Page 41 - The Hunt - Summer 2021

Bill Fairbairn on the job.
generous, selling off breeding stock to help establish other herds near and far. He’s also involved in the management, breeding and genetics of other local herds. There’s D.D. Matz’s 30 mahogany-red Santa Gertrudis cattle—the same breed her grandfather and King Ranch kingpin Robert Kleberg had. Dillow works with Dr. Bill Elkins’ 80-head Black Angus herd and Peter Weygandt’s 60 commercial crossbreeds.
The pandemic stimulated another part of the business. “Now there’s a reason to buy the side of an animal and fill our freezers again,” Fairbairn says. “The real value of our food is in who can produce it.”
Fairbairn is the son of a first-generation Irish immigrant. He named
his farm after Lisnageer, a township in their homeland. The second of four brothers, he traveled back and forth to Ireland as a boy to work with his uncle. “My dad saw my interest,” he says.
When Fairbairn was 16, his father started with a herd of Horned Hereford cattle on 100 acres off Sugartown Road in Malvern. The school bus dropped him off there, and his mother brought him back home for dinner.
Fairbairn is a Penn State University animal production grad, and
his wife, Cheryl, is a PSU cooperative extension specialist for Chester County. “[She’s] really the beef specialist in the state,” Fairbairn says. Both Fairbairn children are PSU alumni who work in agriculture. Caitlin works as a technical adviser for Tyson Foods in New Holland; Ryan is a veterinarian who specializes in bovine genetics and reproduction for Trans Ova Genetics on the West Coast. “We encouraged the kids to go where the opportunities were,” says their father.
Fairbairn would like to see younger people involved. “We say you can’t work here unless you’re 60,” says ranch hand Nick Liberato, whose been friends with Fairbairn since grade school.
There are signs of youth—like the “Uncle Cow Billy” crayon cartoon drawn by an unidentified young cowboy in training and taped to the screen of a TV no one has time to watch. “We want to continue to be an influence for as many years as we can,” Fairbairn says. “But we need young cowboys.”
Dillow is skeptical. “A young cowboy in this part of the country?” he ponders. “You have to go west if you want that.” TH
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