Farm Auction in Derby Connecticut, Sept. 1940, photo by Jack Derby

In 1624, the Pilgrims imported the first cows, three heifers and a bull, to the land we now know as Massachusetts.  Cows provided a controlled food supply for settlers, enabling an independent food supply and new trade.  Cattle and oxen were used for labor clearing forests, building structures and ships, and carrying goods to and from the ports.   Nearly every home kept a dairy cow and in some towns herdsman ran collective herds of beef cows or “dry cows” in the lands surrounding settlements.  Herdsman, however, were few and far between as every person was needed for labor.  Cows were otherwise let to roam free, and often trampled gardens and ate crops planted by American Indians.   English tradition called for fenced gardens, not fenced cattle, a practice that did not translate well in the shared space of the New World.  As cows began to outnumber people, more forests were cleared for their grazing land, and more settlers moved west, infringing on agricultural land long held by American Indians.  Cattle were often moved onto American Indian lands as a precursor to formal (or informal) land acquisition, and were the cause of original conflicts between the two groups.

 New grasses that had evolved with grazing in England eventually found their way to New England through fodder in ships.  Soon enough much of Connecticut and Rhode Island was covered in bluegrass and clover, as the cattle spread the seeds and preferred those grasses for grazing.  Surplus beef became a commodity to trade in the West Indies, where sugar cane production made grazing land scarce.  

 As the population grew in the late 17th century, formal slaughterhouses appeared in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and the first cattle drives were made to those centers from as far as New Hampshire.  Manhattan eventually became the largest slaughterhouse center in the Northeast, and maintained this position until WWII.  Cows were ferried down the river to Manhattan, sometimes being held in stockyards across the river in New Jersey.  Slaughterhouses and butcher shops were a necessity in Manhattan as a lack of refrigeration made it impossible for New Yorkers to have fresh beef by any other means.   

 During the era following the American Revolution, Americans began to distinguish their recipes as being uniquely “American”, to separate their foods along with their values from European luxury.  American food represented the virtues of simplicity, authenticity, and honesty. These virtues were held not only in the simple recipes themselves, but in the Jeffersonian ideals of a self-sufficient agrarian society.   Cattle and individual land holdings offered this kind of material independence.

 As settlers and cattle moved further west in the mid 19^th Century, more Northeast farmers turned primarily to dairy production as competition in the beef industry became steep.  Dairy is still the largest agricultural product produced in the Northeast.   However, due to little change in dairy prices and subsidies since the 70’s, the 1990’s saw great consolidation for Northeast dairy farms.   A Grass-fed Party staff member who grew up on a dairy farm in western New York, remembers the time well:

 “In the early 90’s I can remember there used to be an auction selling farms at least weekly.  Within a few years all the small farms in the area had been bought up by the few farms that were able to buy all the farms next door, so that 4 farmers owned everything.  All the barns became empty.  My family sold our farm because we couldn’t compete because the price of milk hadn’t changed since the 70’s, with the price of inflation.   We had 600 acres and about 200 milking cows in Wyoming County in Western New York and we’d been struggling for years and years trying to make money with the farm.    There aren’t really family farms anymore, or there are, but it’s more of a novelty than a way of life.  Where I’m from there was a farm every mile and they were all bought out in a span of five years.”

 In recent years, there has been an effort to help dairy farmers on the verge of collapse transition to producing grass-fed beef, as markets for grass-fed beef grow in urban areas.   Grass-fed beef markets, and dairy cooperatives such as Organic Valley are offering surviving and new farmers a way to make a fair living.  The grasses in this region are well suited for grass-fed beef production as they are non-brittle and cattle need far less acreage to gain weight here than in more arid climates.