about us
The Owens Farms Story
Our history
In 1969 Justin’s grandfather, Gary Owens, purchased the farm from the family that homesteaded it in the 1800's. At the time, our farm comprised an additional 700+ acres. For several decades, tucked away in the rolling hills below the Rocks of Sharon, Owens Farms operated as an iconic Pacific Northwest Thoroughbred breeding farm, boarding and breeding over 200 premier broodmares a year. In the late 1980's the farm transitioned from Thoroughbreds to cattle, and by the turn of the new millennium we were well-established as a premier breeder and exhibitor of Piedmontese.
In 2005 Gary was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In light of the diagnosis, Gary made the tough decision to sell all of the cattle, keeping only five nitrogen tanks of several thousand units of semen, and several hundred embryos flushed from the original herd. Owens Farms was then downsized to 200+ acres.
current activities
Current farm activities began in 2009 while Justin was still in college. But the seedstock operation kicked off in 2013 after a friendly conversation between ranchers hypothesizing which genetics would be superior: 20 year old embryos vs. cattle being breed and born today. Justin became interested in implanting the embryos that his grandfather had collected before he retired and decided to put the question to the test. While these embryos were older, they were also out of National Grand Champion foundation cows that were ahead of their time. Over the span of just a few years, our recipient herd has grown from three cows to over one hundred fifty cows. Building a herd completely from embryos is truly a labor of love. Thankfully today we are phasing out embryo work as we have an established fullblood Piedmontese herd that we heavily utilize artificial insemination with.
In the fall of 2016 we completed construction of our newest facility. It includes five barns totaling approx. 26,000 sq ft. These barns accommodate hay storage, vet facilities, equipment storage, open bedded cow barns, and stalls for birthing. Our goal is to bring small, local ranching into the 21st century using innovative and modern facilities designed for efficiency, sustainability, and cow comfort & safety.
our future
Looking ahead, our goal with Piedmontese seedstock has always been to help grow the population of the breed, and grow the base of seedstock breeders. We believe this can be accomplished through continuing to improve performance traits on the beef side, and balancing that performance with maternal characteristics. Through doing our small part, the Piedmontese breed can become the premier beef cattle breed the world over. To realize this goal we have designed our facilities to accommodate GrowSafe Technology in the future, in order to not just test our bulls, but our heifers and feeder calves as well. This will drive herd improvement, and by extension breed improvement.
Another dream, since visiting the Italian National Headquarters in 2015, has been to help American Dairy farms utilize Piedmontese semen on their dairy herds in the same fashion as dairy farms across Europe.