‘Follow your dreams and get in there,’ says Sask. female rancher

When Victoria Primrose was a little girl she never dreamed of being a princess or a pop star — she dreamed of being a rancher.

“As a young girl my dad always included me and brought me in on everything so I’ve been doing it since day one,” she said.

When Primrose was a baby, her dad would put her in a sleigh and would sit her in front of the cows while he forked them hay, and she received her first cow at five years old.

“Usually (if) you give a kid a cow they don’t remember, but I never forgot,” she said. “That was my cow and the calf she had I kept, and then all of a sudden I had 10 to 15 cows of my own.”

Her journey continued after meeting her husband who also has a background in agriculture, now they both run a ranch by Outlook, raising a special breed of speckle park cows exclusive to Saskatchewan.

Primrose handles selling the ranches’ heifers — female cows that haven’t yet birthed a calf — and said sometimes people are taken back when she answers calls about the prized cattle and not her husband.

But Primrose says she knows what she’s talking about and it’s a great feeling working in a male-dominated field.

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“I just stay strong, (and) you either deal with me or you don’t,” she said.

The speckle park breed started in Maidstone Saskatchewan in 1959, and in 2006 they were officially declared a distinct pure breed by Canada’s Ministry of Agriculture.

Primrose says her favourite part of the job is calving season and watching a new life come into spring.

Primrose’s ranch is home to 40 of those cows, and she said what makes them so unique is their colour patterns.

“They are (also) known for their feed conversion, so they can go out on hearty grass and still come out nice and fat,” she said, adding they are also known for their carcass yield and meat quality.

Her advice to any aspiring female rancher is to “Follow your dreams and get in there.”

“There’s a lot of support from everybody, and the odd person that doesn’t support you can’t stop you.”