A cold Spring and dry Summer tell the story of livestock production in southwest Saskatchewan, damaging cow markets.

Donnie Peacock is an auctioneer with Heartland Livestock, and he said that despite the weather, they saw more cattle come through their gates.

"The stockyard itself, we had a very good year, we handled 110,000 cattle for the year, and that's a little bit higher than the average over the last 25 years, in the fall run, from the calf sales from October to the first of December, calf sales alone, we handled 50,299 calves.

While the number of cattle sold through the business increased, Peacock said that a noticeable drop in quality was also affecting the prices of those animals.

"Price this fall average on all those 50,000 calves was $1,084.78 per head, that's down probably $100 a head from the market a year ago."

While this year may not have been ideal for cattle producers, Peacock said he thinks southwest Saskatchewan can make it through the rough year.

"They say tough times go away but tough people don't, and we've got some pretty good people raising good cattle in this part of the world."