We are looking forward to starting a periodic newsletter to keep you up to date on the happenings here at the farm. We look to talk about anything of interest to our customers such as what’s keeping us busy at the current time, what stages different sets of livestock are in, product offering news, and much more! We hope you’ll find this interesting, and we look for it to be another way for you to connect with your farmer. To make sure you receive an email when we have a new issue, you can subscribe to our emails at the bottom of this page.
What’s keeping us busy
When it’s not raining, our team is working on some of the following tasks each day:
- Tending to our 1000 baby chicks in the brooder pens.
- This is probably the easiest time we have with the broiler chickens since they don’t eat a lot of feed and we’re not moving them each day like we will be soon.
- We top off their feed each day and make sure everything looks good with them – especially their temperature.
- They need supplemental heat when they are small, and that’s what the saucer-like thing is in the picture.
- We’re also excited to be seeing some spring grass trying to grow, which means we’ll be shifting more and more cattle to all grass instead of supplementing them with hay. It’s usually a gradual process in early spring where every couple weeks or so we pull 10-20 head out of the herd we feed hay and put them in the herd that is on grass. By early to mid April everyone should be on grass and gaining at a high rate.
Recent Successes
As most of you know we’ve recently launched Home Delivery routes in 3 major metropolitan areas in South Carolina: Charleston, Columbia, and Greenville/Spartanburg. Overall they’ve been successful so far and we are gaining new customers each week in these areas. We are not to the volume we would like to be in GSP yet, but we know it takes time.
This might be a good place to plug our referral program: Did you know you can get a $15 store credit if a new customer says that you referred them? It’s true! And the new customer gets the same thing as well. Click here for details and start getting the word out (especially you, GSP folks ????).
Perhaps the most significant success we are seeing is the fact that we are still able to operate after one of the largest shifts in production practices in our farm’s 70+ year history. If you haven’t read our blog series: A Farm in Transition, please do! It details the ups and downs of our family farm through many decades and ends with our efforts in 2020 to abandon conventional agriculture practices completely and transition to 100% pasture raised livestock instead.
We’ve got several hurdles to clear to ensure our continued viability as a 100% pasture-based farm, but with your help we believe we will have the sales volumes that we need to continue being a source of wholesome pastured proteins that your family can trust.
Lastly, thank you for all the kind words of encouragement and, of course, the orders that you choose to place with us. Both of these keep our farm running and producing food in a way that positively impacts the environment, the animals, the farmer and the consumer.
Sincerely,
The Watsons