I had started writing this post before the Trump announcement that our country would be importing a VERY large amount of beef "products" from Argentina. Now, I have nothing against the country of Argentina. I have never been there myself. However, I do have to ask a couple of questions. What are they doing in Argentina that they have such a large quantity of extra beef to sell to another country? What qualifies as a "beef product"? When has flooding the market with foreign products ever truly benefitted our country?
Oh, well. I cannot change what any president chooses to decree. I need to focus on what our family can do to improve our small part of the world, and we choose to serve others by producing great food. So, here's a piece of our story.
The elevator version is that the hubby and I started out in healthcare. We became discouraged trying to help patients on the back end when a lot of the issues were due to, or exacerbated by, our food system (aka the front end). I did a deep dive into researching food and what we call food-products. Based on my findings, we made significant changes to our eating habits. As we continued this path, we discovered that it was difficult to find the food we wanted to consume. So, we jumped to the next logical step and decided to raise it ourselves. In order to offset our personal costs, we decided to raise a few more to sell to our community. Eventually, this snowballed into what we call Growing Roots Farm.
We didn't start out with the inventory that we have now. We added components as our customers requested them or we needed them. That is how we ventured into cattle.
When we purchased our property, it did not have a good perimeter fence. We fixed portions of this fence as time and finances allowed. We (mostly the hubby) were concerned about adding cattle to a property without the proper perimeter fencing, so we avoided the addition of cattle for a long time.
Instead, we added smaller ruminants, like goats and sheep. The goats were a fun experiment but eventually their antics became too much for some of us (mainly the hubby) so we sold them. However, the sheep became a farm favorite. They work well on our property and we enjoy raising them. After we started integrating lamb meat into our home diet, it was decided that the sheep were here to stay.
As much as we enjoy our chicken, pork and lamb, we were both raised on beef cattle farms and simply love this meat option. We fixed more fence, did our research and decided to start raising cattle. We chose the Dexter breed for many reasons. They are a smaller breed designed for hilly terrain which fits perfectly to our farm. They have the reputation of being calm which is important because our children are an integral part of the working farm. Dexters are known to have good marbling qualities even when they are not finished on grain. We wanted a grass-finished operation so this genetic propensity for marbling on grass was important. The downsides of Dexters are that they take a bit longer to grow to the size for processing and they produce a smaller carcass than other breeds. For our operation, the positives outweighed the negatives and so we searched for our first Dexter cattle.
In April 2025, we started with a bred cow and her heifer calf. We didn't feel ready to add a bull to the mix immediately so finding a cow already bred was ideal at the time. They were pre-named Toffey and Tippy. They are now beloved members of our herd.
Cattle take a while to reproduce and grow to the size needed to generate the beef that we all love. So, while we had started our cattle herd, we still hadn't fixed our immediate need for beef. We searched and found two steers (castrated males) that we could finish out on grass and have processed. We named them Beef and Burger. It was important to instill to the kids that these animals were going to be our food. Some people have asked if we have issues processing animals that we have raised and interacted with on a daily basis. The answer is no. We know exactly the quality of life that the animal has lived prior to nourishing us. Our goal is to provide the best possible life for each of our animals followed by one bad day. I would rather they have one bad day at the end of a wonderful life than many bad days followed by the relief of death to end their suffering.
I became sidetracked. Sorry! Back to the story.
Our plan for the steers was vague. We didn't have a set timeline. We discovered that the land we were leasing in 2025 was not going to be available to us in 2026. This caused us to reassess our options on our property. We were concerned with the number of animals grazing our land over the winter. We work very hard to build a system of grazing that enhances the quality of the land and the last thing we wanted was to undo this improvement by concentrating too many animals on our smaller acreage. We chose to process the steers in December 2025. They were a bit smaller, but they still produced great meat. We kept one steer for our family and added the other to our business inventory.
In January, Toffey delivered her calf. Remember, Toffey was bred when we purchased her. We named him Pip, short for Pipsqueak, because he was short and cute. He is inquisitive and a bit mischievous. As long as he stays out of trouble, the plan is for him to be the first one born on our farm for processing.
We started selling beef through our winter CSA and at the farmers markets in the spring of 2026. Our beef was more popular than we expected, and we were sold out of most items by June. Pip was way too young for processing, so we were on the search for new steers. At the same time, we wanted a bull to breed Toffey and Tippy.
We had difficulties finding animals with the same qualities. Farmers that we had purchased from before did not have any available. We wanted cattle with grass-finished genetics, raised in a similar manner as ours, trained to electric polywire fencing, located within three hours driving distance, close to the age of processing and calm. It was a bonus if they were used to multispecies grazing. As with a lot of purchases, we simply were not going to get all of the boxes checked.
We found three bulls in southern Kentucky that met some of these requirements, but they were younger than desired. We decided to purchase them. We are using one for breeding and the other two were still young enough to be safely castrated. They were not used to multispecies grazing and the mob of sheep running to welcome them to the farm spooked them during the unloading process. They escaped and sent us searching a neighboring hunting property for hours in a heat wave. It was a tough, but memorable, lesson to learn. We recovered two of them but one remained loose on the open hunting property for a long time. Learn more about this saga here:
Despite this misadventure, we still needed to replenish our beef supplies. We were out of beef and our customers kept requesting it. After more extensive searching, we found a farmer in eastern Kentucky that raised grass-finished Dexter/Angus crosses to process and sell at his farmers markets. We purchased two of them. They resided on our farm for a few weeks and then we had them processed to restock our inventory in early August 2026. We are very happy with the quality of the beef and the response from customers has been very positive.
Thanks to our loyal customers, we are now selling the beef at a much faster rate. We simply have not had time to build our own farm herd to meet this demand. We have been searching again for the same quality of cattle that everyone (including us) have grown to love. We believe we have found a solution and will keep you posted as it materializes.
Our journey with cattle hasn't always been smooth. We have underestimated the market demand for our product and the adaptability of some bovine to adjust to new environments. This has led to a lot of scrambling and fixing on our end. We continue to learn and adapt as our business grows.
Whoever said Growing Roots was an easy process?