Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
Summer rains and drought
Our discussion from last week centered around water that we pump; so this week let’s discuss the water that falls in the form of rain.
Much of our summer grass depends on timely rains in late-May through early-June. While we didn’t get many of these in May, we are better off in June so far. These early summer rains help to jumpstart a particular grass species that is key to our grass-fed beef: crabgrass. That’s right, common crabgrass that many people consider a weed we consider a great asset. But it does best when it has some heat and humidity mixed with a few rain showers, which more times than not is exactly what we get in South Carolina.
Here you can see newly sprouted crabgrass emerging through stubble and thatch of the previously mob-grazed ryegrass.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
The most important nutrient
As we get in the summer routine here at Watson Farms, it’s hard to overstate how important water is to everything we do here. Every time we move a set of animals, the question at the top of our checklist is “do they have access to drinking water?”
Of all the equipment and infrastructure that is on our farm, it’s easy to see that things like ponds, wells, pipe and drinkers are among the most important. This is why over the last 15 years, we have laid thousands of feet of water line, and we’re not done! The goal is to have access to water in every possible paddock that we might create.
We think of water as the single most important nutrient that we provide for our livestock. Life, much less growth, cannot happen without it.
Water serves another critical purpose other than hydration, and that is cooling. There’s nothing that our pigs love more than to wallow in a puddle on a hot afternoon. Soon after that, they proceed to their second favorite activity: eating. By allowing them to cool off, we are allowing them to gain weight like they are genetically predisposed to do.
We also use water to provide some supplemental cooling for our broiler and layer chickens. Our pasture houses for our laying hens have been equipped with misting nozzles that are connected to the water supply in the field. We simply open a valve to charge the misting line while we gather eggs in the heat of the day. We run these misters periodically through the hot afternoons. This keeps the hens happy, healthy and producing eggs.
For the broiler chickens we mist them with a tank, nozzles, and pump attached to a tractor. We drive this rig around the birds throughout the hot afternoons, but only when the birds are big – within 2 weeks of processing. This is when they become especially susceptible to heat.
When we properly care for all the animals that we have the privilege of stewarding, they reward us with health and vitality which produces a meat product that we can feel good about marketing, and you can feel good about consuming.
We use a pipe laying attachment on a tractor to lay water line. We can lay 500 feet in an hour.
Here’s a typical “quick coupler” that is installed in an underground water supply line. We have dozens of these installed around the farm in order to have water access wherever it’s needed.
Gary, Matt and little Abby, examine a new portable drinker after setting it up on the newly buried water line in 2015. This location is over 3200 feet from the well.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
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The “Why” behind pastured chicken
It’s estimated by the National Chicken Council that each American will consume on average 98 pounds of chicken in 2021. In 2001 that number was 77 pounds, and in 1981 it was just 49 pounds.
That’s a huge shift. Chicken cannot be ignored by any pasture based farm that wants to meet the full demand of consumers.
One reason consumption is so high is because chicken is relatively cheap in most grocery stores. This is due to the ability to mass produce these birds in confinement houses and process them in massive, centralized processing plants. Of course, it is increasingly evident how fragile these industrial systems are to things like disease – whether in the animals or the workers.
But for the ever growing number of wise, well-informed consumers who know the pitfalls of mass producing chicken, better practices exist in which they can be proud to support. Our farm uses these better methods and the video below illustrates this. Take a look!
Shoot an unboxing video just like this one of your next order! Tag us and use the hashtag #unboxingwatsonfarms where ever you upload your video! (YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
When you place your next order, remind us in the comments section that you uploaded an unboxing video, and we will include a whole chicken (under 4 pounds) in your order!
Would you like a free chicken in your next order? If so, then shoot your own unboxing video after you receive your next order. Then just share it to Facebook or Instagram and tag us! (As you place your next order please remind us in the comments that you shared an unboxing video.) Help us create some buzz!
We are in the midst of several projects here on the farm right now. The driving purpose behind any project that we undertake is to somehow better serve our customers. As a full-time farm family, we know that if we fail to serve our customers to the best of our ability, then we likely will fail in every other aspect of our farm business. In our eyes, our customers are our most valuable partner!
Farm Store
As we alluded to last week, we are excited to soon be offering the opportunity to shop through our inventory here at the farm. It will be small, but our new farm store will be complete with glass-front freezers and coolers where we can hopefully display and sell all of our available products for you to browse through. We also intend to extend our hours in order to offer more convenience for you. We hope to have it fully operational by the time of the Ag + Art Tour on June 26th! Stay tuned.
Our new store! We have a good bit of work to do to get it ready, but with so many customer requests for the ability to browse our products, we think it will be well worth it!
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
Cattle can capture carbon!
We are met with a certain “good problem” each year around this time: lots of fast growing grass! Our farm’s stocking capacity (the number of cattle that we have forage for) doubles during April and May when compared with the rest of the year. This happens despite April and May not being historically wet months. What is happening is that days are getting longer and temperatures are getting warmer. There is also usually sufficient soil moisture to support rapid plant growth. The grass detects this and does it’s best to put out a seed head as quickly as possible.
Our goal during this time is to “reset” the plant’s growth back to it’s adolescent stage where it can start over in its effort to capture as much solar energy as possible in order to develop its seed head yet again. The grass plant will generally grow back a little shorter after each grazing. We repeat this cycle of disturbance and rest or growth-pruning-regrowth throughout the year. The more cycles we can complete, the more solar energy we are turning into grass-fed beef!
Here’s the Mother’s Day edition of Pasture Posts – the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer! We greatly appreciate all the moms out there who choose to provide their families with pastured proteins from us. Here’s the latest!
Transparency in the Marketplace
We’re in high gear around here right now thanks to you! We truly appreciate your continued support of a type of agriculture that not only is sustainable but actually regenerates the land!
Furthermore, we are purposeful in being transparent and allowing you to visit and see behind the curtains of our farm. Below are some photos and videos from around the farm this morning that show exactly what that looks like.
Here’s the latest edition of Pasture Posts – the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer! Enjoy!
The Case for Grass-fed Beef
Good farms are aesthetically pleasing. Sure, there might be some things out of place from time to time, or a group of chickens on pasture that stand in some water for a while right after a rain storm, but those should be the exceptions not the norm. It’s a standard that we adhere to especially when it comes to things that directly affect the well-being of our livestock.
Poor farming practices have the opposite result: they are generally not pretty to look at. One of the clearest examples of this is the stark difference between cattle on a feedlot and cattle that are pasture-raised for their whole life. Take a look at the photos below and see the difference for yourself.
Here’s the latest edition of Pasture Posts – the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer! Enjoy!
What’s keeping us busy
Chicken Processing
Our first flock of 2021 reached maturity this past week. Harvesting livestock is something we take very seriously as it is the one bad day that our animals have. We work extremely hard to minimize stress for all our livestock throughout their life which is something that is low in priority for the industry which we’ll talk about more below.
Our belief is that by us providing them with a respectful, species-appropriate life, that they will then in death provide us and our customers with a nutrient-dense, nourishing source of food that gives us life.
For this flock we used a small USDA processor for some of the birds which will allow us to market the birds in different ways – mainly to stores for resale. (The birds that we process on-farm can only be sold directly to the consumer or to restaurants, hotels, or other institutions that will further prepare the poultry under government inspection of some sort.)
So here’s some pictures of us loading chickens one morning. It truly was very low-stress for the chickens and went well overall.
After loading the birds into the transport coops, we then put the coops onto a pallet.
Then we slowly take the pallet to the nearby trailer.
Our grasses are loving this weather and are growing extremely fast right now. This causes us to rotate the cattle through each paddock quickly so that they can “top” the grass to reset it’s growth cycle and move on to the next paddock. Here’s a video showing that in action.
All our layer houses out to pasture
We were able to get all our hens into their pasture houses for a long growing season where they’ll be able to forage for bugs and grass!
Here’s a look inside one of the pasture houses where you see nest boxes with red privacy curtains to entice the hens to lay eggs in the boxes. Their drinkers and feeders are also suspended in this house so that everything is mobile.
Here you can see all three pasture houses with accompanying guard dogs.
