Photo from the Peace Country Beef Congress Facebook page

By Curtis Galbraith

Agriculture

Peace Country Beef Congress set for Friday and Saturday

Jan 5, 2023 | 1:47 PM

The Peace Country Beef Congress is back for 2023 after not being held for the last two years.

This year’s edition will go Friday and Saturday at Evergreen Park

Congress president Colby Klassen says organizers are excited to be able to have the event again.

“The biggest thing is marketing. We hope to get the commercial producers to come in and look at, say, our bulls, our heifers that the purebred producers have in here. The whole marketing thing is probably about half of what the show does.”

“The other half that we do is really focused on the junior side of things, getting these young kids that are in 4-H or these junior clubs to get involved.”

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He adds a lot of people will be taking part.

“The exhibitors, I think we got just about 30 exhibitors coming and I think there’s a pretty good group of cattle. There should be about 80 head in total here.”

“On Friday morning we’ll see a pretty large group of junior kids.”

Klassen expects about 100 kids to take part in a grooming clinic. There will also be 13 vendors in a trade show.

The show is taking place at Evergreen Park this year after the last several editions were held in Dawson Creek. Klassen says the congress was intended to be a traveling show and they are hoping to reach a different group of people this time around.

He adds everything gets going Friday morning at 9 a.m.

“There’ll be a junior steer and heifer show later in the afternoon, I believe it’s at 3 and 4 (p.m.). We’ll have a banquet supper at 6 and then at 7, we actually have a new thing to this year’s show. It’s a junior show team competition.”

“What that is is just to get kids more involved in judging and being a ringman for these shows.”

Saturday’s activities start at 10 a.m. Klassen expects them to go around 4:30 in the afternoon.

The cattle are being housed in the Drysdale Centre and the activities are in the Lewis Hawkes Pavilion.

Klassen says the show coincides with calving time for a lot of purebred cattle operations.

“Yeah, that’s the one tricky part for lots of purebred breeders is they have to sacrifice a little bit. Probably a little bit why we don’t get quite as many numbers sometimes because some of the guys are just too busy with calving to be able to get out to the event.”

Klassen says calving has gone well with the warmer weather the region has had lately.