Category: Pasture Posts

We hope you’re enjoying our newsletters!  You’ll find a lot of information packed in each one such as what’s keeping us busy right now, what stages different sets of livestock are in, product offering news, and much more! 

One goal with this is to establish and nurture a direct relationship between you (the well-informed consumer) and us (a pasture-based farm).  That’s something that industrial agriculture and supermarkets will never be able to fully duplicate.  Thanks for your support and enjoy the latest from Watson Farms!

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What’s keeping us busy.

We first of all wanted to wish you a Happy Easter!  This is always a special time of year for our family because of the Resurrection, but also because of the massive renewal and regrowth that we see at this time each year.  It is wonderful encouragement to see pastures and livestock in such a state of vitality and rebirth!

Speed Grazing!

Our grass is growing very fast right now and this requires us to move the cattle quickly over each paddock in order to “top” it and move them on to the next one.  Every time that a plant is clipped off it prunes it’s roots to mimic the top of the plant.  This is called biomimicry and is the key to carbon sequestration.  The plant will then try extra hard to re-grow what has been pruned off and to do so it uses sunlight through photosynthesis.  So what we’re doing here is using tightly grazed herbivores to power this cycle of photosynthesis and carbon sequestration. 

Here’s how Joel Salatin puts it in several of his books: Mob Stocking Herbivorous Solar Conversion Lignified Carbon Sequestration Fertilization.  While that’s a mouthful, it definitely encompasses everything we’re trying to do by moving our cattle in large mobs across the landscape so that we can provide the most positive impact possible for the environment, the cattle, the farmer, our neighbors, and the consumer.

Below is a video we made this week as well as some photos that illustrate some of this process.

We hope you’re enjoying our newsletters!  You’ll find a lot of information packed in each one such as what’s keeping us busy right now, what stages different sets of livestock are in, product offering news, and much more! 

One goal with this is to establish and nurture a direct relationship between you (the consumer) and us (a pasture-based farm).  That’s something that industrial agriculture and supermarkets will never be able to fully duplicate.  Thanks for your support and enjoy the latest from Watson Farms!

What’s Keeping Us Busy

Broiler Turnout

After some rain and a chance for storms, we were able to move our broiler chickens from the brooder house to their pasture shelters on Friday.  They know exactly what to do with the fresh, tender spring grass that was waiting on them.  They clipped it off like a lawnmower just in time for their first shelter move the next day.  

We move them daily using Salatin-style shelters that don’t require a tractor which allows us to service them in all kinds of weather.  Larger mobile range coops require a 4wd tractor and when fields are saturated with rain, you can’t move them without making ruts and damaging pasture and soil structure.  

All pastured poultry is labor-intensive, but we find that it a worth-while tradeoff for birds that are able to enjoy their natural environment and provide you and us nutrient-dense meat that can be consumed with confidence.