your farm history?

whats your farm history plz share

i will start i guess well farms been in my family for years started Angus i think started crossing some char and simmi into it had some beautiful crossbred cows my favorite one when i was little i always called Bessy she always made us a chocolaty mousey color calf when my grandpa died my dad tried taking care of the farm at the time i was to young to do any real work so he was stuck working full time coming home at midnight from chores had to sell all the cows because he got tired of it and now awhile later i wanted cows of my own took a steer to the fair made A Deal with the farmer that i could pay him after i sold the steer took my money and bought my first show heifer kept at it ever since got my first show heifer from a place the guy i bought my steer from took us to

                                                           

Our family farm was started by my grandpa in the 1950's.  He farmed tobacco and ran cattle here in Northwest North Carolina.

In the late 60's their home place moved to where it is today.  They raised tobacco into the 1980's and then turned all their tobacco acres into pasture/hay.  My grandpa and dad ran Registered Angus cattle until 1994 when they dispersed the registered herd.  I then started feeding steers on the farm in the mid 1990's while in school. 

In 2001, at age 15, I built my own barn on the backside of the farm and bought my first two show heifers, both Registered Simmentals.  We had never really had a farm name, so in 2001 we formed 3D Farms LLC.  The 3 D's are for me, my mom and sister.  Our brand is attached below.  My Dad's name is Mark, so our brand is a M on its side like a 3 against the D.  Since 2001 our numbers have changed up and down but we have managed to grow the operation every year.  We currently run Registered Simmental and SimAngus cattle and are expecting our first Registered Angus ET calves to hit the ground next year. 

Ours is a short history. When we got married we said we wanted to have some cows around to keep the grass down, so first it was some of the brothers-in-law who supplied the cows. Then we decided we wanted a few of our own 2 months before BSE hit we bought some old cows that were not cheap. We calved a few cows out here that spring and decided we should maybe try to get a few more, but we had no money so we bought other peoples reject heifers. After they had picked their breeding stock we were allowed to pick from the remainder of the group. Our first bull purchase was a red angus, who on paper didn't look bad but we had horrible results with him. That turned hubby off the purebred business for a while and he picked up mature bulls here and there from guys who need to get rid of them. (quite often not purebred, and any breed would do   :-\ ) Then we bought out an elderly couple who wanted to see their herd go to a place where they would be well taken care of and with that came two really nice red angus bulls. (purebred).  "Charlie" had a major influence on our herd and I think he has moved it ahead considerably seeing what we started out with. We decided that we needed to move our herd in a more consistent direction (  (clapping) ) and after much debating my hubby won out and we started looking for a shorthorn bull. Now that we know more about the breed I think we are starting to look in the right places. My hubby has always favored black cattle. If he is in a pen of heifers he will always look at the black ones and since our herd is multi colored, I finally convinced him that we should cross our cows with a black angus bull. "Wayne" was our first purchase of purebred black angus and he has done a really good job on our cows as well. Someday I'd like to be able to post pics of calves like jamiediamond or okotoks or justintime (to name a few)  but considering where we started I think we are doing all right. We literally started with bottom end cows and I hope with time and experience we will get our easy keeping, easy fleshing, shorthorn x angus cross that we dream of. Oh and just so you know, my hubby grew up on a pig farm and I grew up on a dairy farm which later expanded into the beef business with purebred simmental first and later they switched to red angus. Our sons are young but they love taking care of the 4-H animals and the orphans and they come with me in the minivan to check the cows once a week. They know to look for pink eye and any cow that is limping and they all pick out their favourites that they like to watch. Not an exciting history but its ours!  

My Mom's dad had shorthorns and hereford cross cattle in the 1940's.  My Mom and Dad took over in the late 1960's.  Dad had a herd of commercial and purebred Polled Herefords, selling bulls to to many commercial ranches in the area.  In the 1970's Dad started using traditional Simmental bulls on his Polled Hereford cows.  He kept some of these 1/2 blood heifers as replacements, and soon realized he needed to toughen them up.  He bought a Galloway bull and a few bred Galloway cows.  I bought my first Galloway heifer as a 4-H project in 1982, and that started my Galloway herd.  I have continued raising Galloways since then, and sell breeding stock all over the US and many other countries.  My Dad quit farming in the 1980's, but I kept my cows.  My wife and I currently run 60 hd of fullblood Galloways, and we have a few Black Angus cows, (her family has raised Angus for many generations).  I thought that would help keep the peace in the family...then I found out she had to have her horse(s) too.  ;D

http://www.blegengalloways.com/

Our little farm history is fairly short as well. When I was 10 years old (1995) we moved into the country on a little 6 acre farm. A couple years after that my grandparents on my mom's side, grandpa had farmed all his life before he died in 2008) gave us 4 steers to feed out and sell as a college fund. We sold and bought stockers for a couple years until I was a sophomore in high school and my brother was in 8th grade. I had showed a couple steers that we picked out of a stocker herd the year before. We purchased 3 registered shorthorn cows from Carl Venable, who is on this site, in 2001. We showed the heifers of those cows through the rest of our showing days and some steers from a faimly friend. Carl really helped us out, he even brought a registered bull up to our place and let us use him for two breeding seasons on those 3 cows we bought. Carl's generosity has really stayed with us through the years, everyone has to start somewhere and we hope we are doing the right things in order to help out others.

Anyway, I graduated in 2003, my brother in 2005. Through our college years we didn't do much to advance our herd. we leased a couple shorthorn bulls to breed our cows but selection was lacking and the effects showed. The past several years we have AI'd exclusively and have really worked hard at selecting what we believe to be the correct sire for each of our cows. The last of the 3 cows we bought from Carl died this past winter. We had the opportunity to flush her and are expecting the first ET calf of hers to calve Sept 3. We now have 12 cows, mostly purebred shorthorn and a few recips. We are really excited about some recent purchases we have made, and hope to continue growing our herd.

Growing up my husband and I both lived in the same little town we live in today.  We both had a wide variety of animals including cattle.  My family fed a few fat steers all the time for food for the family and I remember hating them with a passion.  They were mean, fence jumpin' buggers and that is where my hate for cattle began.  I raised and showed pigs and horses in 4-H for many years.  My husband always had a show steer and lambs in 4-H.  When we got married we bought a small acerage place in the same small town where we live.  That is all we could afford because land around here is like gold.  Shortly after we bought our place my husband decided he just had to have some cattle.  We bought a couple pair from a local producer and we have grown every year since then.  These girls were the sweetest things and after spending time with them I was officially hooked.  We have AI'd from the beginning and had some pretty decent calves along the way.  We still have the cow and her heifer calf from one of our original pair and our herd grows every year.  That one old cow has put more replacements into our herd than any other!  We now lease extra pasture ground to support our addiction  ;D     I have learned more from these cows than I have from any other thing in my life.  Our kids are also catching the bug, our son just completed his second year with cattle in the showring, and his fourth year with pigs.  I wouldn't trade my cows or this experience for anything.

http://www.freewebs.com/kfacres/history.htm

only the sheep side of things, but it eludes to the others a tad..

the main portion of our farm, just turned a centennial farm less than 10 years ago.  It has had Dairy the entire time, along with rowcrops... the beef, sheep, and everything else is fairly new.  You name it, we've had it... 

thanks for sharing

the truth said:

http://www.freewebs.com/kfacres/history.htm

only the sheep side of things, but it eludes to the others a tad..

the main portion of our farm, just turned a centennial farm less than 10 years ago.  It has had Dairy the entire time, along with rowcrops... the beef, sheep, and everything else is fairly new.  You name it, we've had it... 

Click to expand...

and the NEWEST part, is raising standard, seedstock Cornish parental breeding stock chickens... 

ANY CORNISH BREEDERS on this board???  They seem to be few and far b/w..

NOT THE cornish rock cross white things that people buy to butcher, I'm talking the original parent stock... 

In 1907, Jasper Stephenson moved to Cayley, Alberta from Northumberland, England where his family had Shorthorn cattle.  Jasper started a purebred Shorthorn herd in 1918 called Newbiggon.  In 1965 his son Herb started the Frimley herd.  Frimley was the name of town in England where Herb met his wife Billie during the 2nd World War.  The original foundation cow was Braeside Rosy Dawn.  There are descendants of Rosy Dawn in the herd today.  Other foundation females were added from Bill Pethybridge (Susan’s), Cecil Staples Diamond herd (May’s, Dottie’s, Belle’s), Winalot (Maid’s and Mae’s) Rothney (Clippers, Beauty’s and Simplicity’s) and Newbiggon (Baroness and Secret’s).

In 1976 when Cecil Staples dispersed the original Diamond herd that had been located at Bindloss, Alberta dad (Dan Stephenson) obtained several females.  Dan had been working with Cecil on shares for couple of years prior to the dispersal.  The Diamond herd was noted for structural soundness easy fleshing and above average size for the times.  There was Thomas breeding through two herd sires Thomas Max 11Z and Thomas Leader 13C.  Dad also acquired the Diamond herd name and the Double Diamond brand.

Currently we are raising Shorthorn cattle, as well as Thoroughbreds (standing the jockey club registered palomino stallion Mining For Gold), Sport Horses, Arabians and Welsh Ponies.

My granfather raised purebred angus cattle starting back in the 1940s till probably the late 80s , early 90s , then we started trying a few different things here and there. We started putting some chi cross into them in the 80s untill the fences couldnt take it anymore , then we tried some maines from Pannel Ranch in Wyoming and they worked pretty well . Somewhere along the line dad started buying the red n white and yellow n white simmy cows to try to raise some bigger calves and that they did ! Didnt start registering any till the early 90s. I remember we bought our first black baldy simmental heifer from Volks i believe it was around 1993. Then in 1995 took a step back to red and bought a red baldy bull from Tom Hook , a son of NLC Tomcat which I wish I still had today lol !!! Now days i live on the home place and back to playing around with the Simmys !

thanks for sharing

Our farm was homesteaded by my grand parents in 1903. James and Alicia Alexander were married on March 28th, 1903 inm Emerson, Manitoba where my grandmother had grown up. My grandfather was born in Scotland and his family immigrated to Minnesota in 1885. On their wedding night James and Alicia ( my grand parents) boarded a train and headed for Weyburn, Saskatchewan, where they had heard of a peice of land that was available that had a creek running through it. Part of our farm was broke with an oxen and a mule hooked together on a single furrow plow. My grandfather soon purchased a few head of Shorthorn cattle and these were purebred but unregistered. In 1917, the Scottish government paid the shipping costs to bring a ship load of Shorthorns to Canada and these cattle were all sold in an auction sale in Brandon, Manitoba. The proceeds from this sale went to Scottish cattlemen who had record flooding that year. My grandfather heard about this sale and wanted to help the people of his homeland and he also wanted some registered Shorthorns. There have been registered Shorthorns on this farm ever since. There have also been lots of other breeds over the years along with the Shorthorns, but for the past 12 years, Shorthorns have been our only purebred herd and they have provided the majority of our livelihood.

thanks

Not much history at all here.....No one in my family has every made a "real" living from farming.  Its always been a "past time" with "in town" jobs.  I started buying cows 7 years ago and bought my first farm this last year at the age of 34.  30 cows and and a farm....oh and a day job.  Welcome to the today's generation "new" farmer.  I will also add that I have always worked in agriculture and have traveled the entire USA and worked with the smallest to the largest operations in swine, cow/calf, confined beef, dairy, and poultry...and nothing amazes me more than the the American Farmer!....and their History!  Great Thread!  I'm a wannabee and envoy those with generations of history!

My family history in the cattle business dates back to the late 1800's. My great,great grandmother, Mrs. Annie Watson apparently had a highly respected herd of shorthorns in her day. Somewhere around here is a newspaper article from 1874 about her and her herd of shorthorns. Through the generations the cattle have changed, my great grand parents ran commercial cows as did my grand parents. My mom married a grain farmer/truck driver and they ran a stockyards for several years. My first hands on experience with cattle was through a 4H/Cattlemans program called a calf scramble at the age of 12. They would turn 15 calves loose in an arena and send in 30 kids, whoever could catch, halter and tie a calf to the fence got to keep the calf and bring it to the county fair as a project the next year. So at the ripe old age of 12 I got into the cattle business via a wild little hereford heifer. Through the next few years I bred her and others that I caught in the calf scramble and had a small commercial herd at 17.At 18 I purchased a retiring neighbors herd on contract. By this time I was traveling around the country side working for a fitting service that showed several breeds including red angus. That is where my interest in red angus began and in 1990 I sold the commercial cows and started into the red angus business where I am to this day. Incedentely I live on the same farm that great,great grandma Annie did and live in the same house. 5th generation on this old piece of white oak/clay dirt. RW

My farm was started around 1902 by my great grandfather around El Dorado Kansas.  He raised Shorthorn cattle and showed them all over.  Even going out to Denver in the 30's through the 60's.  The last we can find of his origional herd was around the early 70's.  When he retired the farm was rented out and our family was out of cattle till 6 years ago when I started raising shorthorns again in Manhattan KS. 

Our ranch's story begins in 1857 in the days of the great cattle drives and longhorns.

http://tombrothersranch.com/history.html

ttt  (clapping)