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Permaculture-based consulting, education and stock for today’s homesteader |
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Grass-fed, Grass-Finished, All Natural Beef We have just begun this project in the early winter of 2012, and hope to have beef available for sale fall 2013. Our fledging herd consists of 14 cows, their calves, and a young bull. They are registered Black Angus, from older lines that have been bred for smaller frame size and to fatten well on just grass. Our stock was acquired from Larry Sansom in KY. In May 2012 we added 6 heifers from Jim Feidler, a well-known grass-finished beef producer in the area. We're partnering with Larry Moore, who purchased pasture land just down the road from us, on this project. Our number one priority, apart from providing healthy and flavorful meat, is building soil and rehabilitating the land. In order to meet these goals, we will practice high-stock density grazing. The cattle are moved one to two times daily with the help of some nifty gadgets like: lightweight electric twine; 3:1 ratio geared reels that hold 1500' of said twine; portable solar fence charger with deep cycle battery; step-in posts; and water troughs/mineral feeders on skids that can be pulled with a 4 wheeler. We are using mostly human-scale tools which is exciting; many folks doing this type of management have sold their tractors and heavy equipment being left with only a truck and 4 wheeler as their farm machinery! (We’ll probably keep a tractor around for a while though.) The main reason to rotate paddocks so often is to be able to trample into the soil any carbon-rich weeds/grasses/sticks/etc that the cattle don't eat. All that stuff becomes valuable organic matter once the soil life digests it, which leads to amazing pasture growth with little to no inputs fertilizer-wise. This is basically a broad scale form of the mulch gardening which we have been so happy with the last 8 years. If you search for Mob Grazing or High-Stock Density Grazing, you'll find a lifetime's worth of info to peruse. We are tentatively planning on adding sheep to the rotation to increase yields and buffer potential parasite problems. We will likely keep a few chickens with the cattle as well. Chickens scratch apart cow pies, naturally reducing fly problems and scattering the manure more evenly over the pasture. We'd like to add pigs too, but still can't figure out how to do this without making big ruts all over the place. For now though, we are sticking with just cattle to be able to focus on learning their nuances the first few years before making everything more complicated! Mob grazing not only heals the land on which it is done, but also helps heal the planet through carbon sequestering. A lot of the high-stock density cattle folks on large acreages are competing in some worldwide competition to see who can sequester the most carbon into the soil via cattle hooves. The concept ties back into biomimicry of wild grazing ruminant herds around the globe that graze in tight herds because of constant predator pressure. They move around their landscape in a mosaic pattern that eventually hits all ground--a sort of random rotational grazing. The electric fences are basically replacing the predator pressure in a more controlled manner. Apparently bison hooves are responsible for the amazing soils that the tallgrass prairie had when Europeans came to America. We hope to direct market all of our meat; through restaurant sales, retail groceries, and directly to folks buying whole or half beeves. Since ruminants were designed by nature to subsist only on forages (with the exception of seedheads), we will not be using concentrates (grain/protein supplements) to finish them. We also will not use sub therapeutic antibiotics nor growth hormones in our beef production. |
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Brambleberry Beef |
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Brambleberry Permaculture Farm LLC |
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Brambleberry Beef |
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Esprí and Darren Bender-Beauregard Paoli, IN 47454 Phone: 812.723.5259 |
