Category Archives: Events

A Farm Adventure for Everyone

There’s a really neat opportunity coming up next weekend here at the ranch. We’re hosting another one of our fun farm tours… but there’s more!

Last month, we had around 30 guests come visit with us to hear about our journey back to health from autoimmune disease using food as medicine. Every tour is different, and during the last one, our visitors got to pet the farm kitties, take a guess at which chickens were roosters (it’s harder than you might think!), and experience up-close a live cow moooooove. Our younger attendees got to participate in a fun little farm scavenger hunt as well, learning to identify fences, farm animals, and more. We always have a great time showing off the ranch and answering people’s questions about real food and farm life, etc. 

We’re doing it all over again next week, and you are invited! 

The consumer tour is $5 per person, ages 4 and up (littles are invited, too, of course, but they attend free). 

I know it seems impossible that anything could be better than coming to an SGR farm tour… 😉 😉

But even better than that… we’re extending the opportunity to farmers in the area who want to see a real working pastured poultry farm. The American Pastured Poultry Association will be in attendance, and anyone who wishes to attend under that umbrella is invited to stick around afterward for an on-farm luncheon featuring Shady Grove Ranch meats (catered by locally-owned Central Perks of Marshall, TX), and a roundtable discussion of all things pastured poultry.

The cost to attend the full APPPA event is $20 for APPPA members, $25 for non-members. You’re welcome to attend even if you’re not a farmer but are interested in learning more about what makes Pastured Poultry Producers tick. They are a cool group of folks, I assure you!

Whichever hat you choose to wear for the day, be sure you pay for ONLY ONE! But BOTH require advance ticket purchase. Sign up for the consumer tour, which ends at noon, or the APPPA workshop, which includes lunch and ends at 4.

Pick a hat, any hat…. But only pick 1!

Saturday, May 26 starting at 10am

Consumer Tour (ends at noon) $5 per person over age 3. Buy Tickets Here.

APPPA Workshop (includes lunch and ends at 4) $20 for members $25 for non-members. Buy Tickets Here.

We’re excited to be hosting this event and we sure hope to see you there!

Pastured Meats and Your Health

Report on Pastured Meats and Your Health

We recently put together an event at one of our Longview retail locations: Jack’s Natural Foods. We did a presentation on Pastured Meats and Your Health, and took the time to share Matt’s health story and some of the things we learned about food during his battle with ulcerative colitis. We shared about the Weston A. Price Foundation and Dr. Price’s findings on principles of traditional diets. We finished by demonstrating how to render lard and offered samples of simple favorite recipes like pork shoulder roast and roast chicken.

jacks presentation photo1

We had lots of fun telling our story and talking about how important well-raised meats and eggs because of their high nutrient content and digestibility. Consuming whole animal foods (organs, fat, bones, AND muscle meats) is key for reducing inflammation and restoring the body’s God-given ability to heal itself. It is interesting to note that there are few, if any, auto-immune diseases that are actually curable, not just suppressible, by modern medicine. Matt was one of the many victims of the effects of a toxic, low-nutrient diet which is so prevalent in our society. It has always been close to our hearts to share what we’ve learned so that others can work to be restored to good health as we were.

Perhaps you have never heard his story of recovery from ulcerative colitis. He went from a tall, muscular, athletic young man to a frighteningly thin, anemic, debilitated sufferer of intestinal disease. There was no explanation. According to doctors, diet had nothing to do with the disease and the prognosis was hopeless without drugs and surgery. After his second flare-up, which followed a year of his strict obedience to doctors’ orders, we became convinced that we had to take our health into our own hands. It took several years to get his guts back on track, but we are happy to report that it has been almost 5 years since his last severe flare-up and 4 years since he took any prescription drugs. So what did he do to recover? Those were some of the topics discussed at Jack’s earlier this month. And of course, a big part of his recovery was changing to a Traditional Diet.  

A few of the Traditional Diets principles we discussed were consuming generous amounts of pasture-raised animal fats, like butter, egg yolks and lard. Animal fat, when it comes from well-raised animals, contains lots of otherwise lost nutrients like vitamins A, D, and K. These nutrients are fat soluble and only found in their animal forms in the fat of animals. And it just so happens that these nutrients were plentiful in the most treasured foods of traditional (aka unmodernized) people groups. Nutrients like vitamin D and K are only found in the fats of animals eating green grasses and living outdoors in the sunshine.

Other principles of Traditional Diets are the intentional incorporation of bone broth and the use of unrefined salt. We talked briefly about fermented foods, raw milk, and avoiding vegetable oils.

We discussed preparing simple foods and meals, like roast chicken and pot roast in a crockpot. Real food doesn’t need to be complicated. One of my most effective strategies for implementing real food is not elaborate planning or strict routines, but rather a simple idea: keep basic supplies on hand at all times, like potatoes, onions, ground beef, lard, and broth. Even when you’re feeling uninspired to cook, you can still put something together that is real, nourishing, and delicious.

It seems there is a need in the East Texas area to learn about what is truly healthy based on evidence because there is so much misinformation out there and so many laboratory-based products that make claims upon your health. We’ve always felt that a proprietary “food” that can’t be made or grown at home but only purchased from a particular company cannot be a sustainable way to achieve and maintain health. Yes, sure, we’re selling a product, too, but we aren’t hiding how we do it or where we got our information. You could do it, too, if you wanted to! The truth is, though, that most folks don’t mind leaving the farming to us. 🙂

There also seems to be a lack of knowledge for implementation strategies. How do you incorporate these principles? Where do you get the foods? How do you cook them? Lard is among the most bewildering foods to incorporate, not because it’s hard, but simply because contemporary food wisdom eschews the use of fat almost entirely, and, well, pork fat? Won’t that kill me dead after the first bite?

We might argue otherwise. We’ve been eating it for years! And though eating pasture-raised pork fat in the form of lard is only a small part of our overall eating strategy, we often focus on that because it has the ability to displace some very nasty conventional dietary components, including trans fat and vegetable oils. Not only that, but fat has the ability to satiate the appetite. Try eating a plate of cracklin for dinner. I would guess you’d only get through the first bite or two before your body says, “Enough. I’m full.” It’s very difficult to overeat when you’re eating the good kinds of fats.

So take this as an encouragement to start taking baby steps toward a more traditional diet. Check out the Weston A. Price Foundation and their extensive (free!) database of dietary wisdom. Would you like us to come do an event like this in your area? Let us know and we’ll see if we can fit it in between feeding pigs, moving cows, and taking care of our trio of future Cadman farmers. Happy eating!

 

PS—Glenn Evans at Longview News Journal was kind enough to come and cover our event. Check it out here!

2012 October Farm Day

Farm Day was a hit at Shady Grove Ranch! We had a small group, which was lovely for taking our time and having plenty of interesting conversations about sustainable agriculture. Once everyone had arrived, we loaded up onto the hayride to collect eggs. Matt hooked us up to the tractor, and away we went!

We had all the workers and the egg baskets. Toby, the farm dog, decided to join us.

What lovely weather here in East Texas that day!

Once we arrived in style at the chicken paddock, everyone headed over to the Egg Mobile to see some truly pasture-raised egg-laying chickens.

A couple of our older helpers grabbed the egg baskets, and Bailey showed them how to collect eggs without breaking them. It worked moderately well…

The chickens were busy foraging for breakfast while we were collecting ours. Shady Grove Ranch eggs are produced by non-medicated chickens that have a soy-free, GMO-free diet primarily based on forage. We give them a new quarter-acre paddock every week.

There is no helper too small at Shady Grove Ranch! These two helpers peer into the ventilated nest boxes in search of white, brown, and green eggs.

Next it was time to move the broiler chickens. More helpers! Their job was to encourage the chickens toward the front of the mobile pens while Matt pulled them to fresh pasture during their daily move. Clapping usually does the trick.

The kids observe the chickens happily pecking away at their new salad bar. They get a new one every morning.

Then it was time to see the beef cows. Matt tells us about his breeding and grazing strategies. Raising well-marbled, delicious grass-fed beef is all about good genetics and proper rotational management.

The best part about sustainable farming is that it is safe (relatively speaking) and kid-friendly because there are no chemicals, and the animals are not stressed. One of our visitors meets Bulls-Eye, one of our finest heifers. She should calve sometime before spring.

Gordita, our matron cow who has given us two beautiful heifers, came to check out the hayride and its occupants. Maybe she wanted to taste the hay.

She was a little too shy to come close enough to munch, but Toby decided to get in on the action and get a nice warm rub-down.

Pretty soon, he was totally buried.

Toby just loves to be loved. He makes a great farm dog.

.We enjoyed our time with our visitors! We hope to have more farm days in order to share our work and our passion for raising real food. Join us next time!