Creeping over fields of green Remembering the
faces The moments unseen The hands that built
a dynasty The vision in their eyes Echoes in
the auction bar Beneath an endless sky This is
the bull buy Turn the bar So picture this. It
is a freezing morning in late 1850s Massachusetts.
Oh man, New England winters are brutal. Right.
The ground is literally as hard as iron. And
you have this group of men on horseback riding
up the lane to Winthrop Chenery's Belmont Farm.
And I'm guessing they aren't there for a friendly
visit. No, absolutely not. They walk straight
past the farmhouse and you can see their breath
just like... pluming in the winter air. They're
carrying rifles and they're heading directly
toward his barn to execute his entire livelihood.
It is an absolutely chilling scene, especially
for anyone listening to this who has ever, you
know, poured their life into a herd of animals.
Every farmer's worst nightmare. Exactly. The
reason those men from the Commonwealth were there
with rifles was this disease called Rinderpest,
the cattle plague. The cattle plague. Yeah. And
the state authorities, they were not taking any
chances. Welcome back to the Bullvine podcast.
Today, we are sharing a story that honestly,
it just stopped us in our tracks when we read
it. Oh, completely. It's wild. We are doing a
deep dive into some incredible historical source
material. Primarily, this piece of research titled
Architects of the Black and White Cow. It's such
a great title. It really is. And we are going
on this journey. into the absolute bedrock of
the dairy industry you know this is the kind
of conversation that reminds you why you got
into dairy in the first place yeah for sure it's
not just um a dry timeline of dates and names
it is a story about the foundation of literally
everything we do today on the farm Exactly. We
are looking at the actual human beings behind
the braid. Like their crushing setbacks, the
massive gambles they took. And this is the craziest
part. The pure sensory intuition that built the
black and white cows standing in your barn right
now. It's amazing to think about. But to really
understand the magnitude of this, we have to
go back to that freezing morning in Massachusetts
and those rifles. Right. So Rinderpest is something
we don't really think about much today. No, not
at all. Because, well, it was globally eradicated
in 2011. Right. Back then. It was a guaranteed
death sentence. What exactly did it do to the
animals? It was this highly contagious viral
disease. It caused severe fever, oral erosions,
diarrhea, and just like massive internal hemorrhaging.
Oh, that's horrific. It really was. The mortality
rate in naive populations was just devastating.
And somehow this virus had managed to slip into
Winthrop Chenery's prized little group of imported
Dutch black and white cattle. So the state government
steps in. Yeah, they realized that if this plague
got out into the general native cattle population
of New England, it would basically collapse the
entire agricultural economy. Right. So they issued
the order. The whole lot had to be destroyed
immediately. And out of that entire herd, the
state spared exactly one animal. Just one young
bull named Dutchman 37. Just one. Wow. Yeah,
it was this last desperate attempt to salvage
something from the wreckage. And we really need
to focus on the physical and emotional reality
of Winthrop Chenery in that moment. Put yourself
in his boots for a second. Exactly. The historical
accounts describe him as this massive, imposing
figure. He was 6 foot 4 and 300 pounds. A literal
giant for the 1850s. A giant. And this giant
is forced to stand there in the cold, completely
helpless. He just has to listen to the crack
of the rifles, watching these incredibly unique
animals hit the dirt one by one. And the thing
is, he knew exactly what he was losing. He knew
their potential. Right. He had already seen enough
of these Dutch cows to know they were entirely
different from the native stock everyone else
was dealing in. How different are we talking?
Well, to give you an idea of what was bleeding
out in the snow that morning, one of his cows
from a later shipment, an animal named Texilar
51, would go on to produce over 76 pounds of
milk in a single day in 1865. 76 pounds in 1865.
I know. So Chinnery wasn't just losing his property.
He was watching an unprecedented leap in agricultural
potential being erased right in front of his
eyes. And here is where the story takes a turn
that honestly defines the rest of dairy history.
This is the crazy part. Nobody actually wrote
down what Chinri said while those rifles were
firing. We don't have a record of his exact words.
Probably a lot of cursing. I mean, you would
assume. But the official records show us something
even more powerful. On the exact same day that
his cattle were condemned and shot, he sent word
back across the Atlantic Ocean to Holland. To
order another shipment. Yes. On the same day.
That one action tells you everything you need
to know about the mentality of the people who
built this breed. Okay, wait. Let's look at this
critically, though. Because when I read that
in the sources, my first reaction wasn't like
admiration. What was it? My first reaction was...
Is this guy insane? I mean, is that actually
grit or is that just reckless gambling? It sounds
reckless for sure. Right. He just watched an
incurable, highly contagious plague wipe out
an astronomical investment. The state literally
just executed his property. And he throws more
money at it. Throwing more money across the ocean
that exact same afternoon sounds financially
suicidal. Why double down right then and there?
It looks suicidal until you look at the macroeconomics
of the mid -19th century American farm economy.
Okay, break that down for me. Well, Chenery wasn't
crazy. He was actually one of the few people
who clearly saw the writing on the wall. Up until
the mid -1800s, the East Coast, specifically
places like New York State, was the birdbasket.
Right, because of the Erie Canal. Exactly. The
canal had essentially turned New York into this
massive grain corridor. But as the frontier pushed
westward toward Ohio and the Midwest, farmers
out there had this deep virgin topsoil. So they
could grow cheaper. Vastly cheaper. They could
produce grain way cheaper than the farmers in
the East, whose soils were already starting to
deplete after generations of farming. This is
the post -Civil War grain crash, right? Yep.
After the Civil War, eastern grain prices just
sagged heavily. Suddenly you have this entire
region of farmers realizing that growing wheat
and oats just isn't going to pay the bills anymore.
They couldn't compete. They couldn't compete
with the West on grain at all. So dairying was
starting to look like the only viable frontier
for survival in the East. But there was a problem
with that. A massive biological hurdle. The American
dairy cow of that era was fundamentally a compromise.
A compromise. I love how the sources put that.
Break that down biologically, because I think
we take for granted what a specialized dairy
cow actually is today. Oh, totally. What were
these farmers actually milking in the 1850s and
60s? The typical animal on an American farm back
then was a shorthorn or, you know, some local
muddy mix of native breeds. It's a mutt, basically.
Pretty much. They were what we call dual purpose
animals. The expectation of the era was that
a cow had to be a generalist. She had to do a
bit of everything. Right. She had to be heavy
and blocky enough so that her steer calves could
be yoked up to pull a heavy wagon through the
mud. Wow. Pulling wagons. Yeah. And she needed
to carry enough flesh so that when her productive
life was over, she had significant butcher value.
And oh, by the way. She needed to give enough
milk to fill a pail for the family. Maybe make
a little butter to trade at the mercantile. Exactly.
So she's a biological jack of all trades, but
a master of none. If we look at the metabolism
of a dual -purpose shorthorn, it's a biological
compromise. It's a split system. If a farmer
puts high -energy feed into that native cow,
her body doesn't know exactly what to do with
it. Half that energy gets shunted into building
muscle and laying down fat on her back. Right,
and maybe only half of it goes toward milk synthesis
in the udder. Exactly. As the markets changed
and grain farming collapsed, eastern farmers
couldn't survive on a cow that split her energy
50 -50. They needed a specialized metabolic engine.
A machine. They needed an animal that if you
fed her a pound of high -quality grain, she shunted
almost 100 % of that energy directly to the udder.
The sources describe what they needed so vividly.
They were looking for a big, true dairy cow with
a stomach like a cement mixer. And an udder to
match. Yes. They didn't need a do -everything
ox anymore. They needed a fermentation vat. on
four legs that could convert massive amounts
of rough forage into milk at a commercial scale.
And Winthrop Chenery knew that the Dutch had
already built her. Right, over in Europe. For
centuries, over in the low -lying regions of
Friesland and North Holland, Dutch farmers had
been dealing with very different economics. They
weren't pulling wagons through the frontier.
Exactly. They had lush, wet pastures, and they
had been selectively breeding big, deep -bodied
black and white cows that were just absolute
milk factories. They only cared about cheese
and butter. Those Dutch cows could absolutely
obliterate anything in America when it came to
pounds of milk on a 7 or 30 day test. Yeah. That
is why Chenery... doubled down. He saw the pivot.
He knew the American agricultural economy was
pivoting to dairy and he knew he had the sole
biological key to unlocking that new economy.
Which brings us to one of the most. quirky, almost
unbelievable historical accidents I have ever
come across. Oh, this is my favorite part. It's
a detail that changed the branding of the entire
global dairy industry. It really is a fascinating
testament to how fragile history can be. So Chenery
gets his new shipment in 1861. The one he ordered
on the day of the massacre. Yep. A bull and four
cows that managed to escape disease and make
it across the ocean. He anchors his new herd
with that surviving bull from the executed herd,
Dutchman 37. Now, In all of his own personal
catalogs, in his letters to other farmers, Chenery
always referred to his animals as Dutch cattle.
Which makes sense. They were from North Holland.
Right. But in 1864, he writes this long, detailed
article for the U .S. Department of Agriculture
to promote the breed. Just doing some marketing.
And in that manuscript, he quotes an academic,
a professor, T. Lowe, who had written about the
Dutch. or Holstein breed of cattle in Europe.
So the word Holstein was literally just buried
in a quote he was referencing. Exactly. It was
just in quotation marks. He sends this handwritten
manuscript off to Washington, D .C. Oh no. And
somewhere in the depths of a government editing
room, a bureaucrat is reviewing the text. Somehow,
through a total editing typo, the word Holstein
drifts out of the quotation marks. It's capitalized.
It gets capitalized and it gets slapped right
into the main heading of the official government
document. I just have to pause and marvel at
that. I mean, imagine dedicating your entire
life to this. It's wild. You risk your family
fortune. You suffer the absolute trauma of the
state literally executing your herd in the snow.
You double down. You double down. You import
and champion these Dutch cattle, only to have
some random Washington bureaucrat with a heavy
pen accidentally rename your entire life's work.
And the crazy part is, it stuck. By the time
the first official herd book was printed in 1872,
the name Holstein had become the accepted American
terminology. Did the Dutch know about this? Oh,
they found out. Back in Europe, a prominent Dutch
agricultural scientist named G .H. Hengeveld
got wind of this. I bet he was thrilled. He actually
fired off an angry letter to the Americans pointing
out that true Holstein cattle, which originated
in the Schleswig -Holstein region of what is
now Germany, were a completely different type
of animal. So he was insulted? Deeply offended.
He hated that these superior Friesland and North
Holland animals were being credited to a German
region. How did Chanry react to the Dutch getting
so angry at him? He tried to defend himself.
He wrote back saying that he used the word Dutch
in his original draft and blamed the Washington
officials entirely for the blunder. But he didn't
fix it. No, crucially, he never actually went
to war to change it back. It was just too late.
The literature had already been printed. Because
of that one casual typo in a government report,
the word Holstein ended up on millions and millions
of ear tags. On milk cartons. In dictionaries
around the world today. It's almost comical.
It is. But, you know, while the name was a historical
accident, the genetic impact was highly intentional.
Jennery proved the concept. He proved they could
survive here. He proved these massive Dutch cattle
could survive the harsh New England winters,
that they could adapt to American forage, and
that they wouldn't just drop dead from the climate.
Which was a real fear back then. By 1870, you
had herds based on his original Dutch imports
operating in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa,
all the way out to California. But Jennery was
really just a spark, wasn't he? Yeah, he was
the pioneer. But it was the next wave of men
who were going to pour gasoline on the fire and
prove what that biological type could actually
do at scale. But to understand how that scaling
happened, we really have to talk about causality.
We have to look at the sheer financial reality
of what it meant to get into this game in the
1860s and 70s. Wasn't cheap. Because not just
anyone could wake up and decide to import Dutch
cattle. Right. Let's talk about the logistics
and the economics. In the mid to late 1800s,
it cost roughly $300 a head to purchase and bring
cattle over from the Netherlands. And what does
$300 actually mean in 1860s money? Well, the
average working man at that time was making about
$1 a day. $1 a day. So a single cow cost roughly
a year's wages for an average American. Imagine
asking a modern dairy farmer to pay $50 ,000
or $70 ,000 for a single unproven heifer. That
is insane. This meant that 99 % of American farmers
were entirely priced out of the genetic revolution.
The only people who could afford to scale this
leap were families with deep industrial, mercantile,
or generational wealth. And it wasn't just the
purchase price either. We have to talk about
the physical logistics of the 1860s transatlantic
voyage. And boats. Yeah. We're talking about
moving 1 ,500 -pound, highly stressed animals
across the Atlantic Ocean on wooden ships. It
was a brutal undertaking. These weren't climate
controlled cargo planes. These were late era
sailing ships or like early coal belching steamships.
Where did they even put them on the ship? The
cattle were often loaded into cramped holds below
deck. or tethered in makeshift stalls on the
upper decks where they were exposed to saltwater
spray, freezing winds, and the pitching and rolling
of the open ocean. That sounds like a nightmare
for the livestock. And for the people. You had
handlers who had to essentially live with the
cows for weeks at sea. They were pitching out
wet manure from pitching decks, trying to keep
the animals standing during gales. And feeding
them. Feeding them dry hay that had to be hauled
on board in massive quantities. The threat of
pneumonia, seasickness, and broken legs was just
constant. If a ship goes down, you lose everything.
If a ship hit a major storm and went down, or
if disease broke out in the stifling lower decks,
you lost a fortune overnight. There was no maritime
insurance policy covering the genetic potential
of a cow. Which perfectly explains how a guy
like Garrett S. Miller ends up entering the story.
Because Miller represents that exact class of
generational wealth required to take on this
level of logistical nightmare. Oh, absolutely.
I love the image of this guy. It's the late 1860s.
And Miller is a student at Harvard. Harvard,
man. He's studying science and liberal arts,
and he's actually captaining what is credited
as the very first organized football team in
the United States. Wait, really? That's wild.
Yeah. He's this wealthy, athletic college kid.
And when he takes walks out from Cambridge for
exercise, he keeps passing Winthrop Chenery's
farm in Belmont. And he sees the cows. He keeps
seeing these massive, deep -ribbed, black -and
-white cows. And they make such a profound impression
on him that he goes home to Peterborough, New
York, and convinces his father, who was a prominent
and wealthy figure, to let his brother, Charles
Dudley Miller, go all the way to Holland. To
buy some of their own. Yes. And Charles' journey
is straight out of an adventure novel. He travels
to a cattle market at Wiener in West Friesland,
right at the very northern tip of the Netherlands.
Just going straight to the source. He buys four
head, a bull named Hollander, and three cows
named Crown Princess, Dowager, and Fraulein.
Great names. He shepherds them onto the ship,
endures the weeks -long ocean crossing, hits
the port in New York, and then loads them onto
a rail car. They take the train as far as Canistota,
New York. But there were no trucks back then.
Right. So finally, because there was no trucking
infrastructure, he physically drives these immensely
valuable animals on foot down an old wooden plank
road. all the way to the Miller family farm in
Peterborough. That shipment in 1869 was only
the third pure Dutch shipment to the United States.
Miller establishes his farm, names it Creamhild
after a princess of Dutch legend, and immediately
sets to work proving that these animals weren't
just like exotic long ornaments for a wealthy
family. He wanted to prove they were commercial
powerhouses. And boy, did they prove it. This
is where we transition to the measurable performance.
This is where the records start to absolutely
shatter the ceiling of what the American agricultural
sector thought a bovine was capable of doing.
The numbers are staggering. Let's look at the
cow named Dowager, one of those original three
females Charles brought over. In 1871, Dowager
completes what is recognized as the first full
365 -day annual milk record in the United States.
What did she make? She gave 12 ,681 pounds and
8 ounces of milk. To understand the shockwave
that number sent through the industry, you really
have to understand the baseline. Right. Context
is everything. Miller wrote a letter to another
Holstein pioneer explaining that back in 1868,
just three years prior, a native cow that gave
6 ,000 pounds a year was considered exceptional.
6 ,000 was the ceiling. She was the pride of
the county at 6 ,000. Dowager more than doubled
the exceptional standard. Okay, wait, hold on.
Dowager makes 12 ,600 pounds. Today... A good
commercial Holstein herd averages 25 ,000 to
30 ,000 pounds. Easy. So 12 ,000 pounds sounds
low to modern ears. But we have to look at the
biology and the husbandry of 1871. How exactly
did she make 12 ,000 pounds back then? That is
the most crucial context. She achieved that record
on two -a -day milking entirely by hand. Entirely
by hand. And look at her diet. During the entire
summer, June, July, and August, she received
absolutely zero grain. None. None. She was strictly
on pasture. For the rest of the year, her grain
ration was incredibly rudimentary. It was mostly
just wheat bran, which is a byproduct of milling
flour. So she wasn't getting a modern TMR. She
didn't have a modern total mixed ration perfectly
balanced for amino acids, bypass protein, and
energy. She had grass, hay, and bran. And on
that diet, she hit 50 pounds of mill in a single
day. Twice in one lactation. And we also had
to paint the picture of how these records were
actually verified. Because there was no automated
testing. There was no DHIA technicians showing
up with a laptop and digital meters. Testing
a cow for a full 365 days in the 1870s was an
act of brutal physical endurance for the farmer.
It meant you were up at all hours of the night
in the dead of winter. Milking into tin pails.
You were milking by hand into tin pails. You
then had to carry that warm, frothy milk over
to a mechanical scale in the milk house. And
write it all down. You're reading the hash marks
on the scale by the flickering, dim light of
a kerosene lantern. And you are writing every
single figure down by hand in ink in a ledger
book. Every single milking for a year. The sheer
labor required to prove the worth of this breed
is staggering. But Miller wasn't the only one
pushing these limits. Down by Onondaga Lake near
Syracuse, you had... Wing and Judson Smith. Oh,
the Smiths and Powell guys. Yeah, their origin
story is fascinating because they weren't even
dairy men originally. They were nursery men.
Like growing trees. Yeah. They ran massive fruit
tree and orchard operations. And honestly, they
really just wanted cattle for the manure to fertilize
their trees. That's hilarious. They just wanted
the fertilizer. But they keep hearing these wild
rumors about a man over in Madison County with
these Dutch. Friesian cows that are completely
blowing past the local milking shorthorns. Because
they go check it out. So they drive over to Peterborough,
they take one look at Miller's herd, and they
buy a bull and four cows. And I bet they saw
the results fast. Once they get them home and
see the volume of milk in the pail, they realize
two things very quickly. One, this breed is an
absolute biological goldmine. And two, Jarrett
Miller is making a fortune selling the offspring.
So they decide to cut out the middleman entirely.
They team up with their family to form Smiths
and Powell, and they start importing directly
from Holland. And the scale at which they operate
is hard to comprehend. It's massive. We said
earlier it cost $300 a head. Smiths and Powell
eventually imported 1 ,293 head over the years.
That is roughly one -sixth of all the pure Dutch
Holsteins ever imported to North America. They
were dropping the equivalent of millions of dollars
into ocean freight. But they weren't just bulk
importers moving cattle -like widgets. They were
master marketers. And they were obsessed with
rigorous record -keeping. They threw themselves
into what became advanced register testing. At
their lakeside stock farm, they were running
official, supervised records on 36 cows a year.
Again, picture that labor. Testing 36 cows on
rigorous, multi -day, supervised tests. Weighing
every drop of milk, keeping the ledgers. And
what about butterfat? Well, keep in mind, the
Babcock test, which is the chemical test used
to determine butterfat percentage in milk, wasn't
invented by Dr. Stephen Babcock until 1890. So
how did they prove it? In the 1870s and 80s,
if you wanted to prove how much butter a cow
made, you couldn't just take a vial of milk to
a lab. You had to physically churn the milk from
that specific cow. Oh my gosh. You had to skim
the cream by gravity, ripen it, put it in a wooden
dash churn. physically agitate it until the butter
broke, wash the butter, salt it, and weigh the
actual physical block of butter. That was called
a churn test. Doing that for 36 cows a year is
a staggering logistical feat. But it paid off
because they built the legendary Netherland family
line, known for immense physical size and heavy
production. And they brought over a cow named
Aggie, who we have to talk about. Aggie is an
absolute legend of the breed. Aggie is the cow
that shattered expectations all over again. She
goes on a yearly test in 1880 alongside another
outstanding cow named Aegis. Early in the lactation,
Aegis hits 82 pounds of milk in a single day.
Which is huge. At the time, farmers reading that
in the agricultural journals must have thought
82 pounds was the biological limit of the bovine
species. But Aggie tops her. Aggie hits 84 pounds.
By the end of the 365 days, Aegis makes a massive
16 ,823 pounds. And Aggie? Aggie finishes at
18 ,004 pounds. She becomes the very first cow
in the United States to cross the 18 ,000 pound
mark in a single year. And Smith and Powell didn't
stop there. Five years later, they imported a
cow named Clothilde, who in 1885 produced 26
,021 pounds of milk. Getting a world record.
Proving definitively that these large framed
Holsteins could produce so much volume that they
could actually compete with the high fat jerseys
when it came to total pounds of butter produced
in a year. The numbers just kept climbing as
these early breeders started to refine their
husbandry and their stock. Over in Walworth,
New York, you had Theron G. Yeomans. Theron Yeomans
is a fascinating character setting. He really
is. To give you a sense of his personality, the
sources share a famous story about him. A young
boy once asked Yeomans what kind of apples were
the best to plant in an orchard. Yeomans told
him that if he were to plant 999 trees, every
single one of them would be a Baldwin apple tree.
He liked Baldwins. The boy asks, well, what if
you planted a thousandth tree? And Yeomans just
laughs and says, son, if I were to plant one
more tree, that tree would be a Baldwin also.
I love that anecdote. It shows exactly who he
was. A man entirely obsessed with consistency,
uniformity, and absolute unwavering reliability.
He found something that worked perfectly and
he saw no reason to deviate. Exactly. And he
applied that exact same rigid exacting standard
to his cattle breeding. He traveled to Holland
himself. And he handpicked his cows, insisting
on perfect type, perfect udders, and perfect
black and white color markings. He imported a
cow he named Princess of Wayne. Under his rigorous
management, she would eventually produce 113
pounds in a single day. 113 pounds. And an astonishing
29 ,008 pounds in a year. Okay, I have to stop
you again. You're telling me Theron Yeoman's
got 29 ,000 pounds of milk out of a cow in the
1880s? I know dairy farmers today. listening
to this deep dive right now, who work incredibly
hard to hit a 29 ,000 pound herd average with
computer formulated TMR mixers, independent nutritional
consultants, and climate controlled tunnel ventilated
barns. It seems impossible. How is that physically
possible on an 1880s diet and in an 1880s barn?
It's a great question, and it speaks to a level
of animal husbandry that is almost a lost art
today. To push a cow to 29 ,000 pounds of milk
without modern nutritional science required an
intense, almost fanatical level of individualized
care. What were they doing differently? First,
they were milking these high -producing cows
three, sometimes four times a day, every six
hours around the clock by hand. You had men practically
living in the box stall with the cow. What were
they feeding her to fuel that kind of production?
Since they didn't have modern extruded bypass
proteins or scientifically chopped corn silage,
they relied on highly digestible, water -rich
root crops. Like beets. Yeah, they fed massive
quantities of mangelwursels, which are these
huge, heavy forage beets. They would... Hand
slice baskets of these beets to give the cow
energy and hydration. Wow. Hand slicing beets.
They would feed oil meal oats and bran. Sometimes
they would even boil or steam the grain to make
it more digestible in the rumen. Steaming the
grain. They would groom the cow daily with curry
combs to stimulate blood flow. They would blanket
her in the winter to ensure she didn't waste
a single calorie of feed on shivering to maintain
body heat. Everything was optimized by pure painstaking
human labor. It is an incredible testament to
their dedication. And it makes me want to slow
the pace down for a minute and talk about a man
who embodied that superhuman level of animal
husbandry in a way that just breaks your heart.
And then lifts it right back up. Yes. I want
to talk about Henry Stevens of Brookside Farm
down in Lacona, New York. Henry Stevens is a
legendary figure. If Miller was the master cowman
who proved the breed, and Smiths and Powell were
the massive engine builders who scaled the imports,
Henry Stevens was the man who built the Great
Sire Lines. He's the bullman. He was the bullman.
He started relatively small. He bought just two
cows from Garrett Miller for $300 apiece. But
he had an absolute genius for genetics. He eventually
built his entire breeding program around four
foundational cows. Bell Corndyke, and Helena
Burke. Those four names are absolute royalty
in the whole scene world. The sons and grandsons
of those four cows went on to build the most
influential sire lines of the early 20th century.
Day Cole's second alone is considered one of
the great cornerstones of the breed. But the
twist in Henry Stevens' story, the thing that
elevates his legacy into something almost mythic,
is how he achieved his greatest success. It's
unbelievable. Right in the middle of his life,
at the height of his breeding program, an illness
struck him. It severely affected his optic nerves,
and he completely lost his sight. He went totally
blind. And logically, this is where you expect
the story to end. A livestock breeder who cannot
see his animals. A man whose entire livelihood
depends on visually assessing the conformation,
the dairy character, and the utter attachments
of a cow. You'd think he'd have to sell out.
It's over. Right. But he doesn't quit. The historical
sources describe visitors coming to Brookside
Farm and watching Henry Stevens walking down
the cow alley. He would have one hand on the
halter rope. And then he would let go, and he
would let his fingers do the judging. I want
you to really sit with this image. A completely
blind man in a late 1800s dairy barn, standing
next to a 1500 pound animal. He was literally
reading the cows, like braille. Explain the physical
mechanics of that. What exactly is a blind man
feeling for that tells him whether a cow is a
genetic champion or a cull? It all comes back
to the biological function we discussed earlier.
The cow as a metabolic engine. Stevens would
run his hands over the cow's frame to assess
her dairy character. What's the first thing he
feels? He would feel the withers, the top of
the shoulder blades. In a beef animal, the withers
are... thick and round, padded with meat. In
a true dairy cow, the withers should be sharp
and angular, proving she is shunting her energy
to milk, not muscle. He would run his hands down
her back, feeling the chine and the loin for
strength and straightness, which indicates a
strong skeletal frame capable of carrying heavy
weight. And the sources specifically mention
him feeling the spring of rib? What does that
tell him? The springer of rib is critical. He
would press his hands against the cow's barrel,
her rib cage. He wasn't just feeling bone. He
was assessing the exact size and shape of her
fermentation vat. The rumen capacity. Exactly.
A cow with ribs that spring out wide and deep
has massive rumen capacity. It means she has
the physical internal space to consume and process
80, 90, or 100 pounds of forage a day. A narrow
cow just can't do it. A narrow, flat -ripped
cow simply doesn't have the digestive real estate
to make 20 ,000 pounds of milk. Stevens could
feel that volume with his bare hands. And the
udder. He would kneel down and test the pliability
of the udder. A meaty udder might look big, but
it's full of useless fat and connective tissue.
It looks good until you milk it. Right. A truly
great udder, once it's milked out, feels soft.
pliable, and collapsed, like a soft leather glove.
It means it's packed entirely with secretory
tissue, the cells that actually synthesize milk.
The sources even say he was so sensitive that
he would trace the hair on the cow's hide to
feel the exact point where the rougher black
hair gave way to the softer white hair. He knew
the precise color markings of his animals without
ever seeing them. Gives me chills. His sons.
who had perfect vision, trusted their father's
blind hands more than they trusted their own
eyes. When it came time to make the massive financial
decisions of which heifers to keep as the future
of the herd and which bulls to sell off to other
breeders, they deferred entirely to his touch.
And the historical records back up that faith
completely. The genetic lines he selected while
blind went on to dominate the breed. By the 1920s,
Brookside Farm was widely considered the most
influential Holstein farm of the decade. It really
forces you to question what we've gained and
what we might have lost with all our modern technology.
How so? We get so caught up today in genomic
tests and linear evaluations and computer -generated
mating programs. And here was Henry Stevens,
operating in total darkness, feeling the spring
of a rib and fundamentally changing the trajectory
of global agriculture. These men possessed an
intrinsic, tactile understanding of the bovine
form that bordered on the magical. And we see
that magic not just in careful selection, but
in these moments of serendipity that defined
the breed. Not everything was a calculated scientific
decision. Sometimes it was just... dumb luck
and personal connections. Take Garrett Miller's
return trip to Holland, for instance. Oh, the
Garrett Smith story. It's such a great, deeply
human farmyard anecdote at the scene. So it's
1879. Miller is back in Holland looking for more
stock. And this local Dutch farmer waves him
and his brother over. The farmer says, look,
I don't have anything for sale, but I know you
Americans love cows and I just want to show you
my herd. Classic farmer move. I'm not selling,
but let me show off my stock. Exactly. So Miller
stands there in the pasture. watching the herd
graze, politely listening to this farmer talk
about his operations and the cheese he's making.
But Miller has that eye. He spots something.
One specific young heifer in the groom catches
his attention. She just has this perfect dairy
frame, and he decides he absolutely has to have
her. So he starts negotiating. He starts negotiating.
He eventually talks the reluctant farmer into
selling her. And it's only after the deal is
done and the bill of sale is being written out
that the farmer actually formally introduces
himself and puts his name on the paper, Jarrett
Smith. And the coincidence of their names is
delightful. The Dutch farmer, Jarrett Smith,
suggests naming the heifer after his own little
daughter, Anna Chee. And Miller then smiles,
reveals his own name, Jarrett Smith. and mentions
that his grandmother and his sister were both
named Anne. So they register her in the herd
book under the name Nanny Smith. She comes to
America, she crosses the ocean, she thrives,
and she heads the two -year -old class at the
1880 New York State Fair. And beyond the show
ring, she becomes this crucial foundational piece
of the Yokonoru branch of the Holstein family
tree. It's a powerful reminder that beneath all
the massive production numbers, the advanced
register ledgers, and the million -dollar modern
industries, this breed was built on personal,
serendipitous connections between farmers standing
in muddy pastures across an ocean. And sometimes
those serendipitous moments or historical accidents
created entire sub -industries that exist today.
I want to talk about George E. Brown of Smithville,
Ontario, and the birth of a controversy that
caused an absolute uproar. You're talking about
the red gene. Yes. So George E. Brown imported
cows from Holland, and he sold a very expensive,
well -bred bull to a farmer in Norfolk County.
Okay. The farmer takes the bull home, breeds
his black and white cows, waits nine months for
the calves to drop, and when the very first calf
hits the straw, it is red and white. And you
have to understand the mindset of the American
and Canadian breeders at that time. To them,
the word Holstein meant black and white, period.
That was the brand. That was the hallmark of
purity. If it wasn't black and white, it wasn't
a Holstein. The farmer was absolutely disgusted.
You can just hear the guy complaining in the
laneway to his neighbors, feeling like he got
completely ripped off by the importer. He probably
thought he was sold a crossbreed, maybe something
tainted with a red milking shorthorn or an air
sure. But he wasn't ripped off. Yeah. It was
pure biology at work. We need to explain the
genetics of the recessive red coat color because
it explains so much about early breeding. In
cattle, the gene for a black hair coat is dominant.
The gene for a red hair coat is recessive. So
black always wins out if it's there. Right. In
Holland, the Dutch farmers historically didn't
care nearly as much about coat color as the Americans
did. They just wanted the cow that gave the most
milk. So if a great cow happened to be red, they
kept her. This meant the red gene was hidden,
floating around in the Dutch population. So if
a bull is black, but he carries one dominant
black gene and one recessive red gene, he looks
perfectly black and white to the naked eye. Exactly.
And if you mate that carrier bull to a cow who
is also black, but who also silently carries
the recessive red gene, the laws of Mendelian
genetics dictate that there is a 25 % chance
that the calf will inherit the red gene from
both parents. And when that happens... The calf
is born red and white. And back in the late 1800s,
before they understood DNA, those red calves
were considered a nuisance. They were viewed
as a flaw, a stain on the pedigree. What did
they do with them? Many breeders would quietly
knock those red calves on the head and bury them
behind the barn so word wouldn't get out that
their bull threw red calves. Oh, wow. They just
got rid of them. But that very same red gene,
which survived hidden in the genome despite the
breeders' best efforts to eradicate it, is now
the basis for the entire red and white Holstein
segment around the world today. It's a massive
global market, all stemming from genes that early
farmers considered a disaster. Which brings up
a really important turning point in our narrative.
We've talked about these massive importations,
the serendipity, the early milk records, the
individual characters like Miller, Stevens and
Yeomans. But things started to shift. There is
a distinct moment in the 1880s and 90s when a
profound biological and structural shift occurs
in America. This is the moment the Holsteins
stopped being viewed as just a foreign novelty,
a weird Dutch cow for rich hobbyists, and became
a structured, unified, self -sustaining breed.
What exactly triggered that shift? I mean, was
it just the sheer volume of milk they were proving
on these churn tests? Did the numbers just overwhelm
the skeptics? The Belk records were the undeniable
proof that won over the commercial dairymen,
but the shift was deeply structural and genetic.
These pioneering breeders, Miller, Smithson Powell,
Stevens, Yeomans, they realized they couldn't
just keep importing from Holland forever. The
well was going to run dry. Eventually, the Dutch
government clamped down on exports and the Americans
realized they had to build their own genetic
engine. They stopped just importing and they
started organizing. They formed the national
associations, they published the official herd
books, they instituted the advanced register
testing to weed out the poor performers. Yes,
but more importantly, they started building sire
stacks and developing cow families with a deliberate
long -term biological blueprint. And they did
this through a very specific... Breeding strategy.
Line breeding. Line breeding. I want to push
back on that or at least get you to clarify for
the listener. When we talk about breeding closely
related animals, people immediately think of
inbreeding, which usually results in genetic
disasters. Low fertility, compromised immune
systems. lethal recessive mutations coming to
the surface. Exactly. How did they line breed
without ruining the very cattle they were trying
to build? It's a vital distinction. Inbreeding
is mating very closely related individuals, like
a brother to a sister or a father to a daughter.
As you said, that rapidly concentrates negative
recessive genes and causes inbreeding depression.
So what's line breeding? Line breeding, on the
other hand, is a much more sophisticated, careful
strategy. It involves breeding animals that are
related but further back in the pedigree, specifically
attempting to concentrate the genes of one truly
exceptional ancestor. So trying to double up
on the genes of a matriarch like DeColsecond.
Exactly. They would take a grandson of DeColsecond
and breed him to a granddaughter of DeColsecond
through a different sire line. They were weaving
an incredibly tight genetic web. They were sharing
genetics between farms. They were pulling a Netherland
bull from Smithson Powell and using him on an
Aggie cow. They were pulling a Brookside bull
from Henry Stevens and using him in Garrett Miller's
Peterborough herd. Cross -pollinating. cross
-pollinated their best genetics, carefully concentrating
the traits for massive rumen capacity, high milk
volume, and utter quality, while avoiding the
extreme closeness that causes genetic collapse.
They essentially locked in the foundation. They
crystallized the genome. That's a perfect way
to phrase it. They crystallized the genome. Everything
that happened in the 20th and 21st centuries,
every world record broken, every genomic leap
made today rests entirely on that specific tight
genetic web they wove in the late 1800s. They
provided the clay that every modern breeder is
still sculpting. Exactly. So what does all this
mean as time marches on? Because sadly... Time
is absolutely ruthless. We transition into what
the sources call the ripple effect, and there
is a very somber, reflective tone to this part
of the history. Time is incredibly rough on buildings,
and it's rough on people. The physical empires
these men built did not last forever. Let's look
at the Powell brothers. We haven't touched on
them deeply yet, but down in Pennsylvania, they
operated a massive outfit called Shadeland Farm.
Shadeland Farm was an agricultural empire of
the highest order. At its peak, Shadeland was
basically its own self -sustaining town. A whole
town. They were running 1 ,500 head of elite
livestock. They had their own dedicated post
office. They had their own Wells Fargo express
office just to handle the financial transactions.
That's insane. The Pennsylvania Railroad literally
built a dedicated siding right onto their property
so that rail cars could pull off the main line,
roll up to the barn doors, and load or unload
cattle directly from the stables. It sounds indestructible,
but they made a fatal miscalculation. They did.
The Powell brothers banked heavily on cattle,
but they banked even more heavily on the horse
market. They bred massive draft horses, Clydesdales,
and Percherons to pull plows, and they bred fast
road trotters and Kentucky thoroughbreds for
transportation and sport. But the machine age
arrived. As the early 1900s dawned, Henry Ford
started rolling Model Ts off the assembly line.
The first gasoline tractors started dragging
plows across the fields, replacing muscle with
internal combustion. And the Powells refused
to pivot. They stubbornly clung to their buggies,
their draft horses, and their thoroughbreds.
They believed machines were a passing fad or
at least that high -quality horses would always
hold their value. That stubbornness broke them
financially. And on top of that massive economic
shift, profound tragedy struck the family directly.
The history books show they lost sons to the
trenches of the First World War. And then just
as the war ended, the devastating 1918 influenza
pandemic swept through the globe, claiming more
family members. The combination of the changing
agricultural economy and the decimation of the
family line was too much. The brothers died in
reduced circumstances. By 1923, this massive,
bustling livestock village, the post office,
the rail siding, the grand barns, was sold off.
It eventually ended up in the hands of a developer,
and those incredible physical structures simply
vanished from the earth. It's heartbreaking.
And it wasn't just Shadeland. Up in Peterborough,
New York, the Smith family's mansion house met
a tragic end. That was an incredible 28 -room
architectural marvel that anchored a half -million
-acre empire. It caught fire and burned completely
to the ground in March of 1936. Jared S. Miller,
the very same guy who, as a college student,
walked out from Cambridge to see Winthrop Chenery's
cows and started his own revolution, was still
alive when the mansion house burned. But the
fire broke his spirit. The sources note that
he seemed to lose heart after seeing that physical
anchor destroyed, and he died a year later at
the age of 92. Brookside Farm, where Henry Stevens
judged cattle in the dark, eventually went quiet.
The Stevens family is gone from the dairy forefront.
The blind hands that felt the ribs of the future
are dust. If you drive around these areas today,
Madison County, Onondaga County, Crawford County.
Most of the big sweeping dairy barns from that
era have either collapsed under the weight of
winter snows or they've been remodeled into machine
sheds or rustic wedding venues. You might see
an old farm name on a rusted historical marker
or a road sign, but the physical empires are
gone. If this were a story about real estate
or architecture or even just family fortunes,
it would be a profound tragedy. A story of empires
rising and turning to ash. But this is dairy
history. And dairy history is fundamentally different.
The monuments that these men built aren't made
of brick or wood or slate tile. They are made
of flesh and blood, and they are very much alive
today. That is the pivot right there, the living
legacy. Because when you open up a modern genomic
proof sheet today, whether you're farming in
Canada, the United States, Europe, or Australia,
and you trace the lineage of your cows back through
the generations, your jaw will hit the floor.
The genetic reality of what these men accomplished
is almost difficult to comprehend. Let's lay
out the facts for the listener. Let's trace the
lines. Remember Decol II, the cow that Henry
Stevens built his Brookside herd around in the
1880s? Yes, the cornerstone. Holstein historians
and geneticists have calculated that her blood
is shared in common with roughly 7 .2 % of the
modern General Holstein herd today. Think about
the math on that. One single cow. born in the
1880s, has saturated into 7 .2 % of the global
population of a breed that numbers in the tens
of millions. And it gets deeper. Let's look at
the bulls that defined the modern era. Take a
legendary 1970s bull like Round Oak Rag Apple
Elevation. He essentially created the modern,
tall, dairy -framed Holstein. If you trace Elevation's
maternal line back mother to grandmother to great
-grandmother, exactly 20 dams back. You land
squarely on a cow named Ondine. Ondine was one
of Garrett Miller's Triple Crown cows, imported
in 1879. Take Hanover Hill Starbuck, the bull
that practically built the modern Canadian type.
Starbuck traces back to Ondine on his sire's
side through elevation. But if you trace Starbuck's
maternal line, you go straight back to a cow
named Johanna, another of Garrett Miller's prized
animals from the Creamhild farm. As the historical
sources point out, you could walk through a Canadian
dairy barn in the 1980s, look at a long row of
beautiful Elevation and Starbuck daughters chewing
their cud, and you wouldn't even realize you
were essentially looking at cream -held cows
from a century earlier genetically talking to
each other across time. It's literal genetic
time travel. Let's keep going. Walkway Chief
Mark. Massive influence on production traits.
Traces maternal line back 20 generations and
you hit Gorchie Eckendt, a cow imported by George
E. Brown in 1879. Tamar Blackstar, one of the
first million -dollar bulls. Trace him back 20
generations and you land on Fena, imported in
1878. Toby Manford Justice, the bull that redefined
health and fitness traits in the genomic era.
He traces 19 generations back to Netherland Jewel,
imported by Smithson Powell in 1882. And we can't
forget Glenridge Citation Roxy. She is officially
recognized as the queen of the breed for her
unmatched ability to transmit flawless type and
longevity. Her maternal roots go straight back
through the generations to cattle imported by
B .B. Lord in the 1880s. Every single time you
look at the giants of the modern breed, you are
looking directly at the handpicked, heavily scrutinized
choices of these 19th century pioneers. This
raises an incredibly important point about the
nature of their achievement. We mentioned earlier
what they didn't have when it came to feed and
barns. But look at what they didn't have regarding
genetic tools. They built this living architecture
without a single DNA swab. They didn't have artificial
insemination to freeze semen and spread elite
genetics globally in a single generation. They
had to physically walk a bull over to a cow.
They didn't have embryo transfer or IVF to get
40 calves out of their best cow. They had to
wait a year for a single natural calf and pray
it was a heifer. They didn't have linear classification
scores or computer -modeled predicted transmitting
abilities. They operated purely on handwritten
daily milk weights, physical churn tests for
butter, the brutal comparison of the county fair
show ring, and an incredibly deep tactile feel
for what a true dairy cow looked and moved like.
Yet, armed with only those rudimentary tools,
they successfully built the exact biological
foundation that our modern, multi -billion dollar
genomic testing charts are constantly analyzing
and bragging about today. That is the synthesis
right there. Yeah. Every single time a modern
Holstein cow walks up to a robotic milker, stands
calmly while the laser -guided arm washes her
and finds her teats, and the digital meter starts
counting out 50, 60, 70 pounds of milk in a single
visit, she is doing a job that Winthrop Chenery
and Jarrett Miller couldn't do. could never,
ever have conceived of in their wildest dreams.
They had no concept of a 40 ,000 pound herd average.
They didn't know what a total mixed ration was.
They didn't breed their cows to comfortably fit
into sand bed at freeze stalls. Or to calmly
step onto a 100 stall, 24 hour rotary parlor.
But the physical and metabolic cow that they
built in the 1880s is the exact same cow that
possesses the skeletal frame, the massive rumen
capacity, and the internal metabolic engine to
handle those intense modern challenges today.
If you were to somehow magically, surgically
extract the fingerprints of these specific men
from today's Holstein population, if you erased
Johanna and Empress and Ondine from the pedigrees,
what would happen? If you took out Aggie and
Clophilde, if you stripped away Declosek and
Bell Corndyke, the breed that would be left standing
in the barn would barely resemble the Holstein
we know. It wouldn't be the same cow. The incredible
forage capacity, the angular dairyness, the sheer
unrelenting biological will to produce milk that
defines the modern cow simply wouldn't be there.
They are, without any exaggeration, the architects
of the cow that pays the bills, educates the
kids, and sustains the rural economy on dairy
farms around the entire world. I want to bring
this right down to the ground. Someone is listening
to this deep dive on their tractor right now,
or maybe they're washing down the parlor walls
or pushing up feet in the freestall barn. What
is the one core thing from this incredible historical
saga that they should sit with today? I think
the most memorable insight here is about resilience
and foresight outlasting physical structures.
Barns will eventually fall down or burn or be
repurposed. Technological eras will inevitably
change from lantern light and hand milking to
glass pipelines to laser guided robots. But the
cow remains. But a farmer's intuition, their
grit in the face of absolute disaster, and their
deep, tactile connection to the animal, whether
that's fighting off a plague on a freezing morning
or judging the spring of a rib by touch in the
dark that echoes for centuries. The cows milking
in your barn today are literal, breathing, living
monuments to farmers who, 150 years ago, simply
refused to give up. I absolutely love that. They
are living monuments. And that leads me to leave
you with one final thought to mull over as you
go about your chores today. We started this deep
dive talking about Winthrop Channery, watching
his herd get destroyed, making a split -second
decision to double down to order more cows that
very day, a decision that changed the world.
A huge gamble. Today, we're standing on the precipice
of a brand new era in agriculture. With CRISPR,
gene editing, and advanced cloning, we are looking
at genetic leaps that make the 1860s look simple.
So ask yourself, who is the Wint of Chenery of
today? That's a great question. Are we currently
standing in the middle of a new genetic revolution
without even realizing it? And the next time
you look out across your own herd, ask yourself,
what decisions are you making today with your
own eyes and your own hands that might still
be walking around in a pasture 150 years from
now? That's another story from The Bullvine Podcast.
These are the people building the future of dairy.
Find more at www .thebullvine .com. Next time,
we're doing a deep dive into the hidden history
of the first automated milking pioneers. Subscribe
so you don't miss it. Coming right on through.
Oh, tell the tale, tell the tale. The Beaumont
legends live here.