WHO WE ARE & WHAT WE DO

If you’ve joined our email list (& if you haven’t, what are you waiting for??) you received a welcome email. I wrote that email almost two years ago, & thought it was time to update it, but on reading it again, it still seems to work. It’s a really brief look at who we are, what we do & why, and how we hope to keep you the reader up to date on what’s happening on the farm (which I have not been very good at). The thing it doesn’t do is really let you know WHO we are, and if we want you to trust us with providing food for your family, if we expect you to “know your farmer”, we have to tell you!

The team at Walnut Lane is our family. Jim & I got married 30 years ago, after meeting & showing dairy cows together for years in 4-H. We took over the herd & dairy business from his parents two weeks later, & the rest is history! Jim’s been passionate about cows from a very early age, and our herd was our family for the first 10 years. When we realized we weren’t getting any younger, along came the boys. As I’m writing this, our oldest son Gus is about to turn 22. He works off the farm at a local construction company as a mechanic & equipment operator, but lives in the farmhouse & helps us out when he can. Our second son, Curtis, will be 20 this month. He left home this past fall to explore and is working on a large dairy in Vermont. We miss him terribly, but are happy for him to be doing his own thing. Our youngest, Nolan, is 12. He’s our right hand man for calf chores & is taking on more responsibility. He’s pretty good with the iPad & is maybe our best salesman/tour guide. He may be able to stand in for me in the store anytime now. Between us we get the cows milked twice a day, milk bottled for sale, calves fed, dairy & beef herds fed, cleaned, & bedded, and the chickens fed & watered with eggs collected (3 times today because of the freezing temps). When we say that our animals’ comfort comes first, we aren’t kidding. If they aren’t warm & dry with full bellies there’s not much point in the rest of it!

Wholesale dairy as a sole income source isn’t a very good business plan these days (that could be a whole post of it’s own), so we sold the majority of our herd in 2017. When we sold, we kept a few of our favorite girls, ones that we’d been developing the genetics on for generations. This let us keep our fingers in dairy, & gave us enough milk to keep supplying our raw milk customer base. We had been rotationally grazing the dairy cows for years, & had added a small beef herd to the mix a few years earlier so we could sell grassfed & finished beef too. The diversification had begun! Since then we’ve added laying hens for eggs, broiler chickens for meat, pigs to drink a lot of the extra milk, & veal calves (because we don’t always get girls).

We’ve always been a fairly “conventional” farm; growing corn & grass, using minimum & no-till practices for years. Over the last few seasons we’ve done a complete 180 degree turn. We are deep in the study & implementation of “regenerative agriculture”, thanks in part to YouTube & the internet. We’re learning all the time from folks like Joel Salatin, Gabe Brown, Dr. Allen Williams, & John Kempf. One of the best ways I can describe it is getting back to the way nature intended things to be. It all starts with healthy soils, which grow healthy plants (with no use of synthetic fertilizers) , which can be harvested by/for healthy livestock, which then provide products which can be scientifically proven to be more nutrient dense & healthier for the end user, the human who consumes the meat, eggs, or dairy products. We are basically having to change our mindset at every turn! And we are loving it! It involves every aspect of our animal husbandry & farming. I’m sure we’ll post more about that in the future.

It is a running joke around here that the boys have “the talking gene”, & that it didn’t come from me, but I seem to be rambling on pretty good here… so I’ll stop. My word for 2022 is “Integrity”. I want to have integrity in everything I do, & every relationship I’m in. We want you to know that what you see is what you get with us. We raise every animal that we sell, & we do it in a way that honors the animal and their purpose. We want you to feel comfortable asking us questions, & sharing your ideas & experiences. This is our family helping your family.

God Bless! kk