Hereford Beef Cattle
One day my husband decided that we needed to raise some Hereford beef cattle for our own use, so he bought three pregnant registered Hereford cows. I remember that one was named Big Foot Primrose... The Hereford breed was founded some two and one-half centuries ago as a product of necessity according to the American Hereford Association. Thrifty and enterprising farmers near Hereford in the County of Herefordshire, England, were determined to produce beef for the expanding food market created by Britain’s industrial revolution. Benjamin Tomkins is credited with founding the Hereford Breed. Herefords came to the United States in 1817 when the great statesman Henry Clay of Kentucky made the first importation…a bull and two females. Many changes in the size and shape of the Herefords have taken place since then, but Hereford Beef cattle will continue to command a premier spot in the cattle industry for years to come.
The three cows were put in our barn and had a pasture to graze on. However, these cows had other ideas and they would wander over to the neighbor’s cornfield and graze on his corn. Daily the neighbor would call me up and say, “Your cows are back in my corn and you must get them out of there” So I would take my yellow Labrador Timmy, and we would go after the cows. I had a big voice and a big stick and we would drive them back to our field. The problem was that Timmy was afraid of them….and to tell the truth, I really was afraid too, for they had big horns. Timmy would go behind me to get away from the cows….He felt safer there. But it didn’t make me feel safer. We would get the cows back into our field and fix the fence and the next day, the cows would manage to go back to the corn field and we would start the process all over again. I raised such a fuss that we finally sold the cows and I was relieved of the daily trek to the neighbor's field.
The weatherman at the local radio station gave one of my sons a shorthorn steer calf. My son's 4H leader recommended that he raise this steer and show it at the fair. When we went on family vacation, the steer got out of the lot where it was kept and ended up in the bottom of an old silo that was on our farm. We came home to find the steer bellowing and complaining that it was in the bottom of the silo. But necessity is the mother of invention and my sons figured out that they could put a halter on the cow and make steps of hay bales and lead it out of the silo. And that is just what they did! However, the cow had a short life for it got out again and ended up on the highway about half a mile from our farm where it was hit by a driver and killed. The driver tried to sue us for having our livestock on the road. Only when it was reported that the accident occurred at 4 a.m. in the morning and that the driver was intoxicated, the suit was dropped. We just had to arrange to have the remains of the steer picked up. And that ended my adventure into Hereford Beef cattle.
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