we didn’t buy the beer either, we had found it’. She said, “Let me get this straight. You went to Texas to buy horses but you couldn’t find any horses but you found beer. Pull over there” and she pointed to an area off to the side where vehicles get searched.

We were telling her the truth completely but the story even sounded phony to us so we could certainly see why they would be suspicious. Two more Customs Officers came out for the actual search and they were sure doing their best to look tough and foreboding. They started looking through our truck and trailer but gave it up after a few minutes. Part of this would be because they weren’t finding anything but I’m sure the other part was that we really didn’t fit the profile of someone smuggling something. Instead of being uptight and nervous we were sitting on the box of the truck smiling and trying not to laugh too hard about the whole situation. They then saw the joke of it too and sent us on our way. It does show though that a person can be doing the right thing and still get into a jackpot.

We did see some different country and had some interesting experiences but it wasn’t what you would call a very productive trip. It was a long way to go for a case of beer – even if it was free.

02/27/2025

Looking forward to this scenery again.
STORY TIME -
Hero

Another fella and myself had just finished loading some cattle and had shut the tailgate on the truck when there was a loud bang from the road up the hill from us. It almost sounded like dynamite going off and we knew that there had been an accident. We jumped into another truck and went to investigate. A gravel truck and a half ton truck had collided head on. The gravel truck was upside down in the ditch but the driver wasn’t hurt badly. The driver of the half ton wasn’t so lucky; he was pinned behind the steering wheel in what was left of his truck. He was in shock and was in a pretty bad way. This had happened on a country road outside of Streetsville in southern Ontario.

There were two or three houses a little further up the hill from us and a young girl from one of these houses came down to help us. I’m not very good at guessing ages but I would guess her to be maybe 12 or 13 years old. We were trying to do what we could to help this fella who was trapped in the truck and we asked her if she would go call the police and the ambulance and to tell them what had happened. She did this and was right back to tell us that they were on their way and asked what else she could do to help. I had been trying to hold the driver still so he wouldn’t cut himself any deeper and was pressing a towel to his chest to try to slow down the bleeding. The other fellas were trying to pry some steel away from the trapped man and could use some more help. I asked her if she could take my place so I could help the other fellas. She said that she would and even though it was really bothering her she hung right in there and was a great help.

The ambulance came and between everyone we got the man out of the truck and on his way to the hospital. It was a big relief for us all when he was finally freed from the wreckage.

You could tell that this girl was really shaken from the experience. I guess her mother must have been away and just gotten home and she came out and started hollering and yelling at this girl to come home right now and to never go near something like that again. There were some rabbit hutches out behind their house and the girl went out back and put her head down on a hutch and cried. We all felt sick because she was so good and she sure didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. I felt like going and chewing out her mother and telling her that she should be proud of this girl but I didn’t.

I know that with a female you are supposed to use the word he**in rather than hero, but to me a he**in seems like the main actress in a drippy movie. This kid was far more than that, so I prefer to call her a hero. I know that you shouldn’t poke your nose into family affairs but I’ve always regretted that I didn’t say anything to her mother. I think all of us who were at the crash site were in our own way proud of this girl. She deserved far better treatment than what she got. I still wish today, after all these years, that I could tell her that I thought she really was a hero in every sense of the word.

02/24/2025

Story Time.
Insult to Injury

My son Jase and I were looking at some young stallions for sale in Missouri. The owner had five two year old c**ts that he was bringing out to show us. Now these were good looking horses but they hadn’t been handled much and were a little jumpy. As the owner and his son brought them out to show us they would pull the blankets off of these young stallions and after we had looked them over they would put the blankets back on and put them back in their stalls.

The last c**t out (who also happened to be the most skittish of the bunch) was wearing a blanket that was solid in the front rather than attached with straps and buckles so in order to put the blanket on they had to slide it over the c**ts head.

When they did this the frightened animal reared up high into the air and as he was coming back down hit the owner’s son (who would be maybe in his forties at that time) quite a lick and knocked him into the front of a box stall. This all happened in the matter of a few seconds but that’s all the time it took to shatter his knee into 27 pieces, break his little finger, and tear the rotator cup in his shoulder.

His father and I picked him up and set him on a bag of feed that was sitting there. He had taken quite a whack on the head as well and was dazed and it took a few minutes to take stock of what kind of shape he was in after being hit. He said that his knee was broken and his Dad asked him if he was sure. “Yes, I’m pretty sure because this is my knee cap right here,” he answered as he pointed to a bulge under his pant leg that was about six inches higher than where he knee cap should have been.

Jason and his Dad then each got one of his arms over their shoulders to carry him to their truck for the trip to the hospital. They maybe should have planned this out a little better because Jase ended up on the side with the shattered knee. Both the son and the Dad were big fellas and Jase wasn’t as tall but he was the one that was trying to keep the fella’s weight off of the bad knee. Jason was walking on his toes the whole way out but every time they would step into a dip in the barn aisle the bad leg would touch the ground and the fella would groan.

When the doctors operated on his knee it was a long drawn out process to get everything pieced and wired back together. You can imagine the time it would take to put 27 pieces of a knee back together like a jigsaw puzzle. After the operation when he was finally allowed to go home his dutiful wife came to pick him up from the hospital. She helped him out to the car and managed to get him into the front seat and then without thinking slammed the door to close it – right on his bad leg! It was not the thing to do. She then had to help him back out of the car, into a wheelchair, and back to the hospital he went. I think they call this adding insult to injury. I saw him again several months later when he was mobile once again. I had heard about the car door incident and I was kidding him a little bit and I asked him it he was still married the same woman. “Yeah,” he replid, “but just barely.”

02/20/2025

A funny little clip from last year.
As bad as the weather has been this last while its hard to believe that we're only a couple months away from foaling again.

02/17/2025

Starting to realize how much we were spoiled with this summer weather.

02/14/2025

Some of the young ones.
The big black c**t out front is going to be a horse and a half.

02/11/2025

This is a longer story than we usually post on facebook. However it does show how easily a person can end up in a jackpot.

STORY TIME -
Crash

My one son Jason and I had been in Oklahoma for nearly a week; we had bought six horses and had just started out on our way home to Ontario. It was the middle of August and the temperatures down there had been unbelievable, it had been something like 50 days straight with temperatures well above 100 degrees during the day and the whole state was in a severe drought. We were hauling our horses in a big steel gooseneck trailer and we were worried that our truck could overheat due to the load and the high temperatures so we decided to start our return trip in the evening and drive through the night and hopefully get far enough north by morning that the weather would be a little cooler. Even through the night it was hot hot and us northern fellas just weren’t used to that kind of heat.

We got along fine until we crossed the state line into Missouri. All of a sudden there was a huge smash and we were spinning down the road in our truck. We were crashing into things (we later realized that these were the cement abutments along the median of the interstate), the windows of the truck were smashing out around us, everything was a complete blur, and all in all it was one wild ride. With the force of the spinning and the suction created from it and with pieces of our truck flying off Jason figured the doors were going to come off and with all the force we would get sucked out of the truck. He grabbed onto me to try to hold us together to keep this from happening but afterwards I didn’t even realize that he had been holding onto me. This was all taking place at very high speed and we spun down the road quite a ways and finally came to a stop right along the edge of the right hand side of the road just like how a person would intentionally pull over (another couple of feet farther though and the truck would have likely rolled over into the ditch).

After we were stopped I couldn’t get out of my door because the driver’s side of the truck had been caved in but Jason got his door worked open and we both got out on that side. We were shaken up pretty well and still didn’t know what had happened to us and our trailer was no longer attached to our truck. With it being so hot and dry this whole accident had raised a ton of dust and it was far worse than being in a heavy fog and we couldn’t see very well so it was making it that much harder again to figure out what had happened.

We could make out two long objects, one was definitely a tractor trailer, and my first thought was that two tractor trailers had gotten into an accident and we had gotten mixed up in the middle of it somehow. It turned out the second one was actually our trailer but it was on its side and when we looked at our trailer normally we weren’t used to looking at the bottom of it.

What had happened was that a husband and wife driving team had been heading north with their tractor trailer full of lettuce and they had hit us. They had been pushing hard trying to get to their destination before the heat started to wilt their lettuce. The lady had been driving and had their truck going wide open, she fell asleep, and plowed right into the back of us. When they smashed into us it tore our trailer off our truck and threw it into the ditch on its side, we went spinning down the road in our truck, and their outfit went between our truck and trailer and rolled three times out into a field before it came to a stop.

We headed towards the trailers and as the dust settled a bit we were then able to tell what we were actually looking at. We went to check on the people in the tractor trailer as there didn’t seem to be any activity over there. When we got to the cab there was the man sitting there naked as a Jaybird kind of confused and disoriented and in shock. He asked where his wife was and we could hear some noise coming from the truck so we said she was in the cab, then he asked where his clothes were and we had no idea where they were. He had been sleeping in the sleeper of the truck and didn’t have anything on because it was so hot. When the tractor trailer was rolling the roof of the sleeper was completely torn off of the truck and it’s a miracle that he wasn’t thrown out and crushed.

The wife was down on the floor on the passenger’s side of their truck and was pinned there. Luckily two medics happened to be coming down the road a few minutes after this all took place and a police cruiser was just a few minutes behind them. An ambulance and fire trucks were called and they all took over looking after these people. The jaws of life were brought out to cut through some of the truck to get the lady out but they managed to get her worked free without using them. At one point the truck started to turn back on and with diesel on the ground from the crash the emergency people almost had a heart attack because the whole thing could have burst into flames but one of the firefighters got into the truck and got it turned off before anything like that happened. They finally hauled the two people from the tractor trailer away in the ambulance. The man had cracked or broken ribs and his wife had a broken leg and a medic carried part of her scalp up to the ambulance to hopefully get sewn back on. The medics checked us out as well, we said we were ok but they warned us that we’d be hurting the following day and that we were still running on adrenaline.

When all of the emergency professionals took over looking after these people we then went to see about our horses. We didn’t know how badly they were hurt and we both figured that most of them would be dead and that any that weren’t would have to be put down. The state troopers wouldn’t let us open the trailer for fear that if any horses got out and got away from us they might run down the highway and cause more accidents. We didn’t want to get in there with flashlights because it was fairly calm inside the trailer and if we started shining light in it would likely get them excited and if they started moving around they would quite likely injure themselves even more. There wasn’t a thing that we could do and it sure gave us both a pretty sick and helpless feeling.

A rancher with a livestock trailer was called by one of the emergency personal and then someone else with a livestock trailer was called so the first outfit thought they weren’t supposed to come then the second outfit somehow got canceled so by the time a trailer arrived for the horses it was about three hours after the crash actually took place. One thing that I did have to smile about was that because the trailer was somewhat in the ditch and not on flat ground there was a space between the ground and the middle of the trailer. As I walked past the trailer I could hear a munching sound. I looked under the trailer and all I could see was the nose and feet of one of the horses stuck threw the bars of the trailer and it was eating grass out of the ditch so I knew at least one of them must be alright.

The trailer that finally arrived was backed up to ours and gates were run from their trailer to ours to form an alleyway to keep any horses from escaping. The door was opened and the horses were unloaded and reloaded onto this rancher’s trailer. Five of them walked off easily and onto the other outfit. The sixth horse was lying under a trailer gate that had been torn loose during the crash but when it was lifted off of her she calmly got up and walked out to join the other horses. We had the horses hauled to a vet; they had cuts and scratches but were generally in pretty good shape considering what they had been through. The vet gave them penicillin, a tetnus shot, and shots for shock. We reloaded the horses and the rancher took them to his ranch and put them in a paddock where they could move around and hopefully work out some of their stiffness and soreness. It was a relief for us to have them being cared for.

We then hitched a ride with a tow truck driver who had been at the crash to get to a motel. Even this was an undertaking because there had been a Brad Paisley concert in the town that we were taken to and all the motels were booked. We finally found a pretty scruffy and rundown joint where they had one room left and we checked in. We tried to phone Brenda to let her know what had happened but the phone in our room was broken. We could make a call and hear what the person on the other end was saying but they couldn’t hear us. So we phoned home and kept trying to tell our story but would just hear, “Hello, hello, is anyone there?’ on the other end. We finally figured out what was the matter and went across the street to a gas station and phoned home from a payphone.

We went back to the motel and tried to get some sleep but we were pretty wired. The next morning we found out just how right the medics were when they said about we were ‘going to be hurting tomorrow.’ Everything hurt but our hair, no matter what we did it hurt to do it. If we stood up it hurt, if we laid down it hurt, if we only thought about moving it still seemed to hurt. I had gotten a bump on my head somehow during the crash and Jason had sore wrists. He had been sleeping when the crash started and he figured he had gotten his arms out in front of him to protect himself and hurt his wrists hitting hard against the dashboard.

Brenda notified our insurance company about what had taken place and phoned the rest of our family to let them know about what had happened. Our oldest son Travis who at the time was working for an oil company in Colorado phoned us and said that he was coming to help and showed up bright and early the next morning. He had driven over so we had transportation again. We went to the yard where the tow truck had hauled our truck and trailer as well as the tractor trailer. When Travis saw what was left of our outfit he whistled and said, “You sure wouldn’t want to do that often.” We got our clothes and tools and everything else out of what was left of our outfits. Our truck and trailer were both complete write offs and the tractor trailer was too. We then went to check on our horses at the ranch where they had been hauled to and treated their scrapes and cuts again with some supplies that we had picked up from the local vets office on the way there. We had to treat them several more times in the next few days. With the extreme heat the wounds needed extra care or they would turn septic.

The insurance company covering the tractor trailer was liable for the damages but they were playing dumb and let on like they didn’t even know that there was a second vehicle involved in the accident (us). We knew this wasn’t so because the tow truck driver told us that their adjustor had asked him if we had been hurt in the crash. I’m sure the plan was to wait and let us sit there and we’d get more desperate to just get home and settle easily. We were annoyed at the way they were handling things and told the adjustor that for every day extra that they let us sit there it was going to cost his company another $1000 so that got them moving. I also threatened them with a lawsuit and said that we had been talking to a lawyer who specialized in big truck accidents and then threw out this lawyer’s name. This wasn’t exactly lying but it wasn’t exactly the truth either. When we were at the motel I had seen this lawyer advertising on tv and had written the phone number down. I had phoned and gotten his receptionist and then was put on hold to wait for him but after about several minutes of waiting I hung up. So technically I did phone him but hadn’t actually talked to him. Either way though this seemed to get their attention and we hammered out a settlement with them and started looking for a new truck and trailer.

Travis drove us around to dealerships to look at new outfits and he was a great help. We did have one thing happen that struck me pretty funny. We had just looked at several trucks and trailers and were pretty much settled on what we wanted to buy and the trailer was from a dealership in Missouri and the truck was from a lot in Oklahoma. Travis had been driving us up and down roads in every direction and I’m sure I’d have gotten lost ten times by that point if I’d have been the one behind the wheel. It was getting on into the evening and we were headed back to our motel (which was in Oklahoma) and I said about how much we appreciated his help and driving us around and how I’d never have been able to find my way into and out of all these places and how it was sure great to have someone there that knew where they were going. About half a second after I said this we passed a big sign that had written on it in large letters ‘WELCOME TO KANSAS.’ Everything went real quiet for a couple seconds and Jason and I both turned to look at Travis who had suddenly gone silent and seemed to be putting a little too much effort into looking at something else on the other side of the road. “Are we supposed to be in Kansas?” I asked, and then everyone started laughing. And no, we weren’t supposed to be in Kansas.

When we were looking at new trucks one of them was a jazzy new dually with all the options on it – including a moon roof. I laughed and told Jason that that’s the one we should have. I said I could drive and he could stick his head up through the moon roof and watch out for women drivers, after that lady running into us we sure didn’t want to tangle with another one.

We were getting things organized and told Travis that he should probably head back to work as we didn’t want to keep him from his job any longer and we didn’t know how long we were going to be there. After he left we rented a truck so we’d have transportation. When horses are leaving the US to go to Canada they have to have international health papers drawn up by a regular veterinarian but these papers also have to be verified and signed by a federal veterinarian and the regular vet and the federal vet have to be from the same state. Originally we were leaving Oklahoma on a Saturday and were going to stop in Michigan and have international papers drawn up and then verified by the Michigan federal vet. This way we would spend the weekend driving instead of waiting for the Oklahoma vet to open up on the Monday. We were sure getting homesick and the weekend was rolling around again and we figured if we headed north we’d likely end up stuck and waiting over the weekend in Michigan for the vets to open Monday so we had a Oklahoma vet do health papers on the horses while they were at the ranch and drove to Oklahoma City to have them verified so that we could drive straight home.

After we had the health papers verified and on our trip back to the town where we were staying we decided which truck and trailer we were going to buy for sure. By the time we got back to town from our trip the truck dealership was just closing down for the day. The salesman that I had talked to saw our rented truck and asked us if we had bought that truck and we said no, that it was just rented and told him which truck we wanted. He said there was no point in us renting a truck and he put a thirty day license on the new one and gave it to us and said to come back tomorrow and we’d do the paperwork then. There was nothing signed and no money given to them and I thought they were a pretty trusting bunch to let us drive away with a brand new truck.

We had also decided on our trailer and told the owner of the dealership which one we wanted but I said it would maybe be a couple days before the insurance cheque was through to pay for it. He said for us not to worry about it and to take it and send him a cheque when we got home. We couldn’t believe how trusting these people were. The trailer we had picked out was a 28 foot aluminum trailer and worth a lot of money and we would be taking it to another country. I said that we wouldn’t do that but we sure did appreciate the offer.

Our threat to the insurance company had worked and they drove the cheque up to us the following morning. We got the hookup for the trailer installed on our truck, hooked up the trailer, drove our new outfit out to the ranch where our horses were, squared up with the rancher, loaded our horses and headed north for home once again.

When we got to the Canadian border and they asked us if we had anything to declare we kind of flinched because everything that they could see was brand new- the new truck, the new trailer, and six horses. We had been dreading going through Customs with all this and thought we’d be there for at least half a day (if we were lucky). However these Customs officers were a nice group of young people and we told them what had happened to us and they were courteous and helpful and got us cleared in good time and we really did appreciate it.

All told we were away for about two weeks and it sure was a tremendous relief to be back home once again. We got our new horses settled in and then we caught up with what had happened while we were away and we filled everyone at home in on all the details of what all had happened with us. The horses healed up and came along really well. The following week it took me the whole week of phoning and running around to get our truck and trailer licensed. The week after that we were fairly well back to normal - about as normal as we ever get around here anyway. A couple weeks after that we took off for North Dakota and bought another group of horses. Let me tell you, it was a far better trip than the one I’ve just told you about was.

Something we couldn’t get over was how helpful and trusting the southerners that we dealt with were. We couldn’t have asked for better people to get along with, they were just great.

Northstar Livestock

03/24/2025

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