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Farm Announcements

written by

Ben Simmons

posted on

June 27, 2020

Good Morning and hello from the farm,

Today, I want to let you in on three important announcements from Nature's Gourmet Farm.

As a way of introduction, back in the 1990's i was introduced to a man named Joel Barker through his best selling business film titled "Paradigms". One of the illustrations he used in the film was of an elderly couple walking on the beach when they came upon a young boy who was picking up up the many starfish that had washed ashore. They stopped to ask him how he ever expected to make a difference as there were so many. As he picked up another starfish and tossed it into the surf he looked up at them and said "it made a difference to that one."

Many of you I trust have heard about all the pigs that are being euthanized because the packers say they cannot process them due to Covid. (A friend told me Tyson is euthanizing 40,000 TONS) About three weeks ago we had the opportunity to purchase 100 pigs that were scheduled to be euthanized and bring to our farm. While it is a small amount in the big scheme of things but, like that starfish that was chosen to be tossed back into the surf, our action will make a difference to these 100 pigs.

NC-Pigs.jpg

Our second announcement started back in August 2018 when a rep from Richton Tie & Timber drove up to our farm and said the family who owns the quarter section next to me wanted to sell.

All the land I currently farm was once owned by the McKenzie Family. Most of the land had never been outside of their family until my dad purchased some back in 1969. This quarter section has never been sold outside of the original McKenzie family that homesteaded it. Think about that. There is a small McKenzie cemetery on the property that has several 2nd & 3rd generation buried there.

I had three priorities: 1) harvest the pine timber 2) do not damage the soil structure 3) leave as much carbon on the soil as possible as a food source for soil biology

It took about a year to harvest the trees due to wet weather. May of this year we started mulching. He's about two thirds complete and will be back in July to finish the bottoms after this rain dries up. Here is a short video.

In the past four weeks there a nice stand of native grasses that have sprouted and now the new pasture is deep green.

The third announcement is about our new egg carton design. As you know, our eggs are also sold at retail along side many competing brands, label claims, and price points. Once of the things we wanted to do was better differentiate our farming practices from competitor label claims.

So, our new design has a QR Code that a customer can take a picture of with their smartphone that will take them to a short video on our YouTube Channel of our hens on pasture and how we move them to new grass.

Egg-Carton.jpg

Email and let us know what you think!

Until next week,

Ben & Beth

A. Wildberger recently left this ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Google Review:

"I am so pleased with my first experience with Nature’s Gourmet Farm! You can easily taste the difference in quality from your grocery store brands.Their grass-fed ground beef made the best tacos this weekend! Whether you are on a crazy strict diet like the Plant Paradox or just health conscious and want to know where your meat is coming from I highly recommend Nature’s Gourmet Farm. I can’t wait until their Best of Farm deal is back!"

More from the blog

Farm Visitors

Since we started selling via our online store in 2016, the number of visitors to our farm increased. Then, building the on-farm USDA poultry plant in 2019 spurred a lot of interest from folks who were interested in raising pastured poultry and were looking for a way around the MS Department of Ag regulation limiting the number of chickens per farm to only 1,000 per year. Most of the folks visiting were potential customers looking for naturally raised meats to feed their families.

Farmer Musings!

Beth & I hope you enjoyed your Thanksgiving - and turkey if you purchased one our our pastured turkeys. For our family the turkey did not disappoint. I spatchcocked (removed the backbone) so the turkey would lay flat. Beth then brined it for a day before smoking. It turned out tasty and juicy. Before our Thanksgiving meal each of us shared something we were thankful for. Beth's sister Debra shared the following:

A Day Processing Ground Beef!

Overall rain this week on our farm was about ONE inch! Not a lot in the big scheme of things, but very appreciated. It was enough to make a difference for our winter grass as you can see from this picture. In some areas of other pastures it appears that the seedlings died after germinating back in October. An observation that the heavy dews was not enough to keep them alive.