Both Micah and I (Jenny), grew up with agricultural backgrounds. Micah, on the ranch we’re now working fields and moving cattle on, while I came from a family of dairy farmers. Once we started our own family, clean, wholesome food became a priority. No better place to find a trustworthy food source than to grow it yourself!
It all started when I was surfing Craigslist, randomly looking for a sow and boar to keep on the farm for our own pork needs. I not only found a sow and boar but THREE sows and a boar for the price of one pig! We decided we would harvest two of the sows to fill our freezers right away and then save the other for breeding every year. We never did harvest any of them and ended up supplying a grass finishing farm with piglets. When that market slowed down we decided to raise all the growers, from what our, now 9, sows were producing, to share our clean, homegrown meats with the public.
The next step was to find a good butcher to harvest and package the meat. One that we could work closely with, trusting enough to fill that middle step, between the farm and customer. A long journey and four butcher shops later, we finally found one we can trust to do a good job. We have processed many animals through Willcox Meat Packing now and are confident in the service they provide us.
In Nov of 2018, Micah was working for a crop farmer, spending long hours in the tractor. With all that time to fill, he started listening to and watching other farmers who had taken their nearly dead soil and brought it back to thriving life. What was the secret? Bringing animals back to the land and grazing them in a way that brought the microbiology from dormancy to teeming with life! He decided he didn’t want to only learn about soil regeneration, but to start his own regeneration story!
Earlier this year, the opportunity came for Micah to start working the land on his family’s ranch. He has been working the fields for close to 9 months now. Moving the cows frequently and planting a diverse crop of many different grasses and legumes. It’s a slow but rewarding process, watching the fields start to take on a new form of life. We are in the process of relocating closer to the ranch, bringing our herd of pigs with us. We are excited to watch this journey unfold as the land heals, creating a more nutrient dense foliage, which produces the highest quality of meats, from the animals that graze it.
