They have done away with a twenty-foot row of beet tops, followed by ten chinese cabbages that had gone to seed. Late last fall they worked their way through eighty pounds of green tomatoes, devoured all the apple pomace from the annual sauce-making, and throughout the winter snacked happily on banana peels, grapefruit and orange rinds, and a dozen surplus pumpkins. A man raises Herefords because his daddy and his grand-daddy raised them. And the Highlander's exotic looks may scare some people off. A lot of folks are prejudiced against horns.
Horns take up a lot of room at the feed trough and can get in the way in loading chutes.
And, of course, accidents can happen. At present, only a handful of farmers are raising Highlanders or Highland crosses commercially. Many owners are hobbyists, not serious breeders, which creates difficulties for future generations, because hobbyists are not breeding selectively to improve foundation stock. The oldest and biggest breeding farm in the Northeast, Pitcher Mountain Farm in Stoddard, New Hampshire has for many years been the mainstay of the industry. So many of their cattle have gone to establish other herds in the area that breeders like Carse and Flynn have chosen to import bulls from Scotland or Colorado to broaden the gene pool.