Our Story
HoofnHorn grew out of two very different experiences with the same problem.
Emily had spent years raising, buying, selling, and marketing Highland cattle. She helped found the Southeast Highland Cattle Show & Sale, served in leadership roles within the Highland breed community, and worked with breeders and buyers across the country. She had also been scammed herself while trying to buy livestock online, an experience that made the lack of trust and accountability in online livestock sales much more personal. Through those experiences, she saw both how valuable the internet had become for connecting buyers and sellers and how much was still missing when it came to knowing who you were dealing with.
In 2019, Emily took what she was learning from livestock sales, along with her own experiences buying animals online, and built CowMatch. She wanted a better way for breeders and buyers to find each other, but she also wanted to make online livestock sales feel safer and more accountable. The idea worked, but she eventually reached the limits of what she could build on the technology side. She understood the livestock industry and knew what she wanted the platform to become, but she didn’t have the technical background to take it there.
Jason came to many of the same problems from the opposite direction. He wanted to build a Highland herd of his own, but finding the right cattle meant searching Facebook groups, breeder websites, farm pages, auctions, and word of mouth. Finding reputable breeders, comparing animals, understanding pedigrees and genetics, and simply knowing where to look was far more fragmented than he expected.
That search is actually how Emily and Jason met. Jason came across Emily’s farm while looking for property and Highland cattle in North Carolina and reached out to ask if she would consider selling the whole thing, farm and cattle included. She wasn’t interested in selling, but offered to help him find another property and cattle of his own. They stayed in touch, and as Jason continued his search, many of the frustrations he talked about were the same problems Emily had been dealing with from the breeder and seller side for years.
Eventually, Emily told him about the marketplace she had built years earlier and what she had wanted it to become. Jason immediately understood the problem because he was experiencing it himself, but he also happened to have the piece Emily had been missing: he had spent his career building technology and products.
Emily knew livestock, auctions, breeders, buyers, and marketing, but had reached the limits of what she could build technically. Jason knew how to take a complicated problem and build technology around it, and now he understood the livestock buying problem firsthand. HoofnHorn grew from bringing those two very different backgrounds together.
Today, they are building the kind of marketplace they both wished had existed when they were on opposite sides of the search. HoofnHorn is being built specifically for heritage livestock, with better ways for buyers to find good animals and reputable breeders, better tools for sellers to market their livestock, and more trust and transparency throughout the process.
Emily Grace has spent most of her life around animals, agriculture, and finding creative ways to connect people with both. Long before online livestock marketplaces existed, she was a kid flipping through the Iwanna classifieds in Western North Carolina, calling strangers about animals she knew perfectly well her dad wouldn’t let her buy.
In 2014, Emily founded Happy Hens & Highlands Farm and eventually built her breeding program around registered Scottish Highland cattle. Along the way, she built a social media following of more than 750,000 across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok and has worked with brands including Carhartt. That experience has given her a unique perspective on livestock, marketing, storytelling, and the ways people increasingly discover, research, buy, and sell animals online.
In 2018, Emily helped found what began as a small Highland cattle auction under a barn in Sparta, North Carolina. She continues to run the Southeast Highland Cattle Show & Sale today, which has grown into a Super Point show and one of the leading Highland cattle sales in the country. Years of organizing the event have given her firsthand experience working with breeders, consignors, buyers, livestock marketing, and auctions.
Her involvement in the Highland industry extends beyond her own farm and the Southeast. Emily served on the American Highland Cattle Association Board of Directors, as well as its Education, Social Media, and Website committees. Those roles gave her experience working with breeders and newcomers from across the country and a broader view of the challenges and opportunities facing the Highland community.
Emily’s experience building an early online livestock marketplace in 2019 added another perspective. It gave her firsthand experience trying to take the way livestock was traditionally marketed and sold and adapt it to a world where more buyers and sellers were finding each other online.
HoofnHorn brings all of those experiences together. Emily has spent years on nearly every side of the Highland industry: raising cattle, buying and selling them, marketing livestock online, organizing auctions, working with breeders and buyers, and serving within the breed association.
Emily still lives and farms in the mountains of Western North Carolina with her husband, where she raises registered Highland cattle and continues building Happy Hens & Highlands. Her interest in HoofnHorn ultimately comes back to what made her circle livestock ads in the Iwanna as a kid: finding the right animal has always been exciting, but the people, knowledge, trust, and relationships surrounding the sale matter too.
Jason Beckett has spent much of his career building technology around a simple idea: find a problem people are struggling with, build a better way to solve it, and create an experience people genuinely enjoy using. That approach has shaped a career spanning product development, software, automotive technology, and user experience.
Originally from Canada, Jason grew up spending much of his time in Muskoka, Ontario, where a love of the outdoors became a lasting part of his life. He studied computer science and film, a combination that first led him into the video game industry, and later earned his MBA as his career moved further into technology and product development.
At BlackBerry, Jason led product management for location-based services before moving into automotive technology. There, he helped build products ranging from contact center software to the automotive industry’s first digital voice assistant. After more than a decade helping build and grow that business, it was acquired, giving Jason the opportunity to consider what he wanted to build next.
At the same time, he had become increasingly interested in farm life, Highland cattle, and heritage breeds. As he began exploring what it would take to build his own Highland herd, he experienced livestock buying from a newcomer’s perspective. Finding animals meant navigating Facebook groups, breeder websites, individual farm pages, auctions, and word of mouth, while learning how to evaluate breeders, pedigrees, genetics, and the information accompanying the cattle themselves.
That experience gave Jason a firsthand look at a problem that fit closely with the kind of work he had spent his career doing. He understood what was frustrating about the buying process because he had experienced it himself, and his background in technology, product development, and user experience gave him the skills to start thinking about how it could work differently.
For Jason, HoofnHorn brings together several parts of his life that had previously seemed unrelated. It combines his experience building technology with his interest in agriculture, the outdoors, and heritage livestock, while giving him the opportunity to build around a problem he experienced firsthand.
Today, Jason lives with his wife and two children in the Lake Norman area of North Carolina, where much of the family’s free time is spent outdoors and on the water. With Scottish and Irish roots, his interest in Highland cattle feels like a natural fit, and he hopes to eventually make the Appalachian Mountains home with more land, a herd of Highlands, and considerably more time outside.