Kristy Somerville loves Texas and loves the Longhorns. She loves them so much she brought some to her Spencerville-area crop farm where she plans to breed them and develop a new niche market. (Nelson Zandbergen photo)
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
SPENCERVILLE — When Kristy Somerville sought to adorn the empty pasture in front of the cash-cropping operation, only genuine Texas Longhorn cattle could fit the bill as the “ornamental” bovine she imagined watching from her farmhouse porch.
Just don’t get too close. One horn can be as long as a hockey stick.
She launched Porchview Longhorns last year, a sideline to the 600-acre Ventnor Custom Farming business that keeps husband Clark busy as a cropper and custom operator. They have three purebreds imported from a breeder in Ohio. Somerville hopes to use up to 100 acres to support a future herd of about 30 animals, to be marketed as breeding stock for people in the market for something novel. She agrees the business concept is not all that different from, say, the llama breeding industry in its early days, except that her animals are actual cattle that can be turned into a familiar commodity — beef — if necessary.
In addition to their ornamental quality and their meat potential, the horns from the animals can be worth thousands of dollars as a mounted decoration. A larger female’s span can measure almost six feet from tip to tip. Their hides are also prized.
The very best animals can be worth $120,000 but otherwise fetch regular beef animal prices.
“My husband told me, this is going to be like owning horses, it’s really not going to be that much money. But I said, If there’s a way to make something at it, I’m going to find it,” she said. “We’ve just got to find our niche.”
Although meat from the heritage breed is known to be tough and lean, the Texas Longhorn was once a mainstay of the American beef industry in the 1800s. Descended from escaped cattle brought to North America by the Spaniards hundreds of years earlier, millions of wild Longhorn grazed on the sparse ranges of Texas where cowboys rounded them up and drove the feral herds north to market. The state still reveres the breed as an icon of Texas history. Today, cattle with Texas Longhorn lineage number about 330,000, according to National Public Radio in the U.S., but actual purebreds may be as low 3,000.
Passersby stop to take photos when they see these Texas Longhorns on this Spencerville farm, south of Kemptville. (Nelson Zandbergen photo)
Somerville will rely on Clark’s expertise as a bovine artificial insemination technician — he worked for Semex for years — to build up their nascent herd. They have access to a supply of purebred, sexed semen to ensure that pregnancies produce only females, which is the way they want it for marketing purposes.
Purebreds are rare in Canada and importing them from the U.S. involves so much red tape that Somerville hopes this adds up to a decent demand for Canadian-born Texas Longhorns.
Her first two longhorns were non-purebreds originally purchased in Southwestern Ontario — and their two calves. They sold in a flash when advertised on Facebook, she said.
“We get a lot of people that stop at the end of the driveway to take pictures of them,” she said.
She said she considered raising that other eye-catching breed, Scottish Highland cattle, but they’re not as hardy as her Texas Longhorns. “You could put them out in the desert. They were built for the trail. They birth easily, and they’re really good from minus 40 to plus 40 degrees.
“They’re just really easy cows, but they’re also neat-looking, and nobody else has them around here.”
Somerville recently returned from the “crazy experience” of a female ranchers’ course in Montana where she learned the ins and outs of branding, castrating, tagging and vaccinating beef cattle, among other skills. She was the only Texas Longhorn owner in the group.
“Instead of having their husbands yell at them about how to do it, like shut the gate, it was kind of empowering because we really did learn everything that the boys are doing, but in a judgement-free zone,” she recalled.
She’s taken some of that knowledge for the design of planned cattle handling and corral facilities, including a type of squeeze chute known as a ‘Bry chute’ still in the works at Porchview. Her stepdad, welder Bert Doornwaard has been commissioned to make the chute.
An aficionado of the Lone Star state and western cowboy culture, Somerville also runs a home-based beauty salon — appropriately named Curl up & Dye — with a John Wayne photo on the wall and six-foot wide Longhorn span mounted above the front window. She and her husband, Clark, have been making an annual pilgrimage to the festivals in the historic Stockyards of Fort Worth, Texas, for 20 years.
“It’s my favorite place to go,” she said. “I absolutely love Texas.”
