For today’s edition of Pasture Posts, we want to keep things short and let a quick video we put together do most of the talking. Our broiler chicken production is in full swing, and we wanted to take you right inside one of our 20×50 foot mobile pasture shelters to see how these birds live.
Did you know that only about 1% of the chickens in the United States are raised out on fresh pasture like this [02:07]? In this short clip, you can see exactly how we use a tractor to move these floorless houses every single morning [00:32], giving the flock a brand-new “salad bar” of fresh grass, clover, and bugs.
Treating animals with respect and letting them live the way nature intended is what regenerative farming is all about. Watch the full video:
🥩 Product Spotlight: Beef Bundles Are Back In Stock!
If you’ve browsed our online store lately, you might have noticed that many of our beef bundles were out of stock. We weren’t actually out of a huge number of cuts—just enough specific ones that it put a temporary hold on our popular packages.
The great news is that we just had a major beef restock, and virtually all of our beef bundles are now fully back in stock!
When you buy our whole-animal bundles, it does something incredibly important for our family farm: it helps us utilize and move the whole animal efficiently. We highly encourage you to check out our bulk options:
👨👦 Don’t Forget Dad: Father’s Day Bundle Deadline!
Father’s Day is just around the corner! If you want to treat Dad to the ultimate pasture-raised feast, our popular Father’s Day Bundle is ready to order.
📦 Important Shipping Deadline: For our shipping customers to get their orders delivered safely in plenty of time for Father’s Day, you must order by Sunday, June 14 to guarantee on-time delivery.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
🌿 A Dash of Patience Paid Off: The Cattle are Out!
If you remember from Pasture Posts #260, we were playing a bit of a “waiting game.” We spent time looking over our winter annual pastures—that beautiful mix of ryegrass and triticale—and as much as we (and the cattle) wanted to jump the gun, we had to wait for the ground to be just right to avoid “pugging” and damaging the soil.
The wait is officially over.
The cattle have finally been turned out onto that lush, vibrant green forage, and to say they are enjoying it would be an understatement. There is a certain “spring energy” in the air when the herd hits a fresh, nutrient-dense pasture for the first time after a long winter. We captured some great photos of them soaking up the sun and the ryegrass, which we’ve included below! This high-quality forage is exactly what allows us to produce the 100% grass-fed and finished beef you’ve come to expect from Watson Farms.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts!
Winter Weather Prep
While we don’t mind seeing some snow every now and then, winter weather can definitely create some issues for farms. Our top priority in preparing for winter weather is making sure our animals have everything they need during these challenging weather events.
One of these preparations is providing lots of straw bedding for our pigs that we blow under their wagon shelter with our hay processor. Check out this video.
We also make sure that our cattle are well-fed. You can see on the left side of the photo below that the cattle are lined up on the row of forage getting their bellies full in preparation for a chilly night of freezing rain. We also make sure we are feeding them again before the sun is up the next morning to keep them as comfortable as possible.
As long as we do our part in giving the animals what they need, they usually pull through these events with no problem. Thanks for trusting us to be your farmer!
Gate Codes
We’ve had a few issues lately where gate codes are missing from a customer’s order notes. This causes significant delays for our drivers on their delivery routes.
If your delivery requires a gate code please provide that in the order notes on every order that you place. If we arrive at your neighborhood and find that we need a gate code for access, but we do not have that code, then we reserve the right to skip that delivery in order to stay on schedule.
This and all of our other policies can be found in our Terms and Conditions that you must agree to upon placing any order. Thank you!
The New Year is a great time to start a Pasture Picks Subscription!
One of the best deals we offer is our very popular Pasture Picks Boxes! You receive a generous amount of meat for a great price! They are available for Watson Farms Home Delivery or UPS Delivery! See all the benefits over on the Pasture Picks Page!
Here’s a friendly reminder to get your orders in by the deadline. We have changed our workflow some to help reduce errors, so we have to begin the process of staging orders for the next day’s delivery very soon after the deadlines below. Help us serve you better by ensuring your order is placed in time!
Charleston Area: 12 noon Mondays
UPS Orders: 12 noon Mondays
Columbia Area: 12 noon on Tuesdays
GSP: 12 noon on Wednesdays
Charlotte/Fort Mill/Rock Hill Areas: 12 noon on Fridays
Farm Pickup: Please wait until you receive an email stating that your order is ready to be picked up (usually 1 business day from when you place your order). Farm pickup is done during store hours:
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday: 10am to 6pm Saturday: 10am to 2pm Closed Sunday and Wednesday
“Watson Farms is beyond good, they are GREAT! The beef is so delicious and tender. Their pasture chicken and eggs are delectable! Professionally packaged. All meals we make with their meats are devoured immediately. I love their delivery service as well! Once a week I have brought to my door everything we need. Purchasing an additional freezer for their whole cow now! Order with full confidence – bon appetite!”
We would greatly appreciate it if you would be kind enough to leave us a review. It helps first-time customers purchase with confidence.
It’s now easier than ever to Give $15 and Get $15 through our Referral Program. We don’t spend a lot of money of advertising, but rather we focus on producing products that people love and are willing to tell others about. So we depend on word of mouth to find new customers and ultimately to heal more land.
So in an effort to streamline this process we have made it easier to tell others (via email, Facebook, or Twitter) about Watson Farms. And it’s all automated on the backend, so you don’t have to rely on us to issue the store credits manually. Just head over to our Referrals Page and start sharing!
Thanks again for being partners in this endeavor of local, pasture-raised proteins that has truly transformed our farm. We look forward to continuing this transition while serving you long into the future.
Sincerely, The Watsons
Pasture Posts is written and/or edited by Matt Watson.
Attention Greenville-Spartanburg customers: we will be doing Home Deliveries to you on Tuesday, Nov. 23 instead of Thursday, Nov. 25, which is Thanksgiving day. Your order deadline for this week will be Monday, Nov. 22 at noon.
This should be great timing for you to stock up for the big meal. We will also be offering home delivery of fresh (never frozen) whole chickens in case you would like to substitute a pasture-raised chicken for the turkey this year! Hit the button below for more info on this offering. Please mark your calendars, and we hope to see you then.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts where we show you what we were up to!
Healthy Growth
The times we live in right now are different in many respects to say the least, but one definite difference our farm has seen is the new appetite that many people have for foods purchased directly from a local farm. We welcome this new appetite with open arms and have embraced it fully over the last year and a half – so much so that we drastically shifted our production methods to pastured animals only with nothing marketed through conventional channels. You can read more about that transition here.
One challenge that we haven’t entirely figured out is how to continue to grow and at what speed to grow our farm. The growth we saw in the spring of 2020 was great and afforded us many opportunities to be better farmers. We saw our meat and egg sales increase over 250% when we compare the spring of 2019 to the spring of 2020. This quickly showed us that many new customers were finding us, and we quickly shifted all our efforts to satisfying the demand for pastured proteins in order to retain as many of these new customers as possible.
Here’s the weekly roundup from Watson Farms and your direct connection to your farmer. Enjoy the latest edition of Pasture Posts! (Web versions of this newsletter can be found here on our website!)
Monocultures don’t exist in nature
Last week, we discussed how we view and deal with weeds in our pastures. This week, let’s look at the diversity in our pastures and the species that graze them and compare that to other types of agriculture.
Notice the diversity of forages in this pasture. From Johnson grass and crabgrass to plantains, this field likely has more than 10 different species that flourish after each grazing period.
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.
We have decided that we will not be doing home deliveries on Wednesdays anymore. Today was our last one for the time being. We feel like this is the best decision for the farm right now. Our regular delivery driver (Mason) has started back to college so he is unavailable on Wednesdays now. Kelly has done several Wednesday deliveries over the last couple of months when we have had busy days on the farm but she has started back homeschooling our oldest (2nd grade) so it is hard for her to get away for a day and we don’t want to get behind in school. She is also over the office and answering calls and emails so having her away is difficult. Gary (main boss man around here…lol) has been doing them some but there are jobs around the farm that we can use him for. Matthew is better used on the farm doing chores and whatever else may come up. So as you can see we are all pulled in different directions right now.
So what does that mean for you? If you place an order for home delivery it will be delivered that following Saturday. You are also welcome to come pick up at the farm if you need it before Saturday. Just select Farm Pickup as you checkout.
We do appreciate all of you for supporting our farm. Without you purchasing from our farm we would not be able to do what we are called to do. We love having the opportunity to serve customers. It blesses us that you know where you meat and eggs are coming from and how they are raised.
Lots of rain in a short amount of time makes our creek look like this. This is what we call our “rock crossing” that has large sheets of bedrock that are normally visible and allow us to cross the creek. Of course, on this day none of this was possible.
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