Our journey. How we got to where we are today.

Twenty-five years ago, when my children were babies, I faced the daunting task of navigating the confusing world of “how to feed my family a healthy diet.” When fax machines came on the scene (yes, I’m that old), I decided I could still maintain my role in the music business and move to the farm to live off the land. Once the actual farming and animal rearing began, I realized that “the way it’s done” was not what I wanted for my young family’s diet. Throughout the next few years, my journey took many winding roads that included a two-year off-course adventure sending me reeling through the land of veganism with its landscape of TVP (textured vegetable protein for those fortunate enough not to know), soy meat, soy cheese, and enough tofu and salads that it’s a miracle my children still speak to me.  One nagging thought consumed me, how were animals raised before chemicals and soybeans?  My love for pre-1930s books proved advantageous once again.  At a local used bookstore, I came across the 1902 University of Minnesota Agriculture course and the 1916 Farm Economic Guide. They taught me how it was done when animals were still honored and considered living, breathing beings and not just cogs in a vast machine.

 

Life from that point on took on a whole new journey. I began to look at animals as, well, animals.  What did they need?  How were they made?  What would they eat if they had a choice?  Would chickens willingly consume arsenic?  Did they really have constant heartburn with a grain-based diet?A gathering for a dinner to send seven farmers, two chefs and a student to Terra Madre

 

How misguided I was, firmly believing that I had become a livestock farmer, and yet with each new level of agricultural enlightenment, I could see that indeed I had become a grass farmer. It didn’t take long, though, for me to finally realize that my lucky lot in life would culminate as a rancher of billions of biological creatures unseen beneath my rubber wellies and the hooves of my livestock.  This biological life, if well-tended, will ensure that the juicy steak, the roasted chicken, or the cold glass of whole milk would be loaded with vitamins, phytonutrients, and essential fatty acids such as Conjugated linoleic acids and Omega-3 fatty acids.

Everything changes when farming ceases to center around the dollar attached to the steak, the egg, or the gallon of milk. Every farming decision was instantly fastened firmly around the health of my family and my customers, and our farming life was transformed into something very different and something many believed only existed in Wendell Berry novels.

The amazing universal truth is that when, as a farmer, my concern focuses on what benefits you, the long arm of wellness reaches back and touches the animals, the farm, the land, the community, and the environment.

So thank you for putting your trust in us.  We promise to provide you with exactly what I searched out for my own family; healthy, great-tasting food, nutritionally dense, sustainably raised, without a harmful impact on the animals or the environment