The farmer uses his pitchfork to move hay, straw or other materials from one place to another. Much like the pitchfork our blog is designed to throw ideas, stories, advice, and our experience from us to you. I hope that you find this blog educational, entertaining, and practical as you spend a day or so on our farm.
Beef and Pork pricing is based on "hanging weight" of animal, not live weight. This way you are only paying for the meat not the fluids and other disposed items.
People ask us......."why do you sell your meat in the bulk"? There is several reasons why, but here are a few.
We don't have to inventory lots of product. When we first started out we sold by the piece and found that folks like certain cuts of meat and don't prefer others. Having definite opinions is great, but when it comes to selling meat, we would end up with a large amount of a certain cuts people did't prefer in our freezer. Our family was getting tired of cuts like the "Ham Hocks" or "Beef liver"!
When you buy a "quarter, half or whole animal" YOU get to make all the decisions. Decisions like the size of packages you want you hamburger or sausage to come in, whether you want your pork cut as a tenderloin or pork chops or "would you like your complete half made into hamburger?" Buying in bulk gives you control over what you get. You know best what your family likes to eat, so spend your money on those things.
Its a better value for your family! We have six kids and understand that to buy locally grown, natural food products can be cost prohibitive. We don't want it to be that way for you! The price per pound breakdown amounts to less money spent for better quality product. Product that you have a knowledge of where it came from and how it was fed and taken care of. If the cost is a hurdle we can work with you by offering you the option to "pay as your animal grows". This option offers you the opportunity to help with the cost to raise your animal as it grows to harvest weight. This is like a cost share program!
We are scheduling animals to be processed right now! Give us a call at 1-765-268-2104 or email monica@pastureplace.com for any questions or to get on the list for a animal.
A few miles up the road from our farm you can find a couple icons of days gone by. Just out of the town of Cutler, located in the oxbow of the Wildcat Creek you can find where John Adams built a grist mill in 1845 to serve his community through grinding corn into corn meal, wheat into flour and various other grains. John understood that wheat was the "staff of life" and essential to keeping families and farms thriving. For just a couple of dollars you can tour the mill and see first hand the amazing architecture and engineering that went into the three story building.
Adams Mill
Bring a packed lunch and enjoy the park area outside of the mill and along the beautiful banks of the Wildcat Creek, walk the nature trail and end up at another amazing site. In 1872 the locals built a covered bridge to cross the Wildcat creek. It has been restored and is now fully functional. This makes a great site for a family picture!
We get asked this questions sometimes. Why farm? or Why would you farm? Farming requires so much dedication! Do you really want to take care of all those animals? Wouldn't there be easier ways to make a living? We just give a smile in response! Most people don't understand why we would choose to be committed to all the "hard work" that comes with our farm. Even our friends that farm in a conventional way (grain/hog) think we are crazy! We're the "old fashioned" farmers who work like "dogs" and use "outdated techniques and management styles". Were really OK with all the critisism and being considered weird.
Let me tell you a few things that these weird folks get to enjoy while farming the "old fashioned" way.
NO DEBT! This is a huge issue in conventional ag. A conventional farmer generally does not become debt free on his farm until he retires and has his farm sale. Like when he is "OLD"! YUCK! we came from conventional farming families and started down that road ourselves and said "You have got to be kidding; I have to be in debt to make this farming thing work "! We had farming debt when we were "big modern day farmers" and we hated it. Monica and I decided that if we were going to farm again ever, we would NOT do it with debt. How freeing it has been. Sure we have had to grow slowly, but that's been good also. It has allowed us to really focus on what we want to do and to try to be good at it. It also has given us the opportunity to have more liberty in our management style. See, most lenders are a little freeked out by those "organic/natural/old fashioned/......farmers. Yes, we will continue to grow if the Lord wills, but by His grace we are determined to do it without being a servant to Mr. loan officer.
SATISFACTION! Yes, good old Satisfaction. The blessing of being able to say that we are farming in the best possible way for ourselves and for future generations. There is something satisfying about trying to manage what you have in a way that is sustainable, healthy, and leaving things better than the way you found them. Yes, I can sleep good at night knowing that our farm may be weird, but it is not raping the soil, abusing the livestock or corrupting human food for other people to suffer from. I will take my SATISFACTION any day!
FLEXIBILITY! Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape! Flexibility is important to our family. We enjoy the ability to adjust our schedules or plans at times. This allows us to stop and watch the sun rise or set, stand at the fence and just watch the animals do what they love to do, or take an afternoon and go fishing. I work in the construction field at times and find it soooo demanding. I love to help people with their building problems but always look forward to getting back to the farm. Having the flexibility that comes with our operation also allows us to stop and enjoy life, our family and all of God's wonderful creation.
I like the way the late Paul Harvey said it........
There are other reason that we Love our life on the farm. Maybe we will share them with you here, but for now we need to go. Remember wherever you may find yourself on this journey of life that God is good all the time.
We got a Guernsey milk cow last spring. Her name is Scarlett. In the morning while the family drinks coffee, she calls out, "Moo, milk me .'' When we go out she is waiting at the gate ready to be milked. We feed the milk to the pigs. They go ''HOG WILD". The pigs only get the milkafter the dog have had their share. In the future we plan on making many delicious dairy treats.
A close look at ground beef reveals some pretty disturbing stuff, a Consumer Reports investigation found. Some 300 packages containing 458 pounds of ground beef were bought at stores of all kinds in 26 cities, and every single one contained fecal contamination.
That's more than just gross: It can cause serious illness when beef isn't cooked to the recommended 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Any meat can make you sick if not cooked properly, Consumer Reports notes, but ground beef is especially risky because cows raised on crowded feedlots tend to have manure on their skin, which contains bacteria that can end up in the meat during processing—and bacteria from one cow can end up mixed with that of many other cows.
The testing also revealed antibiotic-resistant "superbugs" in some of the meat, though they were a lot less prevalent in beef labeled "grass-fed organic," which tended to have less bacteria overall.
Experts advise consumers to buy sustainably raised beef when they can—and always make sure it's cooked all the way through. "Remember, when it's ground beef, you're taking it and grinding the bacteria from the surface of the beef into it," Consumer Reports' director for food safety tells CBS.
"So unlike a steak, you're really moving all that bacteria all around the beef. So it's especially important for ground beef, to cook it to 160 degrees to be absolutely safe." (Health officials say "cannibal sandwiches" are a very bad idea.)
This season we are trying something new to grow on the farm. We are growing some Spelt, which is a ancient wheat or grain. We have two different types that we hope to harvest this summer (around July 4th) and use for a whole grain food product. Some research indicates that the ancient grains do not bother folks with gluten allergies. We hope to do some testing and see how it goes. If you would like to try some of the grain let us know and we will work something out. In the future we would like to provide several locally grown grains for our families.
We have a good stand of grain this year and look forward to seeing the field golden yellow ready for harvest. Follow back up with us to see more pictures!
