I’m learning more about a different form of agriculture – Arboriculture! We started a small orchard on our property – five apple trees and five pear trees. The apple varieties are Fuji and Gala and the pear varieties are Luscious and Parker. We had a great spot for them between two rows of pine trees. […]
Today is National Ag Day during National Ag Week! So I thought I’d celebrate with a few cattle pictures and updates from the ranch. This was our first calf born on Valentine’s Day – so you can guess what his nickname is. We typically do not start calving until first part of April, but we […]
This week is National FFA Week! The week-long tradition began in 1947 when the National FFA Board of Directors designated the week of George Washington’s birthday as National FFA Week in recognition of his legacy as an agriculturist and farmer. The first National FFA Week was held in 1948. Today, FFA Week always runs Saturday to […]
My mom and I had the awesome opportunity to “appear” together in a video about how we care for our cattle. In being a CommonGround volunteer and speaking about farming and food, the national coordinators of CommonGround brought a camera crew out to the ranch on a snowy, COLD December day to get a glimpse […]
This year was my first full year “back on the ranch” so to speak and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the year even though my family is still in “Christmas Crazy Mode” (three Christmases in three weekends in three states!). But I get to see nearly all of my family, which […]
Subway heard from agriculture. And I was one of them. I went to my local Subway restaurant on Thursday and spoke to the two managers on duty. I think I shocked them a little bit as neither one of them had heard about Subway’s announcement last Tuesday of sourcing meat never given an antibiotic starting in […]
Yesterday, Subway restaurants’ announcement that they would be sourcing meat that has never been given an antibiotic starting in 2016 brought with it a fiery social media battle of farmers and ranchers trying to post their opinions and comments on the Subway Facebook page, with Subway deleting comments and upsetting people even more. The decision […]
With raising cattle, my Uncle Mark would say, “We are grass farmers.” When it comes to raising cattle, the health of our grass is imperative to the health of our cattle. On our ranch, we practice “holistic grazing” or rotational grazing, which means we mimic the natural herd grazing where cattle graze and keep moving. […]
Weather totally impacts our family business of raising cattle. We manage where the cattle are pastured based on the time of the year to best protect them from the weather factors of wind, rain, snow, tornadoes and lightning. The amount of precipitation that we receive determines the growth of the grass which results on how […]
My son and I had an adventure this week to “hunt thistles”. It was actually a chore, but we had to make it fun somehow, so hunting it was. We had two different types of thistles in our pasture – musk and canada. Both have pretty, purple flowers, but they have thorns and “pokey” as Chisum […]
