Production Protocol
a foundation to live by
Local Sales- We do not ship food, if you are outside our food shed (driving distance) we encourage you to find a farm in your community, verify their commitment to environmental and animal health, and support their efforts.
Seasonality- In working with nature, we find that we must raise and finish critters seasonally. We can not raise our chickens on pasture or grass finish our beef during a Minnesota winter; for this reason we do not sell fresh meat year round. We are working on infrastructure to extend the availability of seasonally-raised frozen meat to more months of the year. We could not be more grateful to our customers for understanding this, and working to accommodate us. Thank you.
GMO's- we do not plant GMO's or feed GMO grain to our animals. More about our thoughts on GMO's here. Information on our non-GMO feed here.
Antibiotics- we do not give our animals any medicated feed, and that includes antibiotics. We do not use antibiotics as a preventive drug. In very rare medical emergency, we may have to use antibiotics to save the animals life. More thoughts on antibiotics here
Hormone Implants- We do not use hormone implants in anything. More thoughts on hormone implants here
Diversity on the Land- We do our best to keep as much diversity on each acre as we can, both in plants and animals. There are no mono-cultures in nature, and we believe nature has good reason for that. Working with mother nature rather then against her produces more food of higher quality per acre.
Staying Within Our Ecological Carrying Capacity- We make a firm stance to never outgrow what our farm can metabolize in it's own waste, i.e. never become a concentrated animal feeding operation. We think manure is gold not a hazardous waste.
Keep Critters on Grass- When we say pastured, we mean on grass, not outside in dirt lots. We keep our critters moving so that they are on grass during the whole growing season. During the winter they get a combination of deep-bedded housing and outdoor life.
Labels- We do not spend time or money trying to come up with a fancy label. We want you to come out to the farm, look around, ask questions, then you can give us a label. This makes it impossible for us to mislead you with a false claim on our label.
Improving Quality- As we grow, our focus is on quality not quantity. Our goal with every management change is to make your eating experience better. We rely on our customers to give us feed back, good or bad, so that we can continue to move in a more delicious direction.
Promoting Individuality- We encourage everything on the farm to be itself, i.e. the cow-ness of the cow grazing, the pig-ness of the pig playing in the dirt, the chicken-ness of the chicken hunting for bugs and so on.