Thistle Hill Farm

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Hume, VA
Thistle Hill Farm

Thistle Hill Farm is nestled along the banks of the Rappahanock River in Fauquier county with the Blue Ridge Mountains as a backdrop.

We sell registered Devon seedstock as well as healthy and delicious grass fed beef.

09/21/2025

Thistle Hill's Progression K21-1. Excited to see his first calves start dropping here in the next month!

10/02/2024

And so calving begins! A nice bull calf sired by Potheridge President's Favorite!

04/28/2024

Our herd bull, Prince. Calm and cool-

Photos by Haley Hardie.

04/11/2024

We are looking forward to hosting the World Devon Congress on Friday April 26. Please let me know if you can attend- we have two wonderful speakers coming!

03/29/2024

Thistle Hill Farm is excited to welcome Red Devon breeders from around the world to our field day on April 26th as a stop on the World Devon Congress Farm tour! We hope to see all of you there!!

03/26/2023

It is with great distress that we announce the passing of one of our founders and mentors, David Schoumacher, who passed away quietly in his sleep, March 24, 2023, at the age of 88.

David received two Emmy awards in his career as a journalist, reporting on the Vietnam war, Watergate, several presidential campaigns, the NASA space program, and the assassination of President John F Kennedy. He was the evening news anchor for the Washington Bureau of ABC News from 1976 to 1988.

David also served our country in the Air Force and the Air Force reserve, flying tankers and tactical bombers until 1971.

In 2001, a widower, he married a neighbor and longtime friend, Elizabeth “Wooz” Matthews and moved to her family farm, Thistle Hill Farm, in Hume, Virginia. After a close call involving a black Angus cow and a grandchild, they made the decision to look for a more calm natured breed to work with, and settled on Ruby Red Devons.

The foundation of the herd initially came from Jeremy Engh at Lakota Ranch, and Charlie and Martha Trantham. Wooz became the registrar for the North American Devon Association, volunteering hundreds of hours to register the purebred Devon’s across the country. David joined the board and passed on his wisdom regarding communications and marketing.

At one of the World Devon Congresses in England, David and Wooz forged a partnership with John Forelle and Nancy and Bill Walker, developing a plan to import embryos from purebred English Red Devon cattle whose lineages could be traced back hundreds of years. They became fast friends with international Devon experts, including Gavin Hunter and Ivan Rowe, Brian Drake, Margaret Elliot, and Juliet Cleave, as well as Ken and Pru McDowall from New Zealand. Eventually, David and Wooz bought out their partners, maintaining a vision for Thistle Hill to become a repository for some of the best English Ruby Red Devon genetics.

David passed on his love for the breed and the business of cattle farming to his stepchildren Carolyn (Curt Humphreys) and Church Matthews. His grandson Church Humphreys ( the grandchild mentioned above who became the impetus for switching breeds) is carrying on the torch for the Devon herd at Thistle Hill, continuing the English lines, as well as introducing genetics from the grandfather of American Devon, Potheridge president.

We are forever grateful to David for his love, enthusiasm, and mentorship, and feel his loss greatly.

03/08/2023

Oh!! The joy of small pleasures!!!

Video by Curt

03/07/2023

The End of Breeding Season
This weekend we took Prince out of our herd of cows, and rejoined him with two of our rental bulls who came home from West Virginia and Lynchburg. I always have a little trepidation at the reintroduction of the bulls. There is a lot of posturing and bellowing- I feel almost like I’m in Jurassic times as the earth can shake with their bellowing! Sometimes there is some fighting as they decide who’s the boss…and once that’s decided everything’s quiet again.

02/25/2023

After an unseasonably warm day Thursday, we are back to winter temps and a little snow today. The cows were glad to get in this pasture and loved what green grass there was. This morning Curt gave them another bale of hay, unrolling it so that it could eventually add to the soil’s organic matter and bring some more nutrients to the soil, as well as to all the cows and calves!

Photo by Curt

02/19/2023

Last weekend one of our neighbors brought out a portable sawmill and we milled some poplar, oak, cherry, pine, and apple (bottom right). The pine was one that had been planted by my parents 50 years ago and fell down in a windstorm this fall. The apple tree produced apples when I was a girl and had died in the last 5 years. Very satisfying to be able to produce lumber for fencing and other needs!

02/11/2023

Prince, our current herd bull. Pure English, out of Ashott Barton Tulip, by Cutcombe Jaunty. We were pleased with his calves from last year.

11/29/2022

It’s like he already knows he’s a star at five weeks old! One of the Potheridge President offspring striking a pose today.
He’s the result of a strawof President semen in a tank from Don Minto’s farm, mixed with eggs from one of our English cows ( Essington Buttercup x Millenium Falcon).

-Carolyn

Address

12345 Cresthill Road
Hume, VA
22639

Telephone

+12148021283

Website

http://www.thistlehill.net/

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Our Story

Our family has always believed that healthy soil, healthy grass, healthy animals result in healthy meat and healthy families. And our pastures are the source of our own healthy meat. We do not use petro-chemical fertilizers or sludge from the city or herbicides, pesticides of any kind. We do use foliar fish oil mixed with kelp or organically- certified sea minerals to constantly build up the soil to maintain the good microbes that promote a healthy stand of grass. Mostly, we use our cows as “four-legged fertilizer spreaders”, recycling 90% of the nutrients they consume right back into the soil. We are constantly testing our soils, our forages and water to come up with that remaining 10%.

We seek to maintain a low carbon footprint by staying in sync with what Nature has given us and encouraging the diversity that was meant to be. So when you purchase Thistle Hill Beef you are not only giving yourself and your family pasture perfect beef that is tender, flavorful and healthy, you are also making a responsible choice for the environment.