Thistle Hill Farm – Blog

…when they are determined to add quality Devon to their herd! Roger and Elaine Witzig picked up a full load of Thistle Hill Devon in Virginia and transported them back to Gridley, Illinois…in all they were on the road 32 hours! Son Shannon took the photo of the arrival at 1:40 in the morning! The Witzigs purchase included two cows, two bred heifers and a young bull. We appreciate their confidence in Thistle Hill and invite you to drop by and share in the enthusiasm. David

…fools rush in, as they say, but we’re going to have to dissent from this announcement from the Temple Institute in Israel. The Institute has hailed the birth of a pure red calf as a sign its time to build the Third Temple. Some Evangelicals consider it a sign of the end times. What we are presented with here is a calf conceived in a Red Angus mother and the resultant embryo imported to Israel. There is no identification of the bull involved. Nor is there any identification of a pedigree much less one tracing back 2000 years. The rabbis seem to have their genetics a bit weak. An earlier…

…that excites us at Thistle Hill. We have always been big fans of Rotokawa’s Ken McDowall and hosted him many times. Ken has been consulted often about our breeding decisions. One day on one his visits he looked at a new bull calf and said, “David you’ve hit the jackpot.” The name stuck…and now here is Jackpot’s son, THF Guardian. Guardian not only displays Jackpot in his pedigree but Thistle Hill’s “2” Rotokawa line, producers of more top animals than any other. Almost needless to say it all starts with Rotokawa 243, who Ken considers his top achievement. As always you’re invited to come see for yourself. David

For years saturated fat, eggs, and red meat have gotten a bad rap from both the government and from the medical community. My great uncle Boze had a heart attack in the 1990’s and was placed on an incredibly strict diet that allowed for no eggs and no red meat, though he could have margarine, which we now know is a huge mistake. In 2016, researchers from the NIH and other major institutions published an interesting study in the British Medical Journal. They reviewed previously unpublished data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment which was  a study that took place in one nursing home and six state mental hospitals in Minnesota…

…this is the start of my favorite time of the year. The air becomes less humid, the leaves are turning and in the mornings there’s a new calf on the ground. We calve in the autumn here in steamy Virginia because it’s easier on mom and baby…surer-rebreeding too on mostly fescue. This little girl is just a few hours old…pure English genetics…at John Forelle’s farm in New York. She’s out of a Cutcombe Jaunty mother and sired by Tilbrook Sunset. John of course was one of the original partners in Traditional Devon America and while retired he maintains a few Devon cows. And here, waiting out the last few weeks…

…weighs in with the blog just below: “Monsanto gets its due”…signed Carolyn. Carolyn Matthews is my late wife’s daughter and she reminds me of Wooz in many ways. Thistle Hill has been the family farm since the 1940s and now Carolyn is the “head honcho”. Unfortunately she is one of those modern women who has to juggle a family with the farm and a demanding career. She has a medical practice to take care of as a cancer surgeon at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas and is also founder and director of Baylor’s integrative medicine center. She also writes and travels widely to make speeches.  And yes she does use…

I began attending integrative and functional medicine conferences in 2007, when I first started attending Andrew Weil’s integrative medicine fellowship program at the University of Arizona. Since then, I’ve attended two to four conferences a year from various nutrition, lifestyle, and environmental organizations; they are “brain candy” for me. I was impressed that from the very beginning of my integrative medicine journey, the speakers stressed the quality of the food we are eating. The traditional medical view at the time was that we should avoid red meat. But at the conferences, not only was red meat in moderation an acceptable part of the diet, it was encouraged- as long as…

Yesterday, a jury awarded Dewayne Johnson, terminally ill with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,  $289 million in damages. After a trial that lasted a month, the jury decided that Monsanto’s Roundup was the cause of his cancer. Johnson worked as a groundskeeper for a school district north of San Francisco and sprayed Roundup repeatedly throughout the year, sometimes for hours a day. While Monsanto has long argued that Roundup is safe for humans and not linked with cancer development, the World Health Organization in 2015 classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Unfortunately it is ubiquitous now in our environment and when I tested myself (my family can attest to the fact that…

The chemical giant Monsanto had a rare come-uppance in a California Court when it was ordered to pay almost $300-million to a Roundup user. Roundup is a herbicide widely used in the United States and widely banned in many other countries. Monstanto Article Back in the day when I was blogging at the North American Devon website a recurring target was Monsanto. I felt then, as I do now, that much of the growth of cancer can be traced in some part (alright, large part) to Monsanto and its’ brothers in the chemical industry. Monsanto is an American corporation recently purchased by the German chemical giant Bayer. Now there’s something…

….and yes we are continuing to offer a limited amount of grass fed beef. If you want to be on our mailing list write: info@thistlehill.net In the 13 years we’ve been raising Devon the market has really exploded. When we began, Wooz and I would carry a booth around and explain the health benefits and offer samples. About year 5 we realized the people standing on the other side of the table knew as much or more than we did about the selling points of our product. And we’d sit quietly while they’d explain it to each other. Since then the grass fed market has grown from $15-million annually to…