Winter Cattle Journal 2025 | Brooks Chalky Butte Ranch: More Than a Century of Angus History
What started as a humble North Dakota homestead in 1905 has become a registered Angus cattle operation now known as Brooks Chalky Butte Ranch. Owned by Steve and Ryan Brooks and located near Bowman, N.D., the ranch covers 16,000 acres and is home to 500 registered Angus cows and 150 yearling heifers.
Brooks’ great-great-grandfather, William Sheets, homesteaded the land in 1905, and the Brooks family still owns that land today. Sheets’ son-in-law, Claude Brooks, was Steve’s great-grandfather. Brooks’ grandpa, Harold, moved to the ranch in 1938 and began expanding the cattle operation in the late 1940s by buying a registered Angus herd from a neighbor. Brooks’ father, Wayne, and his brother, Howard, were partners in the ranching business, buying 13,000 acres of land to the west and running about 120 cows. In the early 1960s, the brothers decided to run their Herefords commercially and weren’t interested in focusing on the registered business, but still bred their cattle to Angus bulls.
The operation did some showing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but at the time, judges were looking for bigger framed cattle, which didn’t fit with the Brooks’ family’s breeding goals. The family hasn’t hit the show circuit since.
Steve returned to the ranch from college in the early 1970s and started buying registered Angus cattle, along with his dad and uncle. Steve, Ryan, and cousin, Rob, became partners in the family business in 1983, buying another 7,000 acre ranch that had registered horned Herefords. Brooks ran the Herefords on shares for a year before switching to registered Angus. The family partnership lasted until 2001, when Rob decided to strike out on his own on the western property. After the partnership dissolved, Brooks and his brother were running commercial cows and decided to put embryos in. By 2005, the operation had leased another ranch and the herd was back to being all registered Angus. They also began putting embryos in cooperator herds, but have cut back on embryo transfer work in recent years as well as reducing herd size.
“As I started getting more involved in the North Dakota Angus Association, I got more interested in the Angus breed,” Brooks said.
Ryan is responsible for farming the ranch’s 5,000 acres of crop ground, where they raise corn, oats, corn silage, wheat, barley, field peas, safflower and flax.
Today, the sixth generation is getting involved in the operation, and the operation supports three full-time employees. Brooks and his wife, April, have three daughters: Calli, Cassi and Skeeter. Ryan and his wife, Becky, are the parents of Sasha, Alicia, Carter and Mariah. Skeeter and Carter are slowly buying land and cattle together. Carter will probably take over the farming side of the operation next year.
Top Quarter of the Breed
The Brooks family’s breeding goals are to spread birthweight and yearling weights as much as they can while controlling mature cow size. Brooks said they aim to have every bull that they sell have enough calving ease to be able to be used on heifers but still remain in the top 25 percent of the Angus breed for yearling growth.
“We also pay attention to carcass traits, too,” Brooks added. “We run our cows pretty rough, so they have to be moderate frame. It works for us.”
All of their females are bred through artificial insemination in the spring to calve mid-February, with mature cows getting bred two weeks later than heifers. Heifers get two cycles to breed before being turned out with a cleanup bull. Brooks said that the operation has been using a lot of Woodhill Blueprint, Woodhill Comstock, Sitz Stellar, Sitz Accomplishment and Sitz Resilient.
“We also have a bull we raised, Brooks Amidon, that we’ve been using pretty heavily,” Brooks said.
Ultrasound is used on all females in the fall to confirm pregnancy and determine fetal sex.
Mature cows eat hay and have access to lick tubs. The Brooks family develops their own bull and heifer calves, with gaining goals of 3.25 pounds per day for bulls and two pounds per day for heifers. Bred heifers receive silage, ground hay, distiller’s grains and shell corn.
Brooks Chalky Butte Ranch has hosted an annual bull sale on the first Saturday in April for 45 years running. In the last decade, they’ve also held a female sale every other year. Seventy percent of their customers are within a 300-mile radius of the ranch, but they’ve also sold cattle to 32 states, including Hawaii, Ohio, Oklahoma, Nevada, Tennessee, Texas, Canada and Mexico. For three years, the ranch also sold 130 bulls to Russia. At one time, the ranch was selling up to 1,300 heifers and 270 bulls a year, but in recent years, that number has been closer to 500 heifers and 150 bulls.
“We sell our cows when they’re rising seven-year-olds,” Brooks said. “We keep a lot of heifers back to help improve our genetics faster.”