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2012–PRESENT · GRANGER (THE LOFT) TO THE ONE-LOFT-RACE WORLD
The one Granger-seated operation whose product demonstrably leaves this ground for foreign markets is a pigeon loft. The banked people leg fixes the tie exactly, in the international pigeon press’s own dateline: Mike Ganus “from US Granger,” who “was born in South Bend Indiana about 10 miles from Granger where he lives now,” and whose Ganus Family Loft (GFL) is a Granger operation, built over more than forty years in the sport. Racing pigeons are a traded good in a literal sense — birds are bred at the home loft, shipped to one-loft races abroad, raced, and then sold, with the winning bloodlines auctioned to buyers in the host countries and beyond — and the loft’s record, run market by market from PIPA (Pigeon Paradise) and the race auctions’ own records, is this ground’s flagship shipping record.
South Africa. The South African Million Dollar Pigeon Race (SAMDPR) is the loft’s founding foreign market. Ganus first visited in 2011; a GFL bird won the 2012–13 edition’s final (553 km against 2,793 birds, per PIPA’s loft record); and in the 20th edition’s final, January 2016, the GFL hen “Laura Is a Big Winner Today” (GFL267-2015) won the final race — about 541 km into a head wind — by an unprecedented fifteen minutes. The loft returned to the same market’s successor series, AfrikaPro, where GFL birds appear in the auction record as sale lots in their own right: in AfrikaPro Auction 2B a Ganus Family Loft bird (ZA-25-NOK/BPK-399) sold at R1,000, and GFL-bred birds run through the South African sales as pedigree stock — one lot’s sire is billed “V Primus 400.000 Ganus Family Loft,” another’s breeding is sold on “Top Mike Ganus Million dollar winner blood.” Zimbabwe. The Victoria Falls World Challenge / International one-loft race is the second African market: GFL took 1st place in the final race of 2017/18, 3rd place in the same final on the loft’s ace-pigeon card, and a run of ace-pigeon placings (2nd, 11th and 18th Ace Pigeon, 2019) in the years following, with birds bred off GFL pigeons winning the race’s Super Ace title in 2021. Thailand. The Pattaya International and Thailand Grand races are the Asian market: 1st Place Team Champion, Thailand Grand Pigeon Race 2019; 14th in the Pattaya International final of 2019/20 against 1,941 birds; 23rd Ace Pigeon at Pattaya 2020 in a field of 7,402 pigeons; and placings through the 2020/21 final. Europe and the auction market. The loft’s own record card also carries the Derby Arona (Tenerife, Canary Islands) and the Algarve Golden Race (Portugal) among its international entries, and the European auction record prices the product directly: in PIPA’s auction weekend ending 28 February 2021, a GFL bird, “Double Wolverine 150,” sold for 3,600 euros — a Granger-bred bird, sold on a Belgian auction platform, in a weekend that totalled 349,325 euros across the sales. GFL pedigrees likewise surface as breeding stock in the AviRings (Slovenian) derby auctions of 2025–2026.
That is the flagship’s shipping record at the strength the open record carries it: three foreign race markets entered and won (South Africa, Zimbabwe, Thailand), two more entered (Tenerife, Portugal), and a documented auction trade in the birds themselves through Belgian and South African platforms. What the record does not carry is a loft ledger — no annual count of birds shipped or sold, and no revenue figure, appears in PIPA’s coverage or the auction reports reached — so none is printed. The settling source for the counted version is the loft’s own sale and entry records, which are not published.
Sources: PIPA, “Mike Ganus (Granger, USA) is dreaming about a new victory on African soil” (the birth-and-residence sentence; the 2016 SAMDPR final and winning bird); PIPA, “Wolverine of Mike Ganus (US) dominates the world of OLR” (the loft’s ace-pigeon and final-race card: SAMDPR 2015/16 and 2018/19, Victoria Falls 2017/18 and 2019, Thailand Grand 2019, Pattaya 2019/20 and 2020/21); PIPA auction report, weekend ending 28 February 2021 (Double Wolverine 150, 3,600 euros); TopPigeon (South Africa), AfrikaPro Auction 2B and Auction 5 lot records (GFL lots and GFL-bred pedigree lots, prices in rand as printed there); AviRings auction platform, 2025–2026 GFL-pedigree lots; the banked people leg of this build for the residence tie.