Caring for Our Animals

By Richard de Wilde

We realize the decision to include meat in your diet, or not, is a very personal one and may be based on a variety of reasons.  We certainly respect each individual’s decision and do our best to be transparent about our practices so our customers have the information they need to make a fully informed decision when purchasing meat.  Unfortunately, there is a wide array of practices amongst meat producers, so it is important to make sure you know what your purchases are supporting.

Goats enjoying a sunny afternoon in early spring

While our focus is on growing vegetables, animals are an important part of our farm.  At present we have 25 pigs, 18 black Angus cows, 30 ducks, 20 chickens and 37 goats.  Not only do they add ambiance to our farm, they also help us better manage our land.  Given our valley location, we have hillside areas that are too steep for vegetable production and are better managed as pastures.  Without proper management, these hillside pasture areas can quickly be overtaken by undesirable “weed” trees and invasive species such as garlic mustard, honeysuckle and buckthorn which would choke out more desirable pasture grasses.  They also help us by fertilizing the land which keeps the pastures nutrient-rich and lush with vegetation to prevent hillside erosion.  Right now our goats are working on slowly clearing some of the woods on our home farm which are becoming overgrown with some of these invasives.  They don’t realize they are “going to work” each day when they make their way to the upper pasture.  They just think they’re going for a leisurely walk in the woods!  It’s a lot of fun to watch them interact with each other as they munch away on plants and tree branches.  This spring we had more than 20 baby goat kids which have kept us entertained as they zip around the pasture and through the woods jumping on trees and playing with each other!

Piglets drinking from Spring Creek

We choose to raise our animals in an environment that allows them to exhibit their natural behaviors and characteristics.  We treat them gently and with respect so they do not live in fear of human touch or presence.  This creates a much more pleasant environment for them to live in and allows us to work amongst them more safely.  Our pigs have a 20 acre pasture which they cover daily eating grass and clover as well as digging up roots with their amazingly strong snouts!  We often only see glimpses of them moving through the woods throughout the day, but rest assured they return to their home base for dinner at night and they are front and center for breakfast in the morning!  We feed them a modest ration of organic corn, barley and flax seed, but they also enjoy a wide variety of vegetable trimmings that we take to them from the packing shed every day.  It’s particularly amusing to watch them eat things like tomatoes and melons, but it’s also cute to see their bright red lips after munching on red beets!  In the fall they enjoy checking on the wild apple trees in their pasture where they gobble up the dropped fruit.  They also fill up on hickory nuts, acorns and hazelnuts.  They have a pretty good life, eat well, and from time to time they appreciate a little scratch behind their ears.  We’re still working on their manners, but then again, perhaps that’s just part of their natural behavior and we have to be satisfied understanding why our mothers’ may have told us to “stop eating like a pig!”

Our Black Angus cows grazing
on summer pasture

Our black Angus beef come to us each fall from John and Denise Hilgart who farm in Auburn, Wisconsin.  They are set up more appropriately than we are to raise calves.  The young animals come to us when they are fully weaned and weigh about 500 pounds.  Their farm and animals are also certified organic, but the thing we really appreciate about John and Denise is that they are excellent animal caretakers.  The nature of their animals clearly demonstrates they have been raised with love, care and gentleness.  While they are very large animals, they are also very gentle and calm.  In the course of a conversation I was having with Denise about how well-mannered the cows were, she disclosed to me that she often brushes them when she has a little spare time.  Well, no wonder they aren’t afraid of human touch!  Our cattle are on pasture their entire lives.  They eat only pasture grass and clover during the summer months and in the winter we feed them hay that we bale from our hillsides.  They also get a free ration mix of kelp meal and natural mineral salts mixed with garlic and diatomaceous earth (DE).  This mix is kind of like their daily “multi-vitamin,” plus the DE acts as a natural wormer.  I recently read some research demonstrating that the trace minerals in the kelp almost totally eliminate the methane gas that cows naturally emit.  We provide this mix in a feeder which also serves as a means of treating them for face flies.  When they stick their head in the feeder their face gets wiped with a blend of organic sunflower oil mixed with citronella which helps to keep the flies away from them.  They also meander down to the creek bottom each day to get water.  They are large creatures to be respected, but we also appreciate how they contribute a serene vibe to our farm.

Healthy animals that are allowed to live in a natural environment seldom have health problems.  However, sometimes in the cold of winter or during the changing of seasons they may get a little sniffle or a cough.  During these vulnerable times, we feed them pellets containing aloe, garlic and molasses.  Sometimes we put them in a feeder, but some of the cows really like them and are tempted to take more than their fair share which leaves us feeding them by hand.

Muscovy duck with her ducklings

While we do enjoy living amongst our animals and they serve an important role in helping us manage our land, we do also raise our pigs and cows with the intention that they will be harvested for meat.  I know this may be a sensitive topic for some, and we do respect that.  However, the issue of respect for the animals continues through the slaughter process as well.  We feel very fortunate to work with Crescent Meats in Caddott, Wisconsin, a family-owned and operated meat plant that is both certified organic and USDA inspected.  Wayne and Stacey Lautsbaugh are the owners and run the business along with their two children, Vance and Samantha.  Vance has a degree in Food Science and has completed the Master Meat Crafter course from UW Madison.  He is the plant manager and manages day to day production.  Samantha went to college to pursue a degree in Business Management and is now the store manager and mastermind behind all things happening on the office side of the operation.  Together this family runs a very efficient, professional operation with careful attention to many details.  Andrea had the opportunity to visit the plant when we first started working with them.  Wayne didn’t hesitate at all when Andrea asked to see the area where the animals are received and held prior to slaughter.  Their system is set up so that the animals remain calm through the entire process and are humanely slaughtered without fear or stress.  It’s very important to us to ensure our animals are respected through the end of the process and we feel confident that is happening at Crescent Meats.

Our "little" Angus cows shortly
after their arrival in late fall

When the pandemic hit back in 2020 and meat was in short supply, we were flooded with orders and quickly sold out.  It takes awhile to increase production, so there wasn’t much we could do immediately.  We did slightly increase our production of cows and pigs for this year and do still have meat available for our November and December 2021 deliveries.  However, we are nearing our sold out point for November and December is not too far behind.  So if you are interested in purchasing meat for this fall, we encourage you to order very soon.

In closing, we just want to reiterate how important it is for consumers to be well-informed with their purchases.  Not all meat is produced similarly and there are some practices in the industry that are, in our opinion, unacceptable.  We appreciate our animals, the value they add to our farm and our lives, and we will continue to do our best to treat them with the respect they deserve.  If ever you have a question or would like to see them for yourself, don’t hesitate to give us a call!

2017 Autumn Meat Information

Our fall meat deliveries are coming up soon with the first delivery on November 9/10/11!  We do still have Beef & Pork packages available for our November delivery and quite a lot still available for purchase for delivery December 7/8/9. 

If you choose to include meat in your diet, we hope you’ll consider trying our meat products this fall.  We feel it’s important for anyone who eats meat to make informed decisions with their meat purchases, so in order to do that here are a few important facts about the meat we raise.

Certified Organic:  All of our animals, pastures and feed are certified organic by MOSA.  That means we do not use GMO alfalfa, herbicides, pesticides, growth hormones or antibiotics.

 
 Grass-Fed Red Angus Beef:  Our beef cattle are 100% grass-fed.  They graze our mineral-rich pastures during the spring, summer and fall.  During the winter we feed dry hay and haylege which were harvested from our pastures and fields this past summer and stored for use during the winter.

Pastured-Pork:  Our pigs spend their days roaming their pasture hillsides where they use their snouts to forage for roots and snack on wild apples, nuts, and other wild plants they find in the woods.  They also receive a certified organic grain blend twice daily as well as vegetable scraps from the packing shed.  They especially enjoy spinach, beets, tomatoes and squash.
 
Animal Welfare:  We place great importance on the humane treatment of our animals and offer them the utmost respect and care for their wellbeing.  We do our best to provide a natural, calm environment for them to live in where they do not experience stress or have limitations to their instinctual behaviors. 
 

Join Our Meat Club:  Enjoy the convenience of our meat club offering.  With one purchase you will sign up for 3 meat deliveries in November, December and May.  You can start at any time and in addition to the convenience of a one-time purchase, we’ve built in a 5% discount on your purchase!
 
Fresh, Frozen:  All of our meat is freshly frozen and delivered to your CSA site in a reusable, thick-walled Styrofoam cooler.  You can store your meat purchase in your freezer and enjoy it throughout the winter with peace of mind knowing who your farmer is and where your meat came from!
 
Ledebuhr Meat Processing:  Our animals are processed at Ledebuhr Meat Processing in Winona, MN.  They are a small-scale meat processing plant that is both certified organic and USDA inspected.  There is a USDA inspector in the facility who inspects every carcass individually.
 

Concerned about freezer storage space?  If you’re limited on freezer space, consider some of our smaller 15# & 25# packages.  This picture demonstrates the space a 25# package of meat would take up in a standard home refrigerator with a freezer on top. 
 
Additional questions?  If you have other questions we have not answered here, please feel free to call or email!

For more information about any of our packages, please see our order form website.

HVF Practices for our Certifed Organic, 100% Grass-Fed Red Angus

As you can see by looking at our cattle, they are happy and healthy inside and out.  We have chosen to raise our cattle in a certified organic, 100% grass-fed production system, which is much different than industrial meat production and other conventional practices. We would like to highlight a few differences that we feel are most important for you to understand when you are making the choice to purchase meat in the future.

We want to start off with the pasture grasses since they are the main food source for our cattle.  We take great care to make sure our pasture has a good mix of grasses and legumes. Since we have plenty of grasses already in the pasture, each spring we use a practice called frost seeding to plant more legumes (usually red clover for us). Frost seeding is putting the seed on top of the pastures, usually during March, on days that alternate between freezing at night and thawing during the day. Along with the spring rains, this helps the seed make its way into the soil surface. Frost seeding offers several potential advantages, including the ability to establish forage in undisturbed sod, a reduced need for labor and energy compared to conventional seeding methods, and the ability to establish forages with minimum equipment investment.  Once the pastures take off and start growing in the spring, the cattle are anxious to start grazing. It’s important, both for the health of the animals and the pastures, to manage their grazing. We do this by dividing the pasture into smaller sections called paddocks. We rotate our cattle from paddock to paddock every five days to make sure they are getting the best of what each has to offer and adequately grazing the grass in that area so it will regrow. Sometimes we over-winter animals as well. Since our cattle are 100% grass-fed, you might be wondering what they eat when the hillsides are covered with snow. Over the course of the summer, we harvest alfalfa as well as premium pasture grasses, which sometimes are in abundance compared to the amount our small herd can eat. We bale the grass and alfalfa and store it in the barn to feed during the winter.

But what about those pesky weeds that pop up in our pastures? We mow our lush pastures when we can to either harvest the grasses or to manage the weeds. Sometimes we have to hand-dig some of those stubborn weeds. There is a newer bad boy invasive species in town, and its name is the multiflora rose. Our animals will eat off the new young shoots to prevent any more spread, but even so it can get out of hand quickly.  The other alternative that conventional farms use is to spray herbicide directly onto their pastures, weeds and grasses included. This creates a residue that stays on the good grasses and seeps into the soil. Then you also have the run-off that occurs from these chemicals when it rains and washes into area waterways. So with a little extra effort, and sometimes ‘elbow grease’, we can control the weeds without contaminating the environment or our animals’ food source.

One of the concerns with raising beef cattle is managing internal parasites. In a conventional system animals are treated with something called anthelmintic products. Most of the products used are either avermectins/ milbemycins (ivermectin, dormectin, eprinomectin, and moxidectin) or benzimidazoles (oxfendazole, albendazole, fendbendazole), (from UW Extention Cooperative).  If you are like us, you are having a hard time even trying to pronounce those chemicals. The chemical residue is then absorbed into the animal and accumulates in the organs and fat to combat the parasites. Then what happens to the chemicals? You guessed it - they work their way through the animal and are deposited into the pastures and thus passed through to the pasture environment. We rotate our animals to different paddocks every 5 days and they do not return to a paddock again for at least a month. Because of this, we actually ‘break’ the life cycle of the internal parasites. We also use Diatomaceous Earth (DE) to help kill off those pesky buggers.  We have the DE mixed with the very desirable kelp meal, Redmond trace minerals salt and a drizzle of organic molasses that we offer as a free choice ration, which they love.  The DE and minerals move through the animal and get deposited in random plops throughout the pasture. This is one way we utilize our pasture and it also helps prevents fly larvae from hatching. 

Our animals stay very healthy in our pastures and are never confined or crowded.  This helps to avoid any other health problems that may naturally occur. In confinement operations, disease can spread easily since the animal population is so dense. Because of this, conventionally raised animals are routinely fed antibiotics in their feed, mineral blocks or are given routine injections. This overuse has caused antibiotic resistant bacteria, such as E. coli 0157. While antibiotic use is prohibited in organic animal production, we would use an antibiotic to save a life or prevent suffering in any of our animals. If an antibiotic were to be used, we would sell that animal on the conventional market as it would no longer be certified organic. 

Mineral Feeder

What about flies – we all despise those little buggers too!  But they can cause great hardship and pain to cattle.  If not controlled, they can create and spread Pink-eye to the animals.  So how do we control the flies you ask?  Good question!  We make a mixture of Organic Citronella and Organic Sunflower oil and put it on strips in front of the mineral feeder. When the cattle go into the feeder for minerals, the oil mixture is then distributed to their faces and repels the flies.  This has been wonderfully effective for our cattle and we have not had any problems since we implemented this system.  The alternative would be to use either a dust bag or Cattle Rub containing insecticides to treat the animals.  Some insecticides used include Methoxychlor, Pyrethroids or Imaden, Permectrin Dust or Rabon Dust. Those chemicals are absorbed into the animal’s skin and through the air they breathe. The insecticides are then passed though the animal and into the manure and pasture environment. This is not allowed in organic production.

Now we move to the back end of the cow.  We have already touched on a few things that move through the cattle’s system, hence the reason we don’t give them those bad things we call contaminants.  Because our cattle eat the luscious grass and legumes in our paddocks, those little patty plops are great fertilizer for our pastures.  Because we rotationally graze our animals, we make sure to get a wide spread of ‘cow pies’ throughout the entire pasture area.  Some of you might think it’s not so good to have those, I agree you don’t want to step in them, but because our animals are spread out in the paddocks, we don’t have to ‘find a place’ for all that concentrated manure in one spot. Our manure stays in the paddocks and increases the pasture fertility. This means no hauling, no fossil fuel use and no disposal problems. On the conventional feedlots or non-pastured cattle, with so many animals crowded in one spot, and the average beef cow producing 10 tons of manure a year, that can spell (or smell) trouble.  All of that manure has to go somewhere! Where it goes varies from feedlot to feedlot, but they have to find places to dispose of what really ends up as a liability instead of a valuable asset.

When purchasing meat from our farm, you can rest assured that our animals are well taken care of. We encourage you to visit our farm and see for yourself.  If you have questions about our animal practices, make sure you ask your farmers.  We are here to help further aid you in making an informed choice, one that you feel is best for you and your family. If our meat is a part of that choice, we are happy to be your farm!

 

Meet Our Pigs

     We have always enjoyed having animals on our farm, both for the ambiance they add to the farm as well as the multiple purposes they serve.  But then there is just the sheer enjoyment of watching their behaviors.  If you were to take a moment to observe our pigs, you would quickly learn that their days are not so rough, they are very happy and content creatures and quite entertaining as well.  So just what exactly do our pigs do all day?  More than you would think!  They are very busy creatures, or at least they appear so!!!

Pigs in a wallow

     Their day starts out once the sun is up.  They don’t rise and shine quite like the chickens that share their pastures, there’s a little more grunting involved.  Once they’re up and moving, they wait for breakfast, which is their modest morning ration of organic barley, corn, oats, flax meal and a mineral mix.  They get just enough to take the edge off and give them some energy to go exploring.  Seldom do you see them at “home” during the day.  There is far too much excitement up on the hillsides.  They busy themselves rooting around their 20 acre wooded hillside and pasture, exploring every nook and cranny to see what treat they can find.  Eating a bite here, a dug up root there.  They look like they enjoy it and they are just doing what pigs are naturally inclined to do—root around and use their snout to dig up underground treasures!   These days they make a special effort to check the hundreds of wild apple trees and berry bushes every day to find fallen fruit.  They also like to check their favorite nut trees for acorns or hickory nuts, but once they’ve had their fill of roaming around, it’s time to work in a nap.  Depending on the weather, they nap in their straw-lined huts or in the shade of trees when the sun is shining.  They like to make dirt “wallows” to lay in and cool off when it is really hot.  If you look at their pasture, you might think it looks a bit like a “pig sty.”  Don’t hold this against them, it all goes along with their natural behaviors!  Muddy patches and some uneven, dug up ground is just the way they like it!

Running to the their culled vegetables!

     While we seldom hear our cows “moo,” you can often hear a myriad of sounds coming from the pigs.  Squeals, grunts, snoring, snorting…these are all very common sounds for pigs to make.  The time of day when you’ll hear them squeal the loudest is when they hear the skidsteer making its way to their pasture with culled vegetables from the packing shed.  They aren’t shy either, they’ll throw themselves right into the pile…literally!   They are very good vegetable eaters, eating most any green or root crop, but it is clear that they do have favorites, like melons, tomatoes and carrots.  (Check out the pictures!)  They don’t seem to mind if the vegetables aren’t perfect, as long as they are organic.  They are just a plain “riot” to watch, especially when they have pink lips after eating beets!  

     Just as with other animals and food crops, the way in which an animal is raised is directly related to how the meat tastes when it gets to your plate.  Our pigs are very active and eat a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, nuts and roots in addition to their organic grain.  As a result, the meat they produce is often darker in color with a rosy hue and is very flavorful.

     When purchasing meat from our farm, you can rest assured that our animals are well taken care of. We encourage you to visit our farm and see for yourself.  If you have questions about our animal practices, make sure you ask your farmers.  We are here to help further aid you in making an informed choice, one that you feel is best for you and your family. If our meat is a part of that choice, we are happy to be your farm!