The Beginning

Welcome to Cutting Hill Beef! We are excited to serve you- and for you to get to know us, our farm, and what we stand for. I want to start off with letting you know that neither my husband nor I came from a farming background, and honestly, I personally, have never been a huge fan of animals. So, ten years ago I never would have dreamed I would be in the position I am in now, but I would not trade it for anything. I have learned more about myself and what I am capable of, both physically and mentally, than I would have ever learned in most other walks of life.

Ten years ago, we were in college, my husband was studying architecture, and I social work. My husband needed a part time job, so he went door to door, and the first one hiring was a dairy farm in southern New Hampshire. He started with one morning milking a week, but that quickly led to more and more shifts, and before we knew it he was living and working full time on the farm. Soon after we got married, somehow he convinced me, to purchase our first herd of milking cows- big beautiful Holsteins. We moved up to the picturesque Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, rented an old tie stall barn, lived in a 1970’s trailer, and milked. The second year in, we purchased a second herd of milking cows, this time organic, sold our first herd and replaced them with a second organic herd, rented a second milking facility, as well as a third barn for raising youngstock, and ran around like crazy (not much has changed in that aspect). You should know- in the dairy industry it is the norm to jerry-rig what is broken, therefore you are just continuously running around adjusting problems, not really solving them- this aspect of the industry is something my husband and I both despise and do our best to avoid- but that is probably an entire entry in and of itself.

So, anyways, we milked in Newport Center for a couple of years before purchasing our own farm in Addison County. This, I will say, may be one of the biggest incentives to the farm life, being a landowner. Without really knowing the area, my husband and I could not have been any luckier, we ended up purchasing a farm in Cornwall, VT right outside of Middlebury, that sits at the cross of two dirt roads, and has three hundred and eighty acres of rolling pastures and fields that sprawl west towards Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks can be viewed behind it.