Our Beef Cattle Experience

In 1972 my wife and I built a home on 90 acres in the Town of Pittstown. The property bordered the Town of Hoosick and was on Warren Cemetery Road, a gravel road that many locals didn’t even know existed. I bought the property, sight unseen, in 1970 for $990.00, including title insurance. A neighboring farmer rented part of the land for corn farming, but quite a bit was an open field.

In the spring of 1976, a client, Lou Curtis (Gail Akins’ father), suggested it would be a great place to raise some beef cattle, which he said would be better quality than supermarket meat. It sounded like a good idea, and I engaged two teenage boys, William Doyle III and his brother, James*, to build a barbed-wire fence to enclose an area an acre or so in size. The fenced-in area had no pond, but it was downhill from a hand pump on a dug well that had previously served a house on the property destroyed by fire decades before. I bought a water trough from Agway and a couple of hundred feet of hose and created a siphon from a 5-gallon pail by the pump to the water trough.

My wife and I went to the Chatham Auction with Lou and bought two young steers that he selected, a white Charolais and a Hereford. Lou arranged to have them delivered to our “cattle ranch.” We gave our two older sons the chore of pumping water into the siphon system to ensure a good supply of water to the steers, and every afternoon they would bring them buckets of grain. Our boys enjoyed giving the steers the grain but weren’t thrilled with having to pump water to them every day.

One day my wife and I returned home from work to find our youngest son alone on the porch. We asked where his after-school babysitter was, and he pointed to the fenced area and said the cows got out.

We saw our sons and the babysitter (a female high school senior) and our sons walking across the property towards a neighbor’s field. We followed and found them walking by the two steers trying to herd them back to the fenced-in lot. We also tried, and we weren’t the least bit effective. Finally, I walked back to the house and got a rope and a bucket of grain. I drove my pickup truck down to where the steers were and offered the dominant steer, the Hereford, the grain, which it eagerly took. I tied a rope around its neck and tried to lead it back, but it resisted. Finally, I tied the rope to the back bumper of the pickup truck and slowly drove it back to the fence, with the Charolais trotting behind.** It was an adventure since, occasionally, the Hereford would get wrapped around a tree between it and the truck, and Nedda would have to lead the Hereford away from the tree. After a lot of frustration, we got the steers back into the fenced area and admonished our sons not to leave the gate open again.

When late fall came, we decided that we would not try to winter the animals over. We bought a large freezer for the basement. Lou arranged to have steers picked up and taken to a butcher he knew. Both steers were butchered and cut into the usual beef cuts. Lou and his wife, Martha, and Nedda and I packaged and labeled the meat. We brought a freezer full of beef home, and Lou and Martha took the rest.

It turned out that homegrown beef was no more flavorful and perhaps a bit tougher than the meat we usually bought at Central Market.

*Our fence builder, William J. Doyle III, became an attorney and practices in Brunswick. After 31 years as a New York State Police Officer, James Doyle retired as Station Commander of the Brunswick barracks.

** Nedda remembers this differently. She recalls that at one point we were able to get the Charolais inside the fence. We then led it down to where the Hereford was on the outside of the fence and tried to lead the Charolais back up the field with the Hereford following it on the outside of the fence. This didn’t work and thus we ended up tying the Hereford to the back of the truck. Nedda couldn’t drive the truck so her job was to poke and prod the Hereford along as I drove the truck back to the fenced in area.

It was a long time ago, and memories differ!