Our Cattle
We are what are known in the cattle industry as “cow-calf producers.” Our cattle are predominantly Black Angus. We operate what is known as a closed herd. All the steers we harvest are born and raised on our farm. All our momma cows were once heifers born right here as well. It’s a closed cycle that we have maintained for decades.
Calves are born in the early spring and reared by their mothers until they are of the age they’d be normally weaned - about 8-9 months old. They’re by their mothers’ sides through the spring, summer, and fall - enjoying East Tennessee’s rolling hills. We calve in the spring to take advantage of nature’s spring bounty, timing our calving season to coincide with the lush spring growth of grasses so that our momma cows have all the nutrition they need to provide rich milk for their calves. Nature has its reasons for animals in the wild to have their young in the spring, and we adhere to that wisdom.
In a normal commercial operation, once calves reach weaning age (or even younger), they would be shipped to backgrounding or feeding yards to be fed as efficiently as possible until they were big enough to slaughter. We take a much softer, slower, and more natural approach in our operation.
Weaning is a very stressful time for the calf. It’s learning to be away from its mother for the first time while transitioning from a diet of mother’s milk and a little bit of grass to a forage-only diet. We attempt to make it as easy as possible through slow-weaning techniques we’ve developed over many years. This results in less stress on the calves as well as the mothers.
Once the calves are weaned, we move them to their own pasture, kept out of our summer rotation for this specific purpose, where their rumens develop, and they learn to graze on the lushest mix of natural forage we can provide. As winter approaches and grazing comes to a close, the calves are transitioned to forages we harvested the previous spring - rich mixes of wheat, oats, and peas, for example. They’re fed that forage mix through their first winter. Come the following spring, they switch back to grasses growing in our pastures, where they roam throughout the rest of the year until it’s time to harvest them.
Our cattle receive no hormone treatments to promote growth. Our cattle only eat what we grow on our farm - from the time they’re born until the day they’re harvested. We feed no food byproducts or other feedstuffs we did not produce. Even the water they drink comes from a well on our farm. They don’t drink surface water from ponds or streams. Our cattle, and therefore the beef products we offer, are as natural as we can make them.
Our Hogs
A normal commercial hog is a “racehorse.” It’s bred and engineered to grow as fast as possible. It’s given feeds developed specifically to put as much lean weight as possible as cheaply as possible on pigs in a confined space. It’s a very efficient system that produces tons upon tons of cheap meat from animals that never see daylight or feel natural earth.
We do things a bit differently.
Our hogs are heritage breed crosses that we buy from neighbors who sell them to us as weaned piglets and we finish on our pastures. They bask in the sun daily and feel the earth beneath their feet. Like our cattle, they eat all-natural feeds and forages produced on our farm - nothing else. They even eat vegetables out of our gardens when we have a bounty beyond what we can eat ourselves. Like our cattle, they drink clean, cool water from a well.
This results in pork products with a different taste and look than commercial pork. “The Other White Meat” — not even close. Our pork has a deep color, much darker than pork in your grocery store cooler, and a full, rich taste you’ll immediately notice and never forget.