The Great Bull Escape of 2026 (And What It Taught Us About Calm Cattle)

I'm finally ready to tell the full, unvarnished story of the Great Bull Escape of 2026.

For the last few years we've kept our breeding bulls over at another farm when they're "off duty."

That farm was set up years ago with wooden fencing, for horses and some sheep.

That fencing is getting up there in years, and many of the posts are starting to rot at the bottoms.

So from time to time a bull scratches an itch on the wrong post and there is an escape.

Thankfully bulls are pretty chill. So mostly we'd get a text, rush over there, and collect them from the landowner's lawn.

I've written a few fun emails in this genre over the years. It's usually pretty lighthearted fun.

This was NOT the case on Friday.

"The bulls are gone."

Friday morning Jackson and I were headed back from setting up our new brush mower, and Jesse was doing his rounds.

Halfway back to our farm, my phone rings and it's Jesse.

This is generally not good.

Jesse and I have a 10 year long, daily text conversation, but we actually CALL each other about 3 times a year, when something urgent happens.

Occasionally that thing is "hey, what's your lunch order?" or "do you know where x/y/z that I need really badly right now is?" But typically it's a problem.

"The bulls are gone."

"How gone?"

"Gone gone....."

This is..... in technical terms, not ideal.

So Jackson and I hightailed it over there.

The three of us spent hours combing through the property. Following tracks. Finding cow plops. Certain that the bulls were just feet away and we'd find them if we listened closely enough.

Spoiler Alert: They Were Not Close.

Finally we did the only thing we could do. Went back to our farm to finish chores, eat something, and regroup.

"Get the trailer!"

Not long into that process, my phone rings again.

It's Jesse.

But this time it is excellent news.

"Get the trailer! Someone found them and they are in a barn!"

Jackson sprinted to hook up the cattle trailer, which he had just spent hours pressure washing the last round of cow poop out of, and which was now destined to get thoroughly repooped upon.

The three of us hopped in the truck and headed to our destination.

A farm over 2 miles away from where the bulls were supposed to be.....

It seems our bovine friends had escaped, meandered through the woods, come to a road, and walked a few miles until they happened upon a herd of cows in a field.

Naturally this caused quite a commotion, and it drew the attention of the farmers, who were able to just walk our bulls right down the fence line (using the cows on the other side as a lure) and into their barn.

When we showed up the two bulls were just chilling in the barn, a little thirsty and tired, but no worse for the wear.

I backed the trailer up and those boys jumped right on like a couple of kids in a sketchy situation who have never been more excited to see their parents pick them up and swear up and down that they will never misbehave again.

Thankfully, we are highly intellight people.... so after 10+ escapes we had the bright idea to NOT PUT THEM BACK IN THE FIELD WITH THE ROTTING FENCE.

Instead we brought the bulls back to our home farm (with a maximum security electric fence designed to contain career criminals like them) where they promptly drank roughly 10 gallons of water each and went to sleep in the tall grass.

The part that should not have been easy

All's well that ends well, I guess.....

Everything turned out alright, so it gets filed away in the "zany farm stories" folder in our brains.

But it is worth taking a second to consider how very-not-normal the conclusion to this plot was.

A bull is enormous (these guys are somewhere in the 1,500-1,800 poundish range) and literally synonymous throughout human history for being stubborn.

And yet, two guys they had never seen in their lives were able to walk them down a fence line and into a barn. Then they hopped right onto a trailer with 0 persuasion.

The other farmers were prepared to offer us corral gates, panels, and help getting them loaded on the trailer, and were blown away when all it took was opening up the door.

It's taken us YEARS to make it that easy.

One of those bulls is 9 years old and has been with us since he was just 3 months.

Nothing bad has EVER happened to him around people. He's handled with love and respect and that pays off when you get in a tight spot.

Why calm animals make better beef

And we handle all of our animals like that.

Not just because it's the right thing to do, and a long-term investment in making our lives easier. It's also CRUCIAL if you are trying to make really good beef.

Relaxed animals eat more. They drink more. They gain more weight, they marble better, and they finish the way they're supposed to.

Wagyu cattle are the extreme end of this spectrum, eating a special diet and drinking beer and getting massaged all day or whatever.

We don't think a "beer and massages" lifestyle makes for the most nutritious (or even flavorful) beef. But we do think they're onto something about the chill vibes thing.

So low-stress living is at the top of our cattle priority list.

(There's real science under this, and it goes the other way too. Here's what stress does to beef quality, from a workshop we did with Dr. Temple Grandin. And here's why that calm shows up in the marbling.)

How to get beef from animals raised this way

And I guess it's working, because those boys hopped right on that trailer, we've been shipping out some of our nicest beef ever lately, and are seeing a surge of returning customers restocking (which is the ultimate compliment to our beef).

So if you want to feed your family the highest quality meat from animals treated the right way, you can reserve a Beef Share with a free chest freezer here.

Your Farmer,

Josh

P.S. Our tale ended well for everyone but Jackson, who now must don the Poop Suit yet again to clean out that trailer. He's the real victim here.