by
Hannah Farber
| Jun 29, 2026
Charlotte Cote was sitting at the Thanksgiving table, looking out the window at the quiet fields that had once been her grandparents’ working cattle farm. Her father was in his 60s now. The fences were down. The land had been idle for years.
“Dad,” she said, “wouldn’t it be amazing to put cows back out there?”
He told her she was crazy. He reminded her how much work it was.
A week later, he and Guy Cote were buying cattle.
That’s how Cote Cattle Company got started in 2015 in Granby, Massachusetts, on land that had been in Charlotte’s family since the 1940s, when her grandparents ran a full cattle operation. They began with Angus and Hereford. Longhorns came later, when Guy fell for the breed and Charlotte tracked down a pair of six-month-old heifers out of Rhode Island. They were weaned and barely registered. But they were pretty.
“We quickly realized they were the prettiest ones in the field, the easiest to take care of, and they were thriving,” Charlotte says. “So we just transitioned.”
They never looked back.
A Farm Built From Zero
When Guy and Charlotte decided to restore the farm, they were starting from scratch on land that had grown over. The first pasture had to be fenced from nothing. Guy spent the better part of eight years building fence, putting up barns, reseeding fields, and figuring out water systems.
“We learned a lot from the people we’ve met throughout the industry,” Charlotte says. “Every time we travel, we try to make the point to visit people’s ranches. See what works for them, what doesn’t.”
That willingness to show up and learn became the DNA of how Cote Cattle Company operates, and the philosophy they carry into every conversation with newer breeders who come to them now.
It’s also how they run the operation physically. Both Guy and Charlotte hold full-time jobs. He’s director of trade shops at Amherst College, 15 minutes from the farm. When people visit Cote Cattle Company for the first time, the reaction is almost always the same: “Wait, you both work full-time and do this on top of it?”
Their answer is always the same: “We just figure it out.”
That efficiency is visible everywhere. Every corner of every field has a gate. Everything leads toward the holding area. The vet showed up one summer and expected the usual rodeo of chasing cattle across a field. Charlotte told him they wouldn’t need to do that. Treats only ever come in the holding area, so the whole herd comes running the moment a bucket appears. You just close the gates.
“One of us has to be able to do everything,” Guy says. “It had to be that way.”
The Bull Charlotte's Father Found Before He Passed
Not long after they got their first Longhorns, Charlotte’s father got sick. In the middle of his illness, he had an idea: get Guy a bull for Christmas so he could breed those Longhorns. He started scrolling Craigslist the way he always did. He’d find something, then hand the phone to Charlotte to actually type.
They found a six-month-old bull calf in Pennsylvania. Six hundred dollars. Charlotte called and left a message. No callback.
“When he wanted to do something, there was no wait time at all,” Charlotte says of her father. “We’re doing it now.”
Her dad passed on a Tuesday. A few days after the services, the call came back. It was Kevin Bond, a Longhorn breeder Charlotte had never spoken to before. She found herself on the phone with a total stranger, crying, explaining why she needed this bull.
Kevin got them the animal. They drove to Pennsylvania in January and brought him home.
“Every time you bring a Longhorn home and it gets off the trailer and stands in your field, that’s amazing,” Charlotte says. “But that one was extra special.”
The bull himself turned out not to be herd sire material. But he connected them to the world of registered Longhorns and got them to Cherry Blossom Sale for the first time. It went from there.
Building the New England Longhorn Community
When Guy and Charlotte made the drive to their first futurities, they loved the atmosphere: the people, the knowledge, the energy. They also noticed something. The Northeast had almost none of it. To attend the closest shows, breeders from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Connecticut were looking at eight-hour drives each way.
That bothered them, not just for themselves but for every breeder they'd sold cattle to, every person they'd hosted at a branding party, everyone who wanted to be part of the industry but wasn't going to drive that far.
So last year, they hosted their first futurity at Cote Cattle Company.
They went into it hoping for 60 entries. Two days before the deadline, they had 12 animals signed up and most of them were their own. By the time the deadline closed on Sunday night, they had 79 entries. The feedback that came back at Millennium the following weekend was overwhelming: everyone had a great time. People were already talking about coming back.
What made it possible wasn’t just Guy and Charlotte. It was the community they’d spent years building: the branding parties, the Longhorn viewing parties they hosted in their barn, the people they’d gotten off their couches and into the breed. The back crew on the day of the futurity was 14 people deep. Most of them had never worked a futurity before. They figured it out.
The food was all New England fall: smoked turkey, smoked brisket, eye of round on a spit, burgers and chowder, and ice cream from a family that had won Massachusetts best ice cream honors. They got eight states represented.
“I wanted to bring outside sponsors into the show,” Charlotte says. “Dentists, doctors, people who’ve never been to a Longhorn show. You never know who’s going to be the next breeder.”
Parking Lots, Beef, and Why Both Matter
Cote Cattle Company runs a registered breeding program alongside a direct-to-consumer Longhorn beef operation. Charlotte describes the pasture math plainly: it’s a parking lot. You can only park so many cars. If the lot’s full, everything breaks down.
“We always put our lower end into the beef program,” she says. “It’s a significant amount of cash flow.”
She built her beef customer base the old-fashioned way: indoor farmers markets at the mall every winter Saturday, talking to strangers, asking one question. “Have you ever had Longhorn beef?” The response was usually one of three things: yes, no, or “I went to Longhorn Steakhouse.”
The farmers market years built her repeat customer base. Now, her goal when she takes cattle to the butcher is to have all six sold before they come back from the locker. The moment beef goes into your freezer, she says, the profit margin starts sinking because you’re paying to keep it cold. It needs to be sold.
Longhorns as an Educational Ecosystem
UMass is 15 minutes from the farm. For the past four or five years, agricultural students have come to Cote Cattle Company every year as part of a class project. The professor sends them to work up the financials on a real project Guy and Charlotte are considering. The students present their findings on-site, get into the fields, and learn what the work actually feels like.
Some of them don’t leave. A few have come back to help on weekends. Some have joined the family for Easter dinner. One master’s degree graduate still shows up regularly to help with hay.
“I love the additional family that we’ve picked up,” Charlotte says.
The farm started as a family operation and somewhere along the way, it became one too.
For the sales calls that come in after dinner, Guy and Charlotte will pull up their Hired Hand powered website alongside the conversation. It helps them and the potential buyer point to a specific animal, walk through what they like about her, show who she's been bred to and what she's produced. It makes a late night call a lot more productive. Find Cote Cattle Company at www.cotecattlecompany.com.
This article was written based on a podcast interview on From the Pasture with Hired Hand. Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or learn more about breeder websites at hiredhandsoftware.com.