My father may have immigrated to this country to teach skiing, but his first job was caring for the cows on the Morosani family's small plot of land in the mountain hamlet of Brusio, Switzerland.  Twenty three later years he returned to raising cattle, this time at Laurel Ridge, our farm in Litchfield, CT.   In 1953, his Brown Swiss cow, Tcherva, won the World Championship for Brown Swiss Milk production.  The next year, convinced he could never top this achievement and sensing the changes that were taking place in the dairy industry, he began to sell off his herd, and our dairy farm's operations shut down soon thereafter.

Having cows around must somehow be in our blood, because after almost fifty years of our family leasing the land to other farmers, I brought cattle back to Laurel Ridge.  Prompted by an article that Marian Burros wrote for The New York Times , I started to learn about grass fed beef, and when my friend Jim Abbott expressed an interest in going along with me in the venture, we decided to fence off an old pasture that had become overgrown with multi flora and other invasive species.  Starting with seven calves purchased from a local farmer in May, 2003, we slowly learned first hand about raising cows (I had been all of 2 when my father exited the dairy business).

In early 2004 I applied for and received a grant from the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS), an agency of the US Department of Agriculture.  The grant was under the Environmental Quality Improvement Program (EQIP), and it helped pay our cost of converting fields into fenced pastures with drinking water.   We bought fifteen more cows the following Spring, and before we knew it, we were full fledged cattle barons.   We slaughtered our first cows in 2005, sampled our own product and sold some to local buyers.  In the Spring of 2006, I applied for and received a farm viability grant from the State of Connecticut's Ag department that enabled me to start up a retail operation from a windmill that my father built back in the early 1970's.  We opened for business on Labor Day weekend of 2006 and have been overwhelmed by the response from customers ever since. Our herd has grown to 80 Black Angus and BlackAngus/Devon, and we have over 200 acres of fields and pastures where we graze the cows and produce our own hay.   Along with my business partner Jim Abbott and a motivated squad of farmhands, I run the daily operations of the farm.

Our cattle subsist entirely on grass and, during the winter, hay. We also feed them kelp as a mineral supplement.  We don't inject them with hormones or antibiotics.  We do not massage them, feed them beer, or house them in climate-controlled stalls.   Our cows live exactly as they evolved to live: outdoors, roaming free, eating grass.

John Morosani