Bud Williams was born in 1932 on a farm in southern Oregon, where his family had horses, dairy and beef cattle, sheep, hogs and poultry and raised grain and hay.
“I met him at a country square dance. We’d been married for 60 years when he died in 2012,” says his wife, Eunice.
“After we married in 1952, we worked on cattle and sheep ranches in northern California. When we went on our first job at a big ranch in the mountains, Bud was horrified at the way they handled the stock. He told me there was no way that he was going to work stock that way.”
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He started figuring out better ways to do it.
“The main things that enabled him to perfect his method of handling livestock were his great powers of observation and pure stubbornness,” Eunice says.
He was able to rotationally graze pastures without fences, taking any type of livestock (including weaned calves) onto unfenced ranges, and teaching them to stay as a herd.
“After our daughters left home, Bud and I started travelling more, taking jobs that were difficult and interesting. We had excellent results working beef and dairy cattle, sheep, goats, elk, fallow deer, reindeer, bison and hogs.
“We gathered reindeer above the Arctic Circle in Alaska and wild cattle in Old Mexico and the Aleutian Islands and implemented remarkable increases in production in dairy herds,” she says.
In 1989, after urging from many of those he had helped, Williams began teaching his stockmanship methods to more people.
“For the 11 years ending in 2000, we headquartered at Vee Tee Feeders Ltd. near Lloydminster, Alta., one of the most northern feedlots on the continent. Since most of the incoming cattle were freshly weaned calves and weather conditions far from ideal, Bud felt the information he gathered there had special significance to help reduce stress and illness,” Eunice says.
Williams died of pancreatic cancer Nov. 25, 2012. Eunice continues to update their website and provide materials to spread the word about her husband and his livestock handling and marketing techniques.
Many people in the livestock industry have heard of or used a Bud Box, the term coined in the early 1970s to describe the small pen Williams designed for bringing cattle to the working chute.
