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About

Hollow Top Angus

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Our Story

Hollow Top Angus began raising registered Angus in 2012 by purchasing a group of registered cows from our neighbor, Sitz Angus, and bulls from Spruce Mountain Angus in Colorado.  In 2017 they bought an additional set of cows from Hinman Angus in Malta, MT. The Sitz and Hinman female purchases kick-started the development of a uniform, strong maternal, and growth-oriented cows.  

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Porter Bennett and his wife Carolyn Quan live on and operate the ranch.  Porter is a Colorado native with a strong affinity and appreciation for the West with its varied ranching traditions.  He retired from a successful career developing commodity-focused data and analytics companies and uses the same approach to analyze and improve the performance of our cattle genetics. His wife, Carolyn Quan, a Western artist, shares Porter’s love of the region, and is inspired by the beauty of the landscape, strong sense of community, rural values and a life-long love of horses.

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Porter and Carolyn’s children, Kelly and Meghan, also participate in the business. Kelly runs B3 Insight, the family’s water resources data and analytics company in Denver, Colorado. He is passionate about conserving Western landscapes and communities, and challenges the operation to think outside of the box when it comes to being good stewards of the land and environment and supporting communities around working lands. Meghan, who resides in Bozeman, recently left a successful career in the global natural gas market to join the family operation to support the ranch’s financial and management performance.  It is a priority of the entire family to find innovative ways to apply data and technology to improve the productivity of the land, to manage employees, and to make the Hollow Top Angus herd and operations as transparent as possible.

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Our Program

Our program aims at providing for the key needs of commercial breeders.  Accordingly, we focus on breeding moderate-framed bulls and heifers that first and foremost breed regularly and aggressively in rough terrain.  We also want them to have strong growth profiles with excellent feet and docility. All bulls and heifers are PAP tested in the fall.

We raise our bulls and heifers here on the ranch. 

 

The young calves spend their initial summer ranging over several thousand acres of rugged, mountainous terrain ranging in elevation from about 6,000 ft to a little under 7,500 feet. The young calves feed off their mothers and have access to abundant nutritious mountain grass.  Once weaned, the heifers continue grazing on the lower reaches of the ranch until breed-up, after which they head up high once again. 

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After weaning, the top 50% or so of the bull calves are moved to our onsite development center where they receive a moderate diet of a developmental pellet and grass until about 16 months of age.  By late August, their feet and legs are assumed to be mature enough to handle a more aggressive feed program which they get until our fall sale and they leave the ranch.

Our Approach

  • AGGRESSIVELY MANAGE OUR HERD TO MAXIMIZE HIGH-PERFORMING ANIMALS THROUGH DISCIPLINED CULLING OF WEAK PERFORMERS

 

  • EMPHASIZE STRONG DAM LINES INCLUDING FOUNDATION COWS FROM THE LEGENDARY SITZ AND HINMAN RANCHES

 

  • RUN OUR STOCK ON DIVERSE TERRAIN AND FORAGE, FROM VALLEY FLOOR TO TIMBERLINE.

 

  • HONOR RANCHING TRADITION AND RESPECT FOR THE ANIMALS AND LAND BY MINIMIZING THE USE OF MOTORIZED VEHICLES

 

  • STRIVE TO COMBINE THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY WITH THE SOUNDEST PRINCIPLES OF PERFORMANCE TESTING

Ranch Management

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