The Story of
Defaid Livestock
Our family started off with a small Boer Goat herd in 1998. Brady and Jodi both grew up in the livestock show ring. To start out Brady showed registered Boers for a couple of years before moving into the market goat and market lamb shows. By the time Jodi started showing, market lambs were the primary focus. Throughout, the years of showing we have always had some commercial sheep or goats around; however, it has changed a lot over the years.
Our Story
The Defaid Family of businesses are family-owned and operated businesses. We have three branches of the Defaid business. It started with the creation of Defaid Livestock Company, our sheep operation. Although we had been in the sheep and goat industry for over 20 years, Defaid was not created until 2016. This is when we started making operational changes to raising primarily Dorpers, White Dorpers, and commercial Dorper² sheep and we changed our name to Defaid Livestock.
We wanted a unique eye-catching name with family history. The Evans family can be traced back to Wales, which is where the word defaid comes from. In Welch, defaid means sheep and is pronounced more like the English word “divide.” However, we pronounce defaid more like its phonetic spelling(d'fād).
We developed our first products to complement our homegrown lamb meat and promote being “lambventurous,” which is why there is a sheep in our logo, and the statement, “Best on Lamb” can be seen on several of our labels. After we started expanding, Brady opened Defaid Emporium to sell our products, as well as Roxanne’s Defaid Candy Co products. Brady added the photo to the Defaid Emporium logo of her great-great grandfather’s general store that was in Girard, Texas in the early 1900s. Most recently Brady has added Defaid Kitchen, a breakfast and lunch food truck serving locally sourced meats and Defaid Emporium favorites in the Snyder, Texas area.
This expansion led to the introduction to our co-packer for our infused cottonseed oil. The cotton industry is near and dear to our heart at Defaid, even though we are a sheep operation. Dan has worked in the cotton industry for over 20 years. So, we are very proud to be the original Texas Company, and one of only two companies in the nation, to provide infused cottonseed oil.
All three companies are Go Texan companies, proudly encouraging everyone to support Texas agriculture by shopping Texan, buying Texan, and finding the mark that matters.