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I know there’s a marketing “rule” in direct-to-consumer agriculture about sharing too many specific details about our farming practices. We know that a lot of people are interested & are following us because of these exact things; but I’ve personally witnessed the “eyes glazing over effect” of Jim or myself going into depth on one thing or another. We’re passionate about what we’re doing & why!

So please forgive my lack of self-control, & let me tell you what’s going on in these pictures, & what it means for our customers, our cows, our soil, & even our environment.

As you may or may not know, we’ve been learning more & more over the last two years about something called Regenerative Agriculture. I won’t bore you with all the fine details here (you can definitely ask one of us if you want to know more), but the principles involved all basically aim back to nature. How interwoven all the aspects of growing grasses, grazing cattle, & ultimately producing milk (& meats) are with each other, & how changing how we do it makes it all work better.

The pictures above are our milking herd grazing yesterday (May 12 if you’re reading this later), & today. We’ve been grazing our dairy herd in season for well over a decade, but the more we learn about Regen, the more we’ve had to challenge our conventional outlook & practices. Regenerative Ag teaches us that there are benefits to the soil & plants in leaving grass uneaten, & especially in trampling it down. To our dairy farmer brains this seems wasteful! We want our dairy cows to have the best young grasses, & eat as much of it as they can. Our new mindset is that it’s okay to leave grass behind, that it will help those plants come back stronger & healthier, & that what’s going on beneath the surface by doing this may be more important than what we can see in the pasture.

We’re also changing how often we’re moving our groups this season. In the past, our dairy cows would get access to new grass every day but also be able to graze where they’d been for the two days before. We moved the fence completely & built an alleyway every 3 days. On the beef side, the cattle would get access to a larger piece of pasture & be moved completely every 4 or 5 days. Because of all we’re learning, we’re committing to move each group of cows to new grass every day. It will definitely be more work for us, but the benefits we’re hoping to produce will be worth it!

What does all this have to do with you?? Healthier animals grazing healthier plants grown from healthier soils all equal a higher quality, more nutrient-dense end product! It’s all about bringing it back to nature & the way nature intended. Hope there aren’t too many eyes glazed over, thanks for letting me ramble!