About Terrence Grant

Terrence Grant is a graduate of Central Texas College and the State University of New York at Brockport. He served six years in the United States Air Force in Washington D.C., eight years as a town and village justice in Caledonia, New York and four years as a town councilman and deputy town supervisor in Leicester, New York. With his wife Mary and daughter Ashley they have owned registered Holsteins since 1987 that they have shown in local, state and national shows, including the Grand Champion of the 2013 Western New York Spring Show. This current photo shows him in his research library with his herd books.

Today as I drive by more and more abandon dairy farms and think back to a time when that farm was a bustling farm, the barns full of cows and the machinery shed was full of equipment to till the soil. The mother hanging the laundry on the line while the young sons followed the greatest man they knew, their father. But now, long after the auctioneer has sold off the cattle and equipment the barns are empty and falling down, and the machinery shed is home to a pickup truck, a lawn mower and a few old barn cats scurrying around.

As I gawk out the car window at the old farm I catch myself wondering who had lived on that farm. Where did they go? Did they just get to old to face the rigors of twice a day milking, seven days a week with no days off? Did his children leave the farm because they knew they could make a better living working off the farm, and they’d have weekends and holidays off? Or did they die and the family sold the farm? And then I always wonder, what kind of cows lived in the barn, registered or grades, good cows or just a bunch of scrubs? That is how this all started.

Many times I have asked myself, who am I to write about Holsteins? I was raised on farm land that had been in my father’s family in LeRoy, Genesee County for decades, but they had stopped farming when I was young. My mother was raised on a dairy farm in Conesus, Livingston County, but her parents had sold the farm in the 1960’s and moved to the village of Geneseo. So I was raised watching the neighbor with his black & white cows until I got an after school and weekend job milking Jersey cows. While milking registered Jersey’s there was always one lone Holstein in the herd, and boy did I love her size and scale as she towered over the herd. It always seemed to me that the Jersey’s had ‘little people syndrome’, where they try to give the image of being tougher than their size should have allowed them to be. But to me that one Holstein was the ‘Queen of the herd’. I remember the owner, Hugh Robertson as the proudest Jersey breeder I ever met, and one time I asked him “why Jerseys?”, and I still remember him telling me how his dad had started the farm with Jerseys in 1938 and then smirking he told the story he had heard years before between a Jersey breeder and a Holstein breeder. The Jersey breeder claimed you could read a newspaper at the bottom of a pail full of Holstein milk, and the Holstein breeder retorted that “at least the Holstein could fill the pail!”

The summer I graduated from high school I left the Jerseys and spent my first semester in college milking registered Holsteins for Carroll Bickford and his family in Caledonia. I worked through the winter then spent time in Washington D.C. as an intern for Congressman Barber Conable and when I returned home I realized I really was not ready for college. So I spent the next six years in the United States Air Force, stationed in Washington D.C. and spent some time in Germany and Texas.

When I separated from the service in the spring of 1987 I found a job milking registered Holsteins for George ‘Buddy’ Filowick Jr. on his Budvale Farm in Churchville. I graduated from S.U.N.Y. Brockport with a degree in history, and during my final year in college he and I put together a herd of registered Holsteins. It was then that I was introduced to the Holstein World and New York Holstein News, and I read everything I could about Holsteins and paid as much attention as I could to whoever I could (including Donny Yahn). We eventually sold the herd to Gerald and Nancy Kohlman in Churchville and I went to work at Hubert Stein’s in Caledonia milking grade Holsteins (for many years they had the high herd average in Livingston County). And during these years, at the age of twenty-five I was elected the Village Justice in Caledonia and a few years later I was also elected as the Town Justice, serving a total of eight years.

While at Stein’s, over the next five years my wife Mary and I put together a herd of registered Holsteins then we spent a winter at Larry Hill’s El-A-Ray Farm in East Otto, Cattaraugus County. Returning to Genesee County we rented a tie-stall barn from Carlos ‘Red’ Page and went off on our own. We enjoyed spending time showing our cows at the fairs and shows in the county and across the state but our daughter Ashley was in kindergarten, money was tight and my wife Mary (who is not a cow person) convinced me that it was time to call it quits. So in the fall of 1997 we sold the cows and I ventured off to the Eastman Kodak Company. For the next six or seven years there was little thought of registered Holsteins except when we visited old friends at the fairs. We tried our luck with Angus, but nothing compared to owning registered Holsteins. Then Ashley took an interest in showing so we sold the beefers (they had no personality, just four legs, a tail and plenty of spookiness) and we bought a few calves and we were off and running again. After her heifers calved they went to Peter Dueppenguisser’s in Perry and the calves came home. Well, she’s out of college, married, and her and her husband Stephen are parents of triplets. Her herd was sold to help finance her college, so the only registered Holstein left is an old cow at Dick and Luanne McKenzie’s in Pavilion. So after all that I realize that I am not the most knowledgeable person to write this history, but I made every effort to include as much information as I could find.

I actually got into this by accident. A few years ago, I was writing a weekly history column for the Livingston County News and had written my first book, a biography of Lt. Governor George Washington Patterson from Livingston and Chautauqua counties when a I came across Edward Morwick’s four volume histories of Canadian and American registered Holstein cattle which gave me the idea of tracing the pedigrees of the Holsteins my wife and I had owned at one time or another. Using the Holstein USA website to do this I found that only went back about fifty years. So I contacted Mr. Morwick (an attorney in Canada) and ended up buying a complete 235 volume set of Holstein herd books from him. Before I knew it I was using the herd books to see what breeders from this county had used for bulls, and the cows they produced over the past one hundred and thirty years. It was really an interesting study and after finishing my second book ‘Dairy Farming with Registered Holsteins in Livingston County, New York’ followed by my third book ‘Were They Truly Champion?’ (The story of Oliver Cabana Jr., Charley Cole, registered Holsteins and the milk record scandal of 1919) and then my fourth book ‘A Bad Goodbye…… the All-American heritage of Gay Ridge and Kingstead Farms in Maryland’, I figured it was time to finish this work on New York State breeders.

No person can put together a work of this magnitude without the help of many others and there are many people to thank who have contributed to this work in many ways. I begin with my daughter Ashley who allowed me to use her camera and provided technical help to someone who didn’t even know what a memory card for a camera was. Dick Bickford, George Filowick Jr., and Donny Yahn who long ago gave me lessons in ‘Holstein 101’ that I have never forgotten followed by Guyla McKee, Johnny Barrett, Glenn Tripp, Red Page and the countless salesmen including Frank Francisco, Jan Longacre and Doug Schomp who spoke of breeders and events that helped my understanding of the Holstein business. And my friend Clark Killian of Akron who has supplied me with many of the Holstein News and Holstein World magazines, and sale catalogs that I have used to glean information.

And finally, with each book I have met some amazing people including Donald and Donna House, who allowed me into their home to tell about his 1950 Reserve All-American two year old. Then there was Charley Cole’s grandson in Vermont who had no idea of the Cabana-Cole scandal that ruined the fortunes of many Holstein breeders, but he wondered why his father had been born in Elma, Erie County. Then there was Douglas King and his sister Mary at Kingstead and spending New Year’s Eve day with Donald Wilcom in Maryland, wonderful people. And then putting this together, getting the opportunity to spend a day with Horace and Doris Backus in their home in Mexico, Oswego County as he talked of the old time breeders that he knew. And to see the old pedigree office was like stepping into a museum. And of course, there is Dick and Nancy Wright. Spending my life in Western New York I thought finding someone willing to help me understand Eastern New York Holsteins would be a challenge, until I thought of Dick Wright. A man who has spent his life breeding, studying and evaluating the registered Holsteins. A man who understands the Holstein business from all angles, breeder of great cows and bulls, president of the State Association, classifier, a Master Breeder who is also the son of a Master Breeder, yet he was always willing to help in any way.

And of course there is my wife Mary. She has traipsed through just about every cemetery we could find, made numerous trips to the Cornell University annex library and Akron to rummage through old News, Worlds and catalogs, driven up and down back roads looking for farms that are gone and patiently listened to stories of people and cows when she had very little interest. And in addition to all that she is the publisher, the chief financial officer and of course the chief executive of our home (and still finds time to love the three grandchildren and mow our five acre yard).

So with all that being said, as I was writing this, I thought of historian and author David McCullough when he said “I write the books I want to read”, and these are the books about registered Holsteins in our state that I wanted to read. With that quote in mind, as I’ve gotten older I realize most of us have done neither. We get up in the morning and go on about our work day and then if we are lucky we spend our evenings with family, and the people highlighted in this book were no exception. Some were born rich and raised in big cities and sought the quite country life, while some married into the farm life, but many were born on the same farm they would spend their entire life working in hopes of passing the farm down to the next generation. But they all had one thing in common, whether it was for a short time or a lifetime, they all spent seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year at some point working and worrying about their registered Holsteins. Not for fame or fortune, maybe for some wealth and possibly to be remembered, but mostly because they had a love for their cows.